Who is the Boy in the Stop Sign?

 Halloween in Fort Lee, New Jersey, 197(?)

I came across this picture by chance, while loading photos from last weekend's Halloween shindig onto iPhoto.

Halloween in Fort Lee, NJ, circa, I think, 1974. 

There was that tug of nostalgia as my mind gathered scattered fragments of longago.

I remembered the broomstick my dad persuaded in through one sleeve, across my back and out through the other. How uncomfortable it was, forcing itself against my shoulder blades, prodding me to be much more upright than I felt. I soon figured out a way to twist my wrists and rest my gloved palms flat on the top of it and kind of hang there, just like a scarecrow would.

My dad was always great with costumes. He liked to let his creative side out – he also made busts of grey plasticine that stood on flat wood offcuts on the dining room table, next to the typewriter and the stacks of white pages which were his real work. They never really hardened, those busts. I guess he would pinch them and change them continually, shape and improve them whenever he needed a break from writing. They looked vaguely presidential. Mt Rushmore men, but only one at a time.

I remembered the scratchy feel of the straw he stuffed in between the broomstick and my skin, bulking me up inside my jacket, trailing out of my pockets, bursting from the tear he made in the knees of my jeans. I have a shadow sense of the illicit thrill when he ripped that hole in a pair of perfectly good pants – although I guess they must have already been too small for me. My dad liked to dress me in too-big clothes, so they would last.

To be a child is to be continually outgrowing.

I liked the way he tassled the bottoms of my pants. Maybe I wanted them to look like the ones the real scarecrow wore on his way to get a brain from Oz.

I remember how impressed I was with the leaves he pinned onto the outside of my jacket -- right over my heart, like a badge. 

And then I remembered something else.

When I look at that hat, I remember how we found it that morning in the walk-in cupboard in my parents' bedroom. The bedroom that was now only his, because my mother had left. 

'Run off', I think is the term they use, when someone leaves to be with someone else. They never seem to depart slowly, in those cases. For good reason, I suppose.

She must not have taken all of her clothes, or maybe she just took the winter ones she would need for the next few months. She'd left that hat behind. The turquoise felt smelt of her, of Joy perfume and scalp. 

I think I remember my father's mouth tightening into that don't-think-about-it-don't-talk-about-it straight line while we rummaged through her things.

And when I look at my face in this picture, under the shadow of that turquoise hat, I think my face is trying not to say the same thing. But failing, miserably.

And then (because it is better to be somewhere else) I wonder: who is the boy in front of me, the one wearing the stop sign? Did I know him? Were we standing together or just randomly in the same line? 

I wonder what his face is like, under that mask.  If I knew that, then. Is his avatar an ironic take on his family situation. (Was mine?) Whose idea was it? Who helped him put his costume together, who constructed that imperfect octagon, painted it red and white, with a slit for eyes. What is he holding there, so tight in his pockets, besides gloved hands?

What was it, if anything, that he wanted to stop?

Some feelings you can outgrow. Others just keep on going.

Spontaneous 'Kom' Bustion

It was the fourth fire to come through in a  month. The fourth time we nosed the smoke, felt the alert begin to tingle in some back part of the brain. The part that's always on, like a radio station in the background. It's telling you what to get together, just in case, while you carry on doing what you had been doing (feeding dogs, meeting deadlines) for the time being.

And after so many 'just in cases' already this month the radio station was turned down low. The bag with the crucial documents, the cat box, the dog's leashes. My manuscript's printed rough drafts one and two. The small red shoebox that my dad kept all these years, the one that says 'Shufflers' and came home for the first time bearing a pair of sandals I can still vaguely picture on my own four-year-old feet; it now holds many smaller boxes of slides he took with his Rolleiflex, looking down into that magic box while he was really looking at me. 

These and all the other things you would rather not live without (although you know that you could, if it came to that) had been taken out and put back three times already this month. Just in case.

So this time, when the smoke began prickling the inside of my nostrils I kind of ignored it. Even thought the wind was pumping a vicious, malicious, mean spirited gale, and coming from the south east.

I live on the southeast corner of Kommetjie, a small coastal village on the south western side of the Cape Peninsula. It's the wild edge of the village, the side that abuts koppies rather than dunes, where the coastal fynbos shelters tortoises and cobras, field mice and long grey mongooses. There are caracal and camels (although those are not indigenous - there are a holy three that graze here sometimes when they are not taking tourists around on Bedouin carpet saddles at Imhoff farm). The baboons prefer the rocky outcrops and easy-access dustbins on Kommetjie's western edge, but last year we had to chase a puffadder out of our compost heap.

There is a stand of gumtrees in the camel field which are not indigenous either, and highly combustible. Every time a fire comes through -- and it is always during a southeaster, and always from the southeast -- we gather, neighbours in this small cul-de-sac which only has four houses, and watch the gumtrees and wonder if this time, they are going to go. The standing joke, as we gather in nightgowns with morning cups of tea at the wire fence that separates the end of the cul-de-sac from the field, is that we should stop meeting like this.

And then the fires pass by, beaten by valiant firefighters into the the mountains to the south, and the bags and the boxes and the documents and leashes and the external harddrives would be put back in the cupboards and life would carry on.

There were a few things that were different about this time -- besides the fact that the wind direction was just right and the gums did burn; besides the fact that the firetrucks were in our tiny cul-de-sac and not way on the other side of the field. Besides the fact that when the call actually came to evacuate the smoke was so thick you couldn't see the field at all but felt the flame heat and the ash wind-blast into the backs of your eyes; this time, despite all the practice runs, my brain just wasn't working.

I spent last week in hospital hooked up to a potent corticosteroid drip to treat a condition I had almost forgotten I had, after seven years in remission. High doses of Solumedrol make you feel like a mustang on tik. Which is particularly disconcerting if you can't feel anything from your chest down. Plus it has been known to induce psychosis. I like to call mine mania, my partner would probably favour the stronger term. Kind friends who visited in hospital told me I just talked faster, which they hadn't thought possible. I can't remember a lot of what I said. (Perhaps this is where I should apologise if I gave any offense to anyone?)

But the drug does work. After almost a week back home I was walking without having to hold on to things, and could feel my fingers and hands enough to type my book column and, when the fire came in, to help pack up the car.

Only I didn't really help, because I couldn't remember what I was supposed to take. After all the practice runs, all I could do was put the bags that were already packed 'just-in-case' on the kitchen table. I did remember my laptop, because I was using that, and my camera (ditto - my hands were good to work that too, especially on motor-drive), and the books that I was reviewing for my deadline. (Douglas Coupland's Player One, Earl Lovelace's Is Just a Movie, Neil Jordan's Mistaken, Emma Forrest's Your Voice in My Head, and Fiona McIntosh's Slackpacking, which I am going to do a lot more of when I get my strength, if not my entire mind, back. The reviews will be in Psychologies Magazine's South African April/May 2011 issue.)

It seemed, it seems, that I could or can only concentrate on what I am doing right now, and have lost the ability to plan forward or, for that matter, think back. Perhaps that is a normal side effect of having too much adrenaline running around your system.  (Rest, they tell you in the hospital, while they pump you full of the stuff. Rest, the tell you when you get home, then test you with a fire through your village.) It's like being in a permanent state of fight or flight, after someone tampered with the brakes.

So I forgot my passport, and a whole lot of other things. But remembered all things living, the dogs and the cats and David, who indulged me, as he does in so many things, by returning for the passport, by which time we couldn't tell through the smoke if the house was still there.

Strange daze indeed.

(to be continued...)