Sunday, February 19, 2006

Memento vivere

I made some contact with old but close family in Atlanta, GA last night. It was a pleasure to hear crazy stories from middle aged Ndebele relatives. One of the drawbacks of being here in San Jose is that I don't know any sub-saharans. No-one to share the ambiguities and idiosyncrasies that are thrown at me everyday. Life in this part of the world is different and those very disparities only add to our longing for a speedy home coming. Today is one of those days in which I find myself dreadfully homesick and have no-one in my 20 mile radius to ramble on about our past lives.

From the nondescript clanging of ice-cream man's bell as he cycled down the street in his red and white livery and you chasing after him, bare feet and all, armed with fifty cent coins and a beaming face, to seeing how far your stone skim would across Maleme Dam, to running around in the blinding sun during winter, to winning the Grade 1's 60 metre dash and showing off your red ribbon to the entire infant school for a week, to days when Wimpy (8th Ave opp Edgars) was a special treat topped with mouth watering Banana Boat, to happily chatting to maid while she did the aftertoon's ironing, to helping your gogo decide which chicken to have for supper, to thanking your gogo for her 20 cent gift after a week in the makhayas, to trying out green blazers four times your size at Haddon & Sly with the hope of growing into one of them, to realising how naive you were to think that high school was a form of heaven, to learning how to own up to one's faults - the hard way, to losing all that innocence in adolescence.... The rest, well, we'll just leave it at that.

I may find myself in some crazy country but it's hard to drift away from my beautiful and idyllic past. Describing my personal African experience is something I enjoy doing with people I encounter here. It is very different to images the rest of the world sees on the evening news. Someone asked me the other day just how it can be that privileges in our society could be divided by a thin and very austere line. Looking back, I realise just how hard my parents worked to afford us better lives than they had. It didn't come cheap and the pendulum could have swung either way.

But then again, the feathers of our Zimbabwe Bird have been ruffled and it somehow feels like a paradise lost, a distant memory. Maybe Shakespeare could concur that all our yesterdays may have lighted fools. One thing I will always be is a dreamer. See this entry. I'm the eternal optimist. An aficionado of the good things that life has to offer, never forgetting to remember to live. Memento vivere.

posted by mpenseli @ 1:10 PM