Alone

The older I get, the more I find I value my solitude. Not as a retreat from a stressful world or for any grand purpose, but for its inherent restorative value.

I love my husband. He’s a great guy and ordinarily easy to live with. I enjoy his company, even when it consists of the two of us doing separate activities while sharing proximal space. But even this companionable pairing needs the occasional break…sometimes I just want to be alone.

It isn’t that I want the alone time for any particular purpose…I’m not planning to go on a shopping spree or a binge of one kind or another. In fact, that’s the whole of it…I’m not planning anything. I don’t need to consider cleaning the house, cooking a meal, making sure there is enough of this, that or the other…none of the ordinary considerations of my ordinary life need be considered. I have a pass to be mentally and physically lazy, to let go the reins of the household and my responsibilities for a day or so. Rather like being on holiday without any of the hassle of planning, packing, and making sure I get my money’s worth of sights, sounds, and tastes. Just permission from myself to veg.

Sometimes I crave the restorative virtues of solitude. Sometimes it’s good to be alone.

Sweet (African) Violet

My mother wasn’t particularly domestically-inclined so I learned many of the womanly arts from my grandmothers. As a result of their patient instruction, I can cook, bake, clean, launder, mend, and can do a credible job of most common forms of needlework. I can even keep a vegetable garden (and preserve its produce), and do a fair-to-middling job of keeping some nice houseplants. But, despite my moniker, I’ve never been able to grow African Violets.

Now this is kind of an embarrassing admission, considering that one of my grandmothers was actually named Violet and the other one collected Occupied Japan porcelain in the “Sweet Violets” motif…and grew African Violets by the hundred. It’s not that I don’t understand their basic needs…filtered light, “wet feet,” and no water on the leaves…it’s just that once their original hothouse blooms have faded, I am left with a shelf full of identical pots full of identical flat hairy leaves. They never, ever bloom again.

Oh, I’ve probably tried all of the tricks and remedies you can think of…changing the watering schedule…“African violet food” in liquid, sticks, and tablets…soil specifically formulated for African violets…changing the light exposure…nothing helped. Eventually, getting no reward (blooms) from the plants for all my ministrations, I would begin to neglect them and one day sadly find their dried and shrivelled corpses where once fat hairy green leaves had flourished.

After several fruitless forays into African violet cultivation, I pretty much gave up and bought fake ones for the pretty pots, but still, they beckoned me. In the supermarket thick emerald leaves crowned with a topknot of beautiful blooms called to me. A beautiful white…a frilled white with lavender edges…a robust traditional violet…”Buy me!” they called out “Only R14! ($2)” “Take me home!”

Seductive little buggers that they are, I am soon hopelessly plunking three new African Violet plants in the bathroom…actually, our toilet is in a separate room of its own, with a tall opaque window, and I put them in there. The shelf over the commode is just the right width for three of them, but within a few days some of the larger leaf stems are becoming soggy. Alarmed that they might actually die before even the hothouse blooms have finished, I move them to the window sill, careful to open it no more than an inch, lest the blazing Cape Town summer sun burn them to a cinder. Within days they have recovered (although I did lose those leaves) and their pretty little blooms liven up the tiny loo.

But all good things must come to an end, and eventually I found myself picking the shrivelled brown petals out of the leaves and resigning myself to three pretty plants on the window. They seemed to like the window, after all, with new leaves bursting out and the old ones growing thick and sturdy and crisp. When I would wash my hands I would check their saucers and refill them as necessary, taking comfort in the knowledge that even if they never blossom again, at least I am cultivating the healthiest crop of African violet leaves I’ve ever seen!

And then one morning, it happened. Looking up from the local gossip rag (we keep a rack of them in the loo), I thought I saw something suspiciously round nestled in the middle of one of the violets…not a new leaf, but something I hadn’t seen before. When I washed my hands I took a close look and, to my great amazement, saw buds! Buds! The plant was planning to bloom for me! But which one was it? After months of watering and moving them on the shelf according to who needed more light (based on leaf sturdiness and size), I had no idea which violet was about to burst forth into bloom!

Within a few days it became apparent that it was the white one and about the time it began blooming, the purple one started showing buds. And after a lag of a couple of weeks, the ruffled one began setting buds, ready to flower. I was amazed! Delighted! Enthralled! For the very first time in my life, my African violets were blooming for me!

