The Gospel acording to Bruce

Pheonix, Arizona, July, 1978. Bruce Springsteen addresses his audience of 10 000 plus in the Veterans Memorial Coliseum (as told by Rolling Stone reporter Dave Marsh):

'It began with a description of his family, house and home, and his perennial battles with his father. 

"Finally," he says, "my father said to me, 'Bruce, it's time to get serious with your life. This guitar thing is okay as a hobby, but you need something to fall back on. You should be a lawyer' –– which I coulda used later on in my career. He says. 'Lawyers, they run the world.' But I didn't think they did--and I still don't.

"My mother, she's more sensitive. She thinks I should be an author and write books. But I wanted to play guitar. So my mother, she's very Italian, she says. 'This is a big thing, you should go see the priest.' So I went to the rectory and knocked on the door. 'Hi, Father Ray, I'm Mr. Springsteen's son. I got this problem. My father thinks I should be a lawyer, and my mother, she wants me to be an author. But I got this guitar.'

"Father Ray says. 'This is too big a deal for me. You gotta talk to God,' who I didn't know too well at the time. 'Tell him about the lawyer and the author,' he says, 'but don't say nothin' about that guitar'.


"Well, I didn't know how to find God, so I went to Clarence's house. He says, 'No sweat. He's just outside of town.' So we drive outside of town, way out on this little dark road.

"I said, 'Clarence, are you sure you know where we're goin'?' He said, 'Sure, I just took a guy out there the other day.' So we come to this little house out in the woods. There's music blasting out and a little hole in the door. I say, 'Clarence sent me,' and they let me in. And there's God behind the drums. On the bass drum, it says: G-O-D. So I said, 'God. I got this problem. My father wants me to be a lawyer and my mother wants me to be an author. But they just don't understand –– I got this guitar.'

 

"God says, 'What they don't understand is that there was supposed to be an Eleventh Commandment. Actually, it's Moses' fault. He was so scared after ten, he said this is enough, and went back down the mountain. You shoulda seen it--great show, the burning bush, thunder, lightning. You see, what those guys didn't understand was that there was an Eleventh Commandment. And all it said was: Let It Rock!'" '

An extract from Rolling Stone magazine's Bruce Springsteen Raises Cain: A true believer witnesses mass conversions, rock & roll vandalism, a rocket upside the head and a visit with God by Dave Marsh (August 24, 1978) 

See the full story http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/bruce-springsteen-raises-cain-19780824

youtube video from a later concert that same year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMLIig1lR1g#t=357

'I'm Your Fan' - The Revelation of Following Bruce Springsteen

At the end of my three-night Bruce Springsteen concert odyssey, I am sated and elated ... and a lot stupider than I was before I started on this ground-hog day like live-gig marathon.

I should wonder how The Boss feels – he's the one who did the equivalent of three long-distance hauls in four days, and despite copious amounts of sweat (which wet the T-shirt nicely, none of the girls complained...) he looked like he could go on for another couple of hours. And he's 17 years older than me...

Part of my stupid-head is just plain tiredness. I managed to meet a couple of pressing deadlines over the past days, in between battling traffic to get to the venue at the other side of the world (from behind the lentil curtain to behind the boerewors curtain, to be exact – but that will only make sense to you if you live in Cape Town), then standing in lines and staking out positions, and then screaming and jiving for three-plus hours in the auditoriam each night. Ah, the happy ear-blast  - it was BIG, it was LOUD! The post-Bruce ringing in my ears only just subsided each day in time to be clear for the next sonic assault. I think doing it repeatedly has done something to my brain.

Do I sound like I am complaining? I am categorically not. It's just - what do I do now, after four straight days of Bruce? I've got this hollow empty feeling. I put another CD on – or better still, pull out the old vinyls, for their warmth, you know? – and it feels a little better. But only just.

I've never been a groupie. I'm not a joiner, I don't go in for mass therapy sessions. I don't like crowds. But if the spirit moves you ... I feel like I understand Renton's urgent rant at the beginning of Trainspotting, with one difference: instead of heroin, I say, Just do Bruce.

His fans know this. Their devotion was a revelation.

I mean the real fans, not just the ones who rushed out to buy tickets as soon as they came online and looked forward to the concerts with some excitement. I mean the ones who camped out from six o'clock every morning in the blazing sunlight, and made sure they were there for the roll call every three hours, and wore their numbers inked proudly on the back of their hands, so that, when they – only the first 350 of them, mind you – got their coveted Golden Circle entry bands, they could line up in strict numerical order and enter the stadium before anyone else to claim their hard-earned spots right up against the stage, within  touching distance of the man they had come to see. 

