DELORIS | I feel for you lovely, loving, lonely rentals

Parenting teens. Kapow! Rat-tat-tat-tat. Rebellion and freedom, baby.

It’s the Great Battle of the Bloody Hormones. The teens are young, crackling with energy, and full of “it”. The rentals are in their prime and starting to imagine they can see the top of the hill approaching.

Shadows and light. Every picture has them, penned the world’s greatest songstress, Joni Mitchell.

It’s such a moment, and I had the privilege of being there on Friday night when it all went down. At Halloween.

A quick Perplexity check (this is an AI tool that gives references): like many of our greatest rituals and holidays, Halloween starts with an ancient Pagan ritual, in this case November 1 was a time when the harvest was over — and winter is coming.

The boundary between the living and the dead has become as thin as a piece of freshly hydrated rice paper.

The spirits of the dearly, and not-so-dearly, departed ancestors roam the land and must be warded off with lanterns carved from turnips.

Later it became pumpkins, and now, in the US, the biggest pumpkin is the most worrisome of all.

The Celtics called it Samhain, and then the Christian church designated this festival as All Saints’ Day (All Hallows’ Day) to honour saints and the deceased, which is a sweet twist.

But try to tell that to those who smell freedom in the very air.

But bonfires must be ignited, costumes adorned and the lanterns lit.

It’s all a bit bonkers and creepy, until you think about the voices that live in your head of your dearly departed mother and father, headmasters and corporals, but also the groovy folk.

All these mentors and maniacs living in your dear old brain. Perhaps a good Halloween skop is a good thing, clean out the cobwebs.

So, when I got the nod to join the soon-to-be-ancestors — the ballies — at a teen Halloween party in our leafy suburbs, I took it up.

It was a dark and rainy night. I had to be nifty on the motorcycle, awake to any banshees and idiots leaping into my rain-spattered visor view.

I arrived at the venue and was met by a gaggle of early teen girls.

I admit, I got off my hobo-chic bike, its bags and straps flapping, battle-scarred and ominous and, with my black helmet and gloves and big boots and jacket puffed up, rumbled towards them, visor still down, demanding to know, in my loudest giant voice, where the crying little child was.

Yoh. In retrospect, that was questionable. I had also, for some dumb effect, drawn a big black “scar” down my eye and added stitches.

They ran screaming.

We soon settled down into this most extraordinary home — my friend is a creative, and, after renovations, it is now an incredible homage to space, colour and functionality.

The grass and gardens flow downhill to a little stream and a big forest. All of this, every bit of the property was filled with props — dolls, mannequins, critters, snakes.

But also, a full-on disco with DJ, strobe lights ... I get ahead of myself.

First, we had to do the walk. Down, down, down to the bottom of the garden we went, picking our way along muddy paths on stepping stones.

As we entered the darkness, a voice boomed out “ooh ha-ha”. Demonic laughter, then a big bang of sound and a swoosh of acrid “mist”.

Strue as Bob, there is this middle-aged ballie standing at the start of the Halloween party trail, guarding the fun with his big sound box, smoke machine and a plastic knife penetrated and exiting his head.

And no-one else. The loneliest party man in East London, in a soggy forest. A stoic.

But he did his job with joy, sending us down the path through a seemingly endless tableau of ghoulish games and activities. When it came to the eyeballs, I admit to stealing one of the Brussels sprouts and chomping it.

Each activity was accessed by a now very wet curtain which was pulled aside, and in you went.

The level of conceptualisation and organisation was startling, but when the host appeared, my friend, in a platinum blond wig, it was explained that all these artefacts were kept in a large storage box or two and hauled out annually.

Halloween, she said, was the family’s biggest party event.

Later on, as we did the impersonation of the elders in FernGully: The Last Rainforest, sitting around chatting about youth and universe while drinking good red wine, I had a chance to check out the wild youth.

First, they move like the ocean, in waves, with wobbles and bumps, never resting, always whispering, and laughing, chittering and chatting, an endless series of scenarios.

Now, when I was young ... snore.

They say old people have a distinct aroma — old perfumes, musty cupboards, greasy toolboxes and uncool fashion (that was before Jonsson, K-Way and First Accent came along and gave us hip, hardy threads).