Seems all I needed to do to grow African violets was to move to Africa…

Happy New Year

Hubby's mum, brother and nephew are here for a week so we had to plan our New Year around the presence of a precocious 12-year-old. No wild partying, no clubbing, no celebrating with reckless abandon...as if we might do that anyway...just something appropriate to share with a 12 year old.

At first we thought we'd go down to the V&A Waterfront where they set off fireworks at midnight and all the ships in port blow their horns, creating a cacophony that startles the snoozing seagulls into swooping excitedly over the celebrating crowd, occasionally dropping little wet seagull bombs on the unsuspecting below. But a couple of days ago a local nutcase and member of a local nutcase terrorist group was arrested with three pipe bombs on his person. During a vigorous interrogation it was discovered that there was a total of 11 pipe bombs, but Mr. Nutcase was not forthcoming with their location, only the information that they were intended to be planted in and around the Waterfront. This news, of course, put the kibosh on our plans to take the kid over to watch fireworks and terrified seagulls and we had to come up with something else.

It's been cold in Cape Town the last few days, with intermittent rain and cool breezes. After dark, the breezes become brisk and the air distinctly chilled. So, deprived of our Waterfront venue for celebrating the New Year, we decided to go down to the beachfront here in Table View and watch the Waterfront fireworks from across Table Bay. It was a brilliant plan, spoiled only by the fact that enough other people had the same idea that we couldn't get parking in the parking lots right on the beach, so we had to park a block away and walk in the wind-whipped cold. Bundled in winter coats and fluffy shawls, we trudged to the beachfront and took seats in the little brick amphitheatre and huddled together for warmth. Five minutes before the critical moment, Hubby cracked open the bottle of chilled champagne we had brought with us and, as the ships across the Bay began their basso profundo warblings punctuated by the sharp reports of exploding fireworks, we raised our glasses and ushered the old year out while welcoming the new year in.

And now we've returned to the warmth and comfort of home, heads a little fuzzy with fizzy , and ready to turn in.

Happy New Year to you all, may it be your best year yet!

Merry Christmas!

Here's a Christmas card for all of you! Hope your holidays are the absolute best!

Cast suddenly back into Hell…

Sixteen days ago I took my lunch and plopped down in front of the TV at noon and clicked on Dr. Phil to watch a show originally aired in the States in May. Here in South Africa, our Dr. Phil broadcasts are delayed by about six months.

Some things never leave us, even when we are sure they are dead, buried, and gone. Within minutes of the show’s start, I found myself catapulted more than fifty years backwards, horrified and helpless in the middle of an emotional firestorm.

You have to see the show or read the archive, which includes transcripts and photos from the taped footage, to begin to understand. http://drphil.com/shows/show/725/. Karen, a stay-at-home mother of five, rages at them constantly, and reserves a particularly large helping of scorn…including physical assault…for her oldest child. I felt chilled watching her and listening to the child plead for surcease…but here is where it gets weird: as that woman hit her ten-year-old son and chased him into his bedroom and assaulted him again…as the gooseflesh of recognition and empathy erupted on my arms and as my gorge rose…at the that very same time I found myself detach from the entire event. I felt as if I were viewing it through a long telescope. Some of the visuals even had a kind of dark yellowish tint in my eyes, as if viewing it through a filter. And as I heard the boy sob and beg his mother to stop hurting him, my mother’s voice echoed in my head “oh, that’s not so bad.” And then I heard the woman on tape speak my mother’s own words: the boy complained his knee was hurting and he could not walk and his mother said, her voice dripping contempt, “oh, bullshit!”

With few exceptions, this woman could have been my own mother. My mother had only two children and thankfully she was not a stay-at-home mother, but what I saw on that tape was still like peeling back the years and standing alone and vulnerable in the face of a vicious hurricane. Mercifully, the bits of tape were short and Dr. Phil immediately called the mother on the carpet for her behaviour, which she tried to blame on the kids. With her confession that she has convinced herself that her abuse is really their fault…that they provoke it with their own behaviours…I started having a creepy déjà vu sense. Wasn’t this, after all, how my mother excused her own conduct? “Don’t make me hurt you!” echoed around in my head.

But the kicker came...I found myself sitting there, mouth agape, heart racing, shudders wracking me…when one of the most terrifying experiences of my early childhood showed up on the tape: in the middle of a terrifying, towering rage, the telephone rang and the mother picked it up and spoke normally…even cheerfully…to her caller. To this day I find people who can turn a consuming fury on and off, as if they were flipping a light switch, absolutely terrifying.