Blikkies and Frikkie - their shirts were hand-painted by a 16-year-old son of someone in their devotional group

Not all of them were locals. Many had come from far and wide, some because that is what they do, others because they were lured here by the novelty – and the double bubble happiness – of seeing both The Boss and Cape Town for the first time.

Linette came all the way from Sweden, with her son. She has been to every Scandinavian Springsteen concert ever. And we had all 'met' her the night before, when Bruce pulled her on stage during 'Dancing in the Dark' and she stumbled in her excitment and fell hard on the giant floor monitor speakers. Our sympathy vied with our envy. She recovered quickly, pulled herself up and went to jive with saxophonist Jake Clemons (Clarence Clemon's nephew). "I was number 10!" she told me proudly the next night, referring to the number inked on her hand. On this, the third and last of the Cape Town gigs, she was badly sunburned from spending another day in the Golden Circle line. "I got high numbers on all three days," she said, "but that one was the best day." When I asked her if she was sore after her fall the night before she gave me a look that said, "I should feel pain? In the midst of this Euphoria?" What she actually said was,  "I will hold that moment in my heart, always. So, so close to my heart."

Ready for round two....

There was a German fan who couldn't wait to hold up his cardboard sign for Bruce to read. It said, "We found your balls!" (A reference to the fact that, on night two, Bruce told the adoring crowd that he had had his first swim in Cape Town. "It's COLD," he said. (Duh.) "It's so damn cold, I haven't seen my balls in a day-and-a-half!")

 Alberto and Beatrice came in from Alicante in Spain. They were the kind of people you want to hang around with in a Golden Circle (and we did) because they were so infectiously joyful, high on being there and just keen to dance and celebrate. They knew what they were doing - it was Alberto's 123rd Bruce Springsteen concert. That's right - one-hundred-and-twenty-third! His wife Beatrice was on number 63 – he already had a couple of gigs under his belt when they met. 

They have a three-year-old son, who stayed home with family in Spain. His name? Bruce. Alberto pulled out his iPhone and showed me pictures of his boy, and his motorbike. It's called Thunder. (As in, Thunder Road). It has lightning bolts and all kinds of other Springsteen related insignia on it – I couldn't quite follow it all through the excitment in Alberto's telling.

But I think the fan that touched me the most was Elan, from Israel. I was chatting to him on the numbered chairs outside the stadium, before they let all the arm-banded chosen ones through to claim their space by the stage. I told him Bruce had saved my life (see last post) and he one-upped me. "Me too," he said. "Me too. There was a time when I was so depressed, I was going to kill myself. But then I just thought, how could I live without his music?"

(Yes I realise there's an existential gordian knot of a contradiction in there, but it's the thought that counts.)

How he undid me was like this: "So how did you feel," Elan aksed me, "when you finally got to see Bruce after all this time?"

I started on an analysis of the first and second night's concerts, how they differed in vibe, the set list, what we thought he might play that night because he hadn't on the others. "But how did you feel?" he insisted.

"I don't know." I said. "His energy is amazing. And he is so generous with the crowds. And..."

He cut me short, impatient. "How. Did. You. FEEL?"

Oh. Okay. I finally got it. And while I tried to find the words he put the last lick on his rollup and left to smoke it elsewhere. I believe I had disapointed him.  I was too logical, Too distant. Too careful.
Why could I not just answer him from the heart?

So how did it feel?

It felt deeply personal. And surprisingly intimate.

It was a revelation. It was everything it had promised to be, and much, much more.

It left me deeply satisfied. And simultaneously ravenous. 

Yes, I was part of this crowdsurf wave . I think one of my best tweets ever was the one I sent moments after I took this. It said: 'I just had #BruceSpringsteen in the palm of my hands'

 
Live Bruce Springsteen is a little bit like a drug. Once you've had a taste of it, you need another fix.

I think I undertstand those die-hard fans, who travel all over the world, who notch-up the Springsteen concerts they've seen, reciting rollcalls of places and years - Barcelona, Milan, Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin, Helsinki, New York, L.A., Boston, D.C. ... The friendships forged in queues, the cameraderie of the Golden Circle seekers, the mix of grim determination and eager anticipation, knowing what you are about to see but knowing also that it will be different, is always different, every time. Bruce makes sure of that.

 It's hard to explain the very personal connection people have to his music. The way thousands of people can gather en masse and yet still feel that he is talking to them alone.

