OK. I woke up feeling so mopey and burdened, all the problems of the world, tax, children, squeezy, work, money, the cold, the dark and I drag the trash out.
It is Wednesday, and I am wondering why they didn’t fetch it last week. So I lug double the forever waste. If those outsourced tenderpreneur contractors don’t do the job today, there will be litter to pick up later.
Everything is connected, ne?
I had a cup of coffee in my hand. I clump down the road like a geriatric troglodyte emerging from the cave and head for the sea.
And there I sat morbidly on a bench wondering if my name would ever be on it on a plaque— “Here sits Deloris Koan, forever enjoying a pity party”.
But I let that 7.30am sun fall on me. It was bright and burnished by the ocean surface.
Apparently, this is excellent for one, if you do it first thing in the morning. It sets your circadian clock, your natural body rhythm.
So that was OK.
Then, still feeling a bit dopey on a park bench eyeing the day with bad intent, I look up and there is my friend, Mandy, bouncing along with her daughter, looking incredibly bright and breezy.
I get a cheerful hello. OK, fine. Now I am looking at the scene differently.
It’s a beautiful day. Storms are rolling past south, just tickling our coast with incredibly light, grooming winds.
The colour is hard to comprehend — light blue, dark blue, no, some black, but the impact zone is yellow, green, chartreuse.
And the surf is fresh and clean, tra-la-la; the lip of the waves is tasselled by the cross-breeze.
Ah, it is spring tide, so it’s low.
I look up again and, whoa! Two high-age women in beach robes, water shoes and bodyboards under their arms, green and red. They are strolling with purpose towards Gonubie Beach. I am enthralled, mesmerised.
Just two, no femme pack? No pom-poms, garden hats, or shrieking pink tutus like the recent Granny Grommet Festival extravaganza?
Nope, just two soul surfers.
And then I’m stumbling, walking, loping, striding.
I’m following them. I do not know why, but they seem to exude some sort of doughty essence, and I want to be part of that.
It is not unusual for writers to follow people.
Herman Charles Bosman, also a sub-editor at the Sunday Express, a paper I worked on as a student in 1984, got so excited when he saw a crowd that he followed them right to the end, which turned out to be the sharp point of a syringe and he got inoculated!
In fact, he and his characters followed us into Rooi Hel prison in then Port Elizabeth, and the warders used to wonder why all the detainees were guffawing at the start of our 12-hour evening lock-up.
But here I am today, shloofing along in my slops and shabby-chic black jeans and faded K-Way jacket, my empty coffee cup swinging on my finger, heading towards a fork in the road.
The galz take the high road, the wooden walkway built so many years ago by my mate, and I take the low road — just as my whiskey-loving Scottish granny Lilith used to sing to us right here when we sprockets had tea at the Gonubie Hotel in the early 1960s.
Apparently she fell off a ladder and died.
But here I am, 60 years on, heading down to the tidal pool, and what is this? A man in civvies unlocking the municipal change rooms and toilets at 8 o’clock on the dot.
Everything is in order, so I decide, on a whim, just to walk along the sea-facing pool wall. Please, don’t try this at home, kids, because it’s a bit slippery. But I mince along with a bit of a bounce in my step.
I get to the middle piece of cement, where the nose bridge in the futuristic goggles-shaped pool creates a natural play stage.
Wow, kids must have fun here!
But in this cool, clear water, I see so much algae and no little fish. Weird because why would it grow in a salt ocean pool supposedly washed clean by the high tide?
We all know why — a sewage leak that comes more than it goes, and the abject failure of the city to simply open a valve to let the sea do its cleaning thing.
Now I am past the centrepiece and approaching the overflow slipway.
The water is barely trickling over the edge, and I look down and there it is, the big square, shiny metal head on top of a grand, rusty old pipe — the infamous valve that is not opened much by BCM except when the lifeguards do it.
Looking down on that four-sided shaft, I am reminded of Edward Abbey’s classic 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang.
It’s about misfit adults — early prototype environmental activists — who step in when other adults lack courage and take on the horrid machines chowing up their land as a construction company smashes in a desert-chomping monster pipe and dam, which will kill a wild river.
But all I am thinking here is, what does the wrench look like that opens this valve so that nature can clean the scale off the pool’s teeth?
And I wonder, yeah, someone’s got that spanner, and why don’t they just open this thing?
Anyway, I look out at the sea, and there the bodyboarding aunties are, their boards out in front as they push over the foamies, heading into the energy zone.
They are having the greatest time out here, and I’m suddenly feeling so much better.
I gaze out at the ocean; my gosh, there’s a whale breaching. And I’m feeling like, good, man!
I look back to the land and see that the pool is glassy and sacred, and above on the walkway stoep are the four Jehovah’s Witnesses. I look at my clock — it’s just after 8.
It’s a cold, sunny wintry Wednesday morning, and here they are, saving souls.
I call up to her and ask, “How many souls do you expect to harvest at this time of day in the middle of winter?”
And the answer floats down in a lakka accent: “Just give us one hour and we will have a chapter of the Bible in your head!”
And I go on to ask, OK, well, that’s committed, but which chapter?
I mean, this book is quite heavily edited, was this much-loved St James Bible, or the Roman one, or Donald Trump’s version? And what happened to the gospels of Mary? But I don’t.
My best friends are delightful and very dedicated Christians and they all pick up on these magnificent stories and then live by them, and that’s awesome.
Well, good luck to them, they are an element of the endless curiosity of human existence and endurance.
I head home feeling so much better.
I ponder about Erling Haaland, everyone’s favourite Norwegian striker, the towering Viking warrior who plays with extraordinary determination, hurling pesky opponents about and loving children.
There’s a picture of him standing in the stadium after a victory, just looking at the crowd, with what could be construed as a goofy expression.
Such is cultural ignorance. There is so much going on in that motionless gaze.
It has a term. He is engaging in the extraordinary cognitive exercise of savouring. He’s just enjoying the moment.
And I realised that sometimes we just need to get off our dark cloud, get onto the beach and lie in the sun, and then get up, go into the surf then get back to our warm towel or just hot sand, mos — rinse and repeat like we used to do, though we got totally roasted in the sun.
Just going down to the sea. And parking off and letting it all work its magic.
That’s what’s going to get me through winter. And it’s what our city is built on.