This has taken 16 days to write and I’m still struggling to write it. She told me not to tell, that she would beat me within an inch of my life if I blabbed, that I was not to air our dirty linen in public. It’s not that I’ve been silent over the decades, for I haven’t. But it took a distancing, a detachment from the reality of events, to loosen my tongue. Fifty-plus years after the fact, five years of intense therapy under my belt, and my normally nimble brain becomes sludge when I try to talk…or write…about it without first donning the filter of detachment and distance to blunt the pain.

Have you ever seen something so horrible that you can only look at it in little peeks? So awful that simply looking at it full on is more than you can bear? Without the cushioning effect of distancing myself, that is how I find myself viewing my early years. Five years of excellent therapy brought me to a kind of truce with the past, a realization that the past is back there and that I control whether or not it taints my present and my future. Most days I don’t think about it or if I do, the protective filters are firmly in place. But on rare occasion something strikes that responsive chord and I am cast suddenly back into Hell. My reasoning brain tells me it was not so bad…that’s what she told me, too. She never broke any bones or drew much blood, I was sufficiently fed. I had clothes and shoes. I even had toys. How bad could it have been?

But I lived in fear. And I knew hatred at a much-too-young age. I had no security…her mercurial nature terrified me, for I could not know from one day to the next what would displease her. And to displease her was the worst sin I could commit. My very existence seemed to displease her at times, a circumstance that could only be mitigated by servitude. At seven I cooked breakfast for myself and my younger brother, standing on a chair at the stove. At ten I baked a cake twice a week after school, peeled potatoes for supper, mopped the kitchen floor every Saturday morning, and dusted and cleaned the house daily after school. But, lacking instruction in how to do these things, I often made errors…the floor wasn’t clean enough in the corner, the cake frosting was too thin, I missed a spot on the dishes…I did the best I could, but it was seldom good enough.

It has taken days to get this all written down and arranged in some semblance of order. The memories come out in disconnected jumbles, each one sharp and dark and haunting, and I don’t want to look at any of them very closely or for very long. The writing is easier now, I have been pulling away, detaching, trying to remember the facts and emotions without actually feeling them. The dark, shadowy edges are clearing from the memories, and the vignettes are clearer, less difficult to look at. I am starting to see events now, without becoming emotionally engaged by them…

Mother and I are standing in the bathroom, the water running from the tap, me stifling my sobs, she is screaming at me, her face puffed-up and suffused with blood, her carmined lips large and terrifying. “Don’t you ever tell me that you can’t again!” she is shrieking at me. I want to cringe away, but I know that will earn me a slap or yank of my hair. I can feel tears leaking from my eyes and running down my face and my lower lip is trembling, and I can only pray that she is too wrapped up in her rage to notice. “When I tell you to do something, you’d damn well better do it, and do it tout de suite,” only she mispronounces it “toot sweet.” I am nodding my head mindlessly, knowing that my only possible salvation lies in agreement with her. The water is still streaming from the tap and she points to it, her diatribe continuing unabated, my agreement ignored. “If I tell you to tie a ribbon around this stream of water, I don’t want any excuses, I don’t want any whiney ‘I can’ts’ from you, I want you to just do it and do it fast! Do you understand?” That last is delivered in a bellow so forceful it makes my ears ring. “And stop that blubbering,” she commands me. “If you want to bawl, I can give you something worth bawling about.” My face immediately goes blank, my tears stop, my throat grows a lump the size of Kansas. I wait silently until she exits the little bathroom, then turn off the tap and creep to my room, shutting the door as quietly as possible so that nothing draws her attention back to me.

She’s dead now, she has been for several years. She can no longer lie to the family about me, manipulate my children, or beat me for blabbing. But still, when I force myself to fully look at my early years, without flinching or changing the subject in my mind, without the numbing effects of detachment, my brain slows, my normally articulate self disappears, my fingers stumble on the keyboard. My words come out choppy and slow, hesitant and clumsy…my eloquence deserts me and I find myself staring at the words on the screen, motionless for long periods while snippets of the past race darkly through my brain.

Some things never leave us.

Oops! They're at it again!

So, after a couple of weeks of titillating the public, Fed-Ex’s mouthpiece comes out with his big bucket of whitewash and tries to repair the wannabe rapper’s non-existent reputation. The sex tape, trumpeted by the media and even the subject of commentary by those who have allegedly seen it, does not exist. Furthermore, a second cleansing brushstroke claims, poor Kev has been the innocent victim of the envious and malicious who have slandered him with untrue allegations that he had such a tape and was shopping it around for the best price. Not a word is true, Lawyer-Boy says. Nary a word.