I should have told Elan that seeing Bruce Springsteen live changed me. If I had a Bucket List, and a reason to use it, following Bruce around a world tour would be on it.

I'll keep you posted on that one.

Why Bruce Springsteen is a big deal (to me)

Tonight I am going to see Bruce Springsteen for the first time. It's a big deal.

Not because his live shows are legend. Or because his songs sustained me through some of the darkest hours of my life. But because it feels like coming home.

I wasn't 'Born in the USA', but I should have been. I moved there before I could walk or talk. I was brought up in the boroughs of New Jersey, where I learned to navigate language with a certain tone and twang. My Fort Lee address was the first one I learned to recite. I made up a little tune in my head to remember the zip code – oh-sevenoh-twofour.

I thought I belonged there. My South African parents, working abroad in NYC, split up when I was just starting school at Fort Lee's Madonna Convent. For a couple of years I spent afternoons and evenings with a day mother in the neighbourhood. Her name was Anna.

Anna lived in John Street. She was Italian American and Catholic and vast. She wore loose tent dresses and flat open shoes that showed her cracked heels. She was solidly there for me when very little else was.

It was a neighbourhood where people came home tired from factory shifts and watched daytime television (and then watched Vietnam and Watergate unfold on the late-night news). They went to church. They sent their kids to wars. They ran pizza parlours on Main Street and hair salons in their basements. And some took in other people's kids for a little extra cash.

I remember interminable bingo games in the church hall, where grownups sat stolid on grey foldout chairs but yelled when their numbers came in.  In winter, we kids made angels in the dirt that gathered in the corners of parking lots, hoping they would freeze over and still be there in spring. I have a scar on my left palm from the giant splinter that went in there, from the playground's steel-and-wood merry-go-round. Anna and hairdresser Nancy tried to get it out with a needle burned clean over a flame, but they couldn't find it. It came out on its own a couple of months later.

Anna's son Ronald resented me being around. If he wasn't scowling at me he was taunting me – especially at night when I pressed my nose against the window, waiting for my dad to get back from his late news deadline and take me to my other home. Our apartment was only a few short blocks – and a jump in income bracket – away. It overlooked the Hudson River and Manhattan. I watched two towers go up on the other side and thought they were building a 'Wolf Trade Centre'.

Ronald had GI Joe action men and baseball cards, but I wasn't allowed in his room. When I slept over it was on Anna's living room sofa under a scratchy olive brown military blanket. I don't know who it once belonged to.

Anna drove a big long car and took us to Dairy Queen on the way back from visits to cemeteries and the homes of her friends where there were knobbed plastic runners to keep the carpets clean and the store plastic stayed on the furniture. The houses always smelled of cooked meat. I remember spaghetti and meatballs, and breaded pork-chops with mashed potatoes, washed down with Coke.

There were crucifixes everywhere, and lots of pictures of Madonnas. The Catholic church was at the centre of everything, but the half-hour when Days of Our Lives came on was also sacrosanct; when Anna said it was time for 'her program' you had to keep quiet.

Whoa, Fat Lady, Big Mama, Missy Bimbo sits in her chair and yawns ...

If I was lucky she'd switch over to I Dream of Jeannie after. When I wished on the first star at night I asked to be like the television genie, just to be able to blink and make all my other wishes come true.

Our priest was Father O'Connor. My dad was agnostic but Anna made sure I had my first communion; Nancy of the underground parlour set my long blonde hair in ringlets. I couldn't sleep that night because the curlers dug into my scalp, but the next day while I was waiting in my white dress and immaculate shoes a boy told me I looked pretty. It was my first ever compliment.

What does all this have to do with Bruce Springsteen? Besides the fact that around then he would be releasing his first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, which was not so far down the road. I was still too young, of course, to dream of riding the backstreets. My life was more Sesame Street than E Street. But that was all about to change.

***

Fast-forward close to a decade and four different countries later: I'm being yanked, kicking and screaming, to South Africa to 'find my roots'. The RSA of the mid-eighties is a place I don't understand and don't want to be because the little I do understand about it, I don't like.

My mother chose to marry a diplomat, a representative of the apartheid government, for her second husband. In the scant handful of years I'd spent living under his roof in foreign lands, I'd learned that his politics was only one of the dodgy things about him. Sure, there were material privileges. But I soon learned that all things come at a price. When I finished high school I couldn't get away fast enough.

I spent my graduation summer with my dad on the U.S. East Coast – he was a correspondent in D.C. now. Born in the USA was topping the charts, everyone was Dancing in the Dark, and thanks to good grades I was accepted into every college I applied for.