But here’s another side to that: young people reek of teen spirit. It nearly knocked me out. A wall of scent and excitement. I was instantly rendered unconscious.

Inside, I was swooning and needed salts to recover.

When I came round, I was able to pick up some of the vibes. The girls were on it, like a sconit. Dressed, arraigned, aligned, organised, feisty and ready to party.

The boys arrived, so courteous in their clown costumes, shaking our hands and calling me “sir”.

I must assume that no boys were injured in this Halloween ambush alley.

Anyway, the teens of two or three “generations” — like a year or two represent different planets which stretch out to decades and even more when you hit 50 onwards — were having the time of their lives.

I assume hearts were broken, dreams shattered, or not, love was discovered, but it’s all still part of an awesome experience.

We are reaching the end of the academic year. Youths are leaving the institutional home of their school years. They face a society which is troubled and full of turmoil.

They must find a starting point, pick a path, make a commitment, all that parental stuff... I wish my parents had stuck a plane ticket in my hands for Hawaii, handed me a stick with a little hanky holding my worldly chattel, and said: “Go out and find yourself, son.”

Instead, we were put on trains, and sent off to have our heads shaven, asses kicked, egos broken “and built up again”, R1 stuck in our hands and told to go to war. It was a war we had no idea about beyond the crass indoctrination of National Party education.

What a travesty and for what? War is absolutely good for nothing.

There are other dreadful pitfalls for youths. Our city lives with the horrifying memory of Enyobeni, the tavern of death where so many of our children died.

It’s brutal and dangerous out there.

And so we have this heady mix of teen energy and power, exploding onto a dangerous adult stage.

In this time of transition, in my experience, our parents, mostly, did not hold us close. In the 70s and 80s, it was “sink or swim”, do or die. Literally.

We lived in a strange world of freedom through abandonment, and extreme punishment if you were caught.

If you smoked weed, you went to jail, for example.

Our parents, we like to say, did their best, and they did some cool stuff — we spent days at the beach, we enjoyed the Papagallo, and Kings Hotel for birthdays, we had five or more movie houses and rugby at the BRU, and of, course, Ray Johnson’s disco near the Star Bakery.

We charfed and smooched in gross cubicles at the drive-inn, or in the bush at the Nahoon River mouth, or simply under the street light outside our homes.

It was rough but we were ready.

Did I want that for my kids? Hell no. My happiest memory was spending time in a kids’ lounge at a Jewish friend’s home in Bunkers Hill. We were left alone, but we were sheltered, held in a circle of care.

Of course, on Friday nights, I had a yarmulke placed on my head, was fed Kitke bread and told I had a Jewish grandfather — all news to 15-year-old me.

I am talking to the rentals here, not the kids. How do we manage this unmanageable period of growth for our teens?

How do we stand back for the inevitable? How do we throw the invisible cloak of protection?

I, for example, famously declared that if my teen daughters were in any trouble while out on the jorl, mostly inebriated, they could call me any time day or night and I would pick them up — with absolutely no fear of remonstration or lecture. Nothing. Simply a dad Uber.

Of course, one daughter did indeed call me for a ride from outside a then-Grahamstown restaurant bar, because, it turned out, she was bored.

I take great joy in the fact that when I fetched younger daughter from a gross open party at Kenton and she was so phuza-faced she could not speak, the next morning, at breakfast, I said nothing, and she burst out: “Dad, you can ground me for two weeks!”

Take that, parenting 101.

We were a different generation of parents. We came out of a civil war, and those of us who were democrats, vowed to raise our children in a more progressive, meaning caring and interested, way.

We travelled to galas, stood in the crowds at the My Coke Fest rock concert in Kenilworth looking “like a farmer”, went to every game, concert, speech and prizegiving, and camped, much camping.

Perfection is mostly depression, and there are great rumples and rents in the process. Parenting should be the hardest task your brain has ever been asked to undertake.

I think it worked, though it brings me some amusement at how parents will never escape the critical pike — my girls love to remind me that I am the father of two “diagnosed ADHD daughters”. Nudge nudge.

I like to call it “drift journalism”.

There is still that moment when you have to let go; the kids have to go out into society and make their own thrilling way, be their own person.

But I feel for you, lovely, loving, lonely rentals.