Yah, right.

I’m guessing there is something, probably tamer than has been advertised. So tame, in fact, that those who would stoop to make money from such a tape have deemed it unmarketable, either through lack of quality (can’t tell who the woman is) or lack of sufficient prurience to generate enough cash to pay back the initial acquisition and distribution costs. So, after a couple of weeks to flog the tape to various internet porn merchants and finding either no takers or receiving offers well below the millions anticipated, what’s a sleazebag to do? Deny, deny, deny!

Other, not-mutually-exclusive, possibilities include Brit’s legal team having a little chat with Kev’s legal team of one, reminding said individuals that her image is her legal property and the release of such a tape could be seen as a serious infringement of Britney’s intellectual (how’s that for an oxymoron?) property…which would mean any money he made from selling such a tape could be awarded to her in an infringement lawsuit, plus damages. Even a porn king might want to sit back and rethink the tape under such conditions, ya know?

And what if a little birdie perched on Kev’s scrawny shoulder and cooed into his ear “Ya know this will make her even more marketable, right? You do this and fans will flock to see her, to buy her music, to attend her concerts…this is priceless promotion that will make her millions and make you look like and even bigger schmuck than you are today. Let the scales fall from your eyes…nobody’s seen that tape yet and it is already happening! You’re doing her a favour, making her money, and you aren’t getting one thin dime of it!”

As much as Britney has shown herself to be a vulgar, under-educated red neck tart, Federline’s various attempts to further blacken her image (and make money off it) are backfiring. His suit for custody and alimony are publicly lampooned and the very media that delighted in catching Brit in all of her thoughtless moments with Sean Preston is now left-handedly defending her by revealing K-Fed’s long list of parental transgressions. Not only did he spend a whopping total of four days with his newest son in the first eight weeks of the child’s life, it’s been revealed that while married to multimillionaire Britney and dropping as much as $50,000 a night at the craps tables, he has paid no child support to the C-list actress, Shar Jackson, for the two children he sired on her. Oh, he pays for their private school, she tells the media. He does? With whose money?

When I last looked in on Fed-Ex’s antics, I was thinking he couldn’t get any more stupid, but I have to admit that I was wrong. With his attorney spewing out nonsense designed to make Kev a sympathetic figure…a victim of someone else’s malicious press and gossip…he just makes the guy look so much more the pathetic loser…and that’s quite an accomplishment.

Murphy’s Law in action

South Africa has a number of large supermarket chains and, like in America, there is often one or two of them anchoring certain of the local malls. Here in Cape Town, Pick ‘n’ Pay is one of the dominant chains (where I do a lot of my shopping), Checkers is another (which I perceive as being a bit downmarket), and Woolworth’s is the premier “luxury” food shop, the place you go for the best quality produce and exotic cheeses. This morning I planned a trip to Woolies, with a stop at the nearby Checkers for some packaged goods. It did not go well.

I drive an SUV. Clearly aware of the prejudices against the vehicles and those of us who drive them, I try to be particularly circumspect when I drive and park, taking particular care to align my behemoth properly in the space. So, can anyone explain to me why, when I emerged from the supermarket this muggy, sweltering morning with a trolley full of perishables and a miserably aching ankle, the space available to open my car door was slim enough to give Nicole Richie pause? And, since I’m built more along the lines of the “before” pics of Kirstie Alley, getting into the car was a bit of a challenge, particularly with that sore ankle. And the cause of this inconvenience? Another gargantuan example of the automaker’s art? Would you believe, a VW Citi Golf, parked catawampus in its space, making ingress to my car…and egress from the parking space…an exercise in white-knuckled creativity?

The sore ankle was a large part of the problem, since the car is right hand drive and I must support my not inconsiderable weight on it as I fling my left leg and haunch up into the driver’s seat. Having my manoeuvring space compromised by the Piggy Parker next door made it all the worse. So why did I come out shopping if my foot is still so sore, you ask? Well, it wasn’t particularly tender when I left the house and, had my experience at Checkers gone according to plan, it would have been fine at the end of my excursion. But things at Checkers did not go well…and I never even made it to Woolies.

