Below my feet

Today is Heritage Day. Or Braai (= barbecue) Day, if you'd rather remember what is being advertised. I hope we share a greater heritage than just knowing how to stand around a fire and grill meat. I really don't get the appeal of braaing all the time. The drinking and sitting around and getting together with friends, yes, sure. But standing around in smoke and having to cater to everyone's desires regarding how they want their steal done and not burning anything? No. Thanks. No no. My cousin showed me once, and once was enough. Here is one situation where I'll gladly accept the stereotypical female role and make salads in the kitchen. With a cocktail, away from the smoke and heat.

I don't know what my heritage is. Celebrating Christmas on the 24th and not on the 25th? Knowing how to make Spätzle (well, knowing to find the cookbook) and melktert (again, the Kook en Geniet)? Is it burning in the sun today because I have the same skin as ancestors that got off some boat 300 years ago? Well, the other ancestry arrived here in the 1950s, so I'm guessing both genetic halves did not adapt well to an African sun. Or I should just learn to wear sunscreen, as Mary Schmich suggested. Wear it like a damn dress.

If one's heritage is connected to where one comes from, what has it become in an age where culture is simultaneously global and local? Maybe the desire to be a puzzle piece that fits rather than the one lost somewhere along the way is stupid. Maybe having different strands mixed is better than having specific roots.
Over the past 48hours I have read too much about web kids and Generation Net and our displacement and how we are everywhere and nowhere and how the Internet has made us dumber and how the sky is vanishing. I'm not sure where it is disappearing to, but apparently it is.

During our walk today it pretty much stayed where it was. Bright blue, above us. A perfect surface for the sun to cast its skin-burning rays from.

Thoughts on a Monday. But not this one.

Walking.
Getting away as far as possible, escaping from what I have grown up with, what I have been taught, what I can remember.
I think about my BFF in elementary school, Tina. I always thought I would leave first, because that is the life when one is used to moving. But she left first.
Now everyone has left, somehow. It's not easy making new friends, but also somehow, it is ok. The whole small talk aspect of it pissed me off, but I see myself as a Zwitter: alone and in crowds, part and yet not, entirely.

Today was a bad day. Normally your presence would have saved it. Holding you would have eased it.
Now mourning, c'est d'être vivant quand la vie même est morte, it's like being alive when life itself has died, c'est de respirer quand tout souffle s'est enfuit, it's like breathing when all breath is gone, c'est sentir trop, like feeling too much about everything.

Walking I saw
the lady in the car waving at me for not letting me walk past. Fuck you.

There is a teenage girl with black tights and shirt jumping in tandem on trampoline with a little girl in a yellow dress. I hear the see-saw of the springs. Un peu d'air sur terre. A moment of not being bound to the earth and its restrictions.

Then the varkhond barks.
A second later the bubbling of a child's laugh from behind a tall wall.
People are standing on the corner, careful to look away as I approach. No eye contact here.
The heavy breathing of an older man jogging only in tiny blue shorts. A short wave.

Congregating in the street. It is strange to see after years of hiding behind enormous gates, "Good fences make good neighbours".
A dad with a huge drooping-eyelid-dog, the two boys barefoot on bikes, circling him.
Walking and crying.
A little boy playing with two pavement specials waves at me.
A grey cat sleeping, blending into the pavement.

Now, the boy kicking the soccer ball home, uphill. I would just pick it up and carry it instead.
Three men around a cellphone, watching me, talking about me in a tongue I cannot understand. But I feel the words. Mens weet altyd.

Two older men, politely greeting. They must have known the restrictions the pass/past laws. I am wondering if we still choose to live in our own race, or if it's mostly dependent on means.

Then, I am home.






This is how I think. It is never just one language.