But I was choke-chained to this scarred country. My mother insisted – blind-channeling her husband's patriotism – that I give up my college dreams and return to South Africa. Pretoria. Culture shock doesn't begin to describe it.

My mother wasn't around during most of my early New Jersey days so she wouldn't have understood why discovering Bruce Springsteen felt like a revelation for me. I didn't share my passion with her anyway. We lived in the same house but barely spoke.

I got a day job at a clothes store, did night shifts at an Italian restaurant, and planned my escape. I made a friend who loaned me her Vespa scooter, and I rode it to the local record library and took out every Springsteen album they had. 

When we found the things we loved,

they were crushed and lying in the dirt

we tried to pick up the pieces

and get away without getting hurt...

Each and every night, when I got home from my second work shift of the day, I retreated to my darkened bedroom. I'd made a cell-sized space, barricaded myself in behind bookshelves. With hi-fi speakers both sides of my pillow and Springsteen on the turntable, I cried for dashed dreams, and for the boy I'd left behind. I didn't cry for this Beloved Country. Not yet.

When you're an only child of split and deflected parents, living over four different continents in as many years, with no single person along for the whole ride to hold the narrative with you, you can get kind of lost. Your internal compass gets dizzy. Bruce anchored me.

Bruce's best songs are stories, and those stories became my lifeline. My bedtime tales were of misfits and circus clowns, of lost hopes and thwarted ambitions, of busted rebels and girls on porches with torn dreams and wrinkles around their eyes from crying themselves to sleep at night ... Those songs reached in and grabbed at the heart of my adolescent self-centered misery. And reminded me that there were other, bigger, miseries in this world. Misery loves company, after all.

'Born' had been everywhere that stateside summer I had just been wrenched out of. Now I went further back - The River, Nebraska, Born to Run, and oh, oh, oh, Darkness on the Edge of Town. I found I liked the really early stuff best. 'New York City Serenade' from The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle conjured rain-slicked streets with hydrants and fire escapes running down brick-sided buildings. I could be diamond Jackie doing a boogaloo down Broadway – I used to watch the Thanksgiving Day Parade from my dad's Broadway press-office window, so I knew its geometry. No matter how far away the mad dog's promenade was from the Pretoria bedroom where I locked myself away each night, I could go back there, in my mind.

Bruce wasn't just taking me home, he was tuning my musical ear.

My memories got tangled up with his images. The lumbering tubas of 'Wild Billy's Circus Story' conjured the fun fair they held every year on the field next to the Madonna school.

The machinist climbs his Ferris wheel like a brave
And the fire eater's lyin' in a pool of sweat, victim of the heat wave
Behind the tent, the hired hand tightens his legs

on the sword swallower's blade
The circus town's on the shortwave

I had been standing underneath the Ferris wheel when Anna told somebody I was actually from Africa. They shouted and looked at me different. Somebody said something about lions.

Now I was in this rogue nation's capital with no friends, no prospects, and a family that felt like a danger zone. How did it come to this? Told to discover my roots, I discovered a country that was lying to itself. Pretending things were one way, when they were shamefully another. Building walls of collusion around some of its citizens, to seal in the exclusion of the rest. A country averting its eyes from its own injustices, on the brink of something frightening; a place where evil doings were kept just out of your eye line, but were there to see if you chose to look.

Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland.
Got a head-on collision, smashin in my guts man.
I'm caught in a crossfire that I don't understand.

I was biding my time until I could get out of these Badlands, get back to a place I understood. In the meantime, in my dark Pretoria bedroom, I put the music on and disappeared into the howl of Something in the Night.

And always, in that gulf between urgency and possibility, between the Hot Rod Angels revving their engines and the escapees on the interstate, between the young lovers going down to the midnight river and the sexual innuendo of Candy's Room, there was a place where someone always had the tenacity to get up and carry on. Where phoenixes rose out of the flames of adolescent fire.

Walk tall ...

Bruce whispered to a waterfall cascading piano scale,

... or baby don't walk at all.

I made my escape: after a few months I had saved enough money to pay for the first year in a South African university. I chose the one furthest away from Pretoria. 

In my res room at the University of Cape Town I put a poster on my wall - the iconic back-view blue jeans and American flag of Born in the USA – and bore the derision of people who didn't understand that it wasn't an expression of mindless patriotism, but represented a critique of a system that was failing the workingman. They didn't get that it had more to do with the struggles going on in this country's working class, living in the blighted flatlands that the university overlooked. If the songs had local relevance, it had nothing to do with waving flags or downing kegs in student beer halls.