One of the things my husband says he loves about me is my practicality. I tend to plan things out…even such mundane things as shopping trips. My plan was to arrive at Checkers at opening time, dash in and pick up a few things, and get out before the store got crowded and the lines at the cashiers got long. From there to Woolies for a few things only Woolies carries, and then home in time to catch the latest instalment of All My Children (several years delayed from the US). But you know what Murphy said…

I hadn’t planned to buy produce from Checkers, but on entering the store, I saw a terrific display of white seedless table grapes (Hubby will only eat seedless grapes), so I grabbed a bunch and bagged them. I’m planning stuffed peppers for dinner this week, and the peppers looked to be in good nick…and there were fresh apricots, loose so I could choose my own (the pre-packaged punnets always contain about 50% unripe and sour!). Now, one of the ways that South African supermarkets are different from American is that loose produce must be weighed and the bags sealed shut and tagged in the produce department…the fruit is not weighed by the cashier at check out. To this end, there are scales and employees manning those scales at every produce department in every major market in South Africa. Or at least that’s the way it is supposed to be.

Once I had my fruit bagged, I headed for the scale. A young man in a red T-shirt with a Checkers logo on it was busy hefting a huge plastic bag onto the scale…and I mean huge…the size you’d ordinarily need a small wheelbarrow to move about. The bag was leaking copious amounts of sticky wetness all over the scale, the stand, the floor…and it stank something awful. It was easy to deduce from the smell that the bag contained decaying produce, most particularly rotting grapes. When he had hefted the nasty goo-dripping bag onto a nearby trolley, he turned to me expectantly…and I looked pointedly at the disgusting mess on the scale.

Correctly interpreting my glance, he looked for something to clean the surface of the scale with and grabbed a plastic bag from one of the rolls of bags in the produce department. Of course, his efforts to wipe it clean succeeded in only smearing it around so he tried another tactic…a larger wad of plastic bags. I looked around for a “regular” produce department employee…they usually wear turquoise blue uniforms and aprons…but nobody was around. I did, however, spot a different scale. Unfortunately, the young man couldn’t make this scale work at all. My foot was starting to get tired, for I had been on my feet nearly 15 minutes by this time, and had barely begun my shopping.

To my left was the produce department, brimming over with employees, but not a produce department worker in sight. I asked a deli worker if she could help me, and she grabbed a “cleaner” (grocery stores have regular employees whose only job is to roam the store and make sure it is clean, mopping here, collecting refuse there, etc) and asked the cleaner to find someone to help me. Eventually she found someone, but she could not make the scale work either. She beckoned me to the other scale but I balked. “It’s filthy,” I told her. “I don’t want to put my bags on that thing.”

Sure enough, she found the scale in the same sticky, stinky condition as before. She dashed off to find something to clean it with while I, hobbling now on my sore foot, crept over to the scale…only to find, by the time I got there, that a line had formed! By the time I got to the scale, I was third in the queue and she was weighing the produce of another customer! Eventually I got the bags weighed and tagged and I headed off to the packaged goods section of the store for some things I knew Woolies didn’t carry.

By the time I was finished with my shopping, I was weighing whether or not my foot would stand the trek down to the Woolies at the far end of the mall or not. I had to stand in a queue to get a cashier (something I had hoped to avoid by arriving at the store early…my plan thwarted by the fiasco in the produce department), but finally it was my turn and when she rang up the total, I handed her my Visa card. She put the card through and a message came up on her terminal screen: “verifying transaction”…machine-speak for verifying my credit card had enough headroom to charge a few hundred rand worth of groceries. Problem is, two minutes later (an eternity in nano-second driven machine time), it hadn’t verified…or rejected…my card. The cashier pushed a button to resubmit the transaction for approval and a little blue window popped up on her screen: her credit card terminal was off line. So what does she do? She keeps me standing there for fully another five minutes (while the queue behind me grows and grows and grows…) as she repeated tries to resubmit my transaction on a machine no long functioning. Just as I figure out what she is doing, she rings for a supervisor who comes over, reads the “off line” message on the screen and tries to submit my transaction for approval on a machine she knows is off line and non-functioning!

To give her credit, she didn’t make multiple attempts, she just wrote down the total of my purchase on her hand, grabbed my credit card and said she had to use a different terminal, then walked away. With my credit card. And so I had to hobble after her…in a direction away from the exit where my car was parked…to complete my transaction.

By the time it was done and I had my credit card back and my groceries bagged, my foot had started to swell. I checked the time and All My Children had already started…I was woefully behind schedule, every step on my right foot was like a sabre stabbing me from the heel to the knee, and I hadn’t even been to Woolie’s yet. Hobbling out the door, pushing my trolley in front of me, I headed for the parking lot, only to find the little VW snuggled up to my driver’s door like a lover.

Murphy was right.