Last night I stood on Look-out Point, looking out over the Farm and this City Bowl a-glitter in the embrace of that mountain. I listened to the quickening choruses of the frogs, and for a few moments I felt nearly pleased. I felt myself the guardian of the frogs. I like my life, but I don’t really like myself. If I fall over now and have time before I croak, I will only regret the unfinished projects and my 3 lowest points. The first one is too ghastly to describe, the second too personal to share, but the third is what has flavored my being ever since I first really looked at it, discovered it, realised it: I have abandoned my own children by the wayside. I met my first daughter when she was 21. I witnessed my second daughter emerge from her mother, and I named her #1, in honour of Miss Una Shirley, an exquisite music teacher in my high school. I left that daughter when she was 5. My third daughter was born difficultly, far away from me. I left her when she was 2. Sometime later I heard that she’d said that she wished she had a daddy. Those words twist like rusty daggers in my breast, always. My first son - from the third mother - I left when he was 5. Etc. I remember every moment of my children’s closeness but most of them don’t remember me, since we parted. So you see why I find it impossible to feel good about myself? I have some nice friends on Facebook, but they only think I’m nice because they are nice first. So I stood on the hill, looking and listening. The frogs are like me – surviving another season together so far. We are opportunistic and thanklessly alive, for now. We live on prime property, and some resent that. I don’t blame those people. Years ago here, when I sat around those first fires at night I looked out over these slopes and those folk watching TV in their homes and apartments and I felt guiltily fortunate and so blessed. (By the way, yesterday morning, while I was harvesting gooseberries I encountered a lizard hoog in die takke. When I see these living beings around me I consider: “Are we not all being sacred strands of this here wonderful living diversity?”) And I noticed again that I require this whole infrastructure and free trade bindery to survive on the edge of. I’m a louse, I’m a tick. I’m a parasite, I’m an itch. I shop from Checkers. I live on a huge coveted wedge into this city and I shed my expectations daily, and I obsess ever that we should love our children. = all the kids I see are mine =
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 21:52:22 +0000
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