Inevitably I got drawn into those struggles. I went to my first protest march soon after arriving at the university. And I never left Cape Town, after that, save for short work trips or holidays. I never made it back to the United States. First work kept me here – I had student loans 'no honest grad could pay'; then Mandela was released and no one wanted to be anywhere else; then I had a child and couldn't leave even if wanted to. (Is there any urge so strong as the one not to repeat your parents' mistakes?)

But sometimes the smell of that white-flowered bush that blossomed in the greenery outside our apartment up on the Palisades will strike at random and stop me in my tracks.

I often wonder what Fort Lee looks like now. I swoop in on my old apartment through GoogleEarth and it's all still there. I can't find Anna's house, although I do find John Street. It's just a few blocks from the church. I don't recognise the shapes of the houses, viewed from above. I don't even know if Anna's house, or she, is there anymore.

Is it hyperbole to say that Bruce Springsteen saved my life? I'm not one for indulging in suicidal thoughts, but looking back on those dark days, in the midst of some very real family and societal traumas, wrenched from everything and everyone I loved ... sometimes disappearing felt like the only sane thing to do. And Bruce Springsteen gave me a way to do that; a way I could come back from.

He also made it feel like there was one other person who got it. And when you're down in that well, one other person is all it takes.

Tonight I'm going to see Bruce Springsteen for the first time, and it's a big deal.

Madiba Flowers

People in South Africa are talking about little else but the state of Nelson Mandela's heath. Since he was hospitalised three weeks ago the nation has been on a permanent vigil. Will he make his 95th birthday? Will he make tomorrow? While the rumours rise and ebb like the tides, and the Mandela family call for privacy, the people who love him in the country that was changed by him search for ways to pay tribute.

I recently signed up for a seven-week Coursera MOOC, 'Introduction to Art: Concepts and Techniques', which has been more fun and stimulating than I could have imagined. Like all courses, what you get out depends on what you put in.  This particular one, which is run by Penn State School of Art and Architecture, brings together thousands of people from all over the world. There is something quite awesome about doing an artwork a week, to a theme, along with people from India and China and Brazil and anywhere else in the world you can think of. The creativity is mindboggling, the interaction always inspirational.

This week's assignment was to produce a temporary site-specific environmental installation. Given the situation that is uppermost in everybody's mind right now, at least where I live, I dedicated mine to Nelson Mandela. It's called 'Madiba Flowers'.

I was inspired by Ana Mendieta's works in sand. In the same way that she was influenced by Santeria, I have been influenced  by the Afro-Brasilian tradition of candomblé. Although it is not commonly practiced here in South Africa, in our family we still do an annual offering to Iamanja, which involves sending white flowers into the sea on New Year's day from our local beach.

I am lucky to live so close to this beautiful natural environment, and so I chose Noordhoek beach, where I walk every day, as the site for my installation. I wanted to create an artwork that would be claimed by the sea, leaving no trace of its having been there.

(Look carefully, close to the waterline, and you'll see the Madiba Flowers...)

I collected 27 bunches of flowers – one for each year Mandela was in prison – from my local flower market, in yellow, white and green to symbolise the ANC colours. (Technically they are yellow, green and black, but – black flowers?) Plus I like the purity symbolised by white flowers.

 
At low tide I chose a spot just beneath the high water mark. Used the flowers to mark out the word 'MADIBA' in letters about 5 foot high. Planted them in the sand so they looked like they had grown there spontaneously. Included some red flowers, in the shape of a heart underneath his name.

I said a prayer for Madiba, gave thanks to the sea and the spirits, and left the flowers to the rising ocean. On our way home we went up to the cliffs above to take some pictures of the installation, to give a sense of the scale of the work and of its environment. From up there we were able to watch the interaction of people who came down to the beach with their dogs or their children or their surfboards, with what they found in the flowers.

Almost everyone who passed by took a photograph of the Madiba Flowers. It felt surprisingly satisfying to anonymously share a private tribute with others whose lives have been touched by this great man.

The intention was always that this would be a temporary installation. I liked the idea that its existance would be fleeting. One tide cycle and it would be gone. A little like a life.

I went down to the beach again the next morning to see what was left. There were still a few flowers there, tangled up with mussel shells and seaweed, but they had been spread along the shoreline, and all signs of the lettering were gone. 

After one more high tide those too will have been taken up by the sea, where they will naturally biodegrade.

All things have their time. That is the ebb and flow we live in. 

Amandla. 

Axé.

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...)