On March 13th, Mark was nice enough to share with us the pure majesty of his life in the bush. Luckily, I do not envy him. If I did, I would hate him. I live vicariously through him.
“It’s six-thirty in the evening, still warm, but cooling slowly as the day fades. The sun is near the horizon and I’ve been sitting on our porch, reading. Just reading, and looking out into our front garden, so beautiful with orange and pink and purple flowers, crimson and white blossoms on the smaller trees, and all of it towered over by fragrant eucalyptus planted by the Germans a hundred and some years ago. I’m watching Jetta, my niece, this 10-year old prewoman/child playing ball with the 5 year-old daughter of the Danish missionaries next door. She’s so un-self-conscious in such play. It’s beautiful to see her still enjoy the carefreeness of a child, this little girl who is so quickly learning the role of woman - becoming concerned about her looks, her motions, her gestures, her words. I know that the pressures of the expectations of society come ever earlier, that is the reality of our modern world, but I don’t wish them on my goddaughter - certainly not yet. It is so nice to see her here, in the garden, in this little refuge tucked, hidden at the back of a compound behind diocese offices where the world isn’t watching her, where these beginning symptoms of accepting the expectations of society fall away, and she is again totally free to be just herself.”
“Behind me, in the house, I hear my parents’ low voices talking, speaking gently with one another - the verbal velvet glove one learns, over so many years of marriage, to use most of the time, knowing that what is said creates reality - in human relationships more than anywhere else. The knowledge of what creates pain, and the choice not to use it. The knowledge of what creates joy and comfort, and the choice to speak that into existence. They are studying Swahili, each with a different book in his and her hands, sharing their new discoveries with each other as they surface their worlds. My father is 72; my mother, 65. This is the first foreign language they are learning — and they are indeed learning it. They are focused, and open, and modest and confident enough to just stumble through, to just try, to be wrong, to be the child. I am so proud of them. They are great people, and I am so happy to see them in this new challenge, in this new country, taking on this new language at their age - with such grace, with such flexibility, and with such a relaxed confidence despite being so far out of their element so many years into their lives. At their ages, they could be stiffly set in their ways. Instead, they are loosely confident and mellow.”
“Today was Sunday. My folks and my niece got up and went to a Swahili church service at the university. I - well, I went golfing with the expats - a gregarious Irishman, a wiry old Dane, an elderly Indian, and a pudgy Punjabi. They’ve put together a rough nine-hole course on the edge of town at the base of a gorgeous boulder-strewn bluff and with a view across the broad plateau with its countless broad, umbrella-like acacia trees and slowly moving herds of cattle all of this stretching out off to the mountains beyond. The fairways of our modest course are groomed by grazing goats and cows. The greens are black sand, swept with a big wooden squeegee before each player’s putt by an old man with a warm, toothless smile. It all felt very colonial… we arrive in our various Range Rovers, and the local boys, having seen us coming, are already waiting to caddy for us. I learn that you simply do not carry your own bag here. That would just be seen as selfishly destroying a work opportunity for one of these boys, not somehow laudably sportsmanlike. My caddy was Joseph, a little boy no more than 4′6″ and probably 10 years old. A hunter’s sharp eyes - I couldn’t hit my ball far enough afield for him to lose sight of it. And after the first hole, I did get rather far afield. The first hole, I bogied and absolutely crushed the rest of the crew. My drive, cultivated over those too-quiet months in Hawaii last winter is simply twice or thrice theirs, and the Indians’ strokes made them look like they were miming getting hit by a bus, not playing golf. The Irishman and the Dane made some snarky comments about what bad form it was for a guest to hammer the locals the first time they invite him out - said in good humor, of course - but I decided to tone it down a bit and focus the view and the company rather than my stroke. I inadvertently bogied and won another hole somewhere along the way, but otherwise I was able to hack around sufficiently to finish a polite next to last. The Punjabi’s game was so miserable I couldn’t not beat him and not clearly be throwing my game. It’s simply not possible to drive to within 20 yards of the hole and take eight strokes to sink it. Five, yes. A poor chip or two and then a couple to putts on the green (well, brown) - that’s believable. More than that and it’s getting transparent.”
“I came home and the Danes next door called me over. They gave me a frozen bag of beef they had picked up the farm where various ex-pats play volleyball and sip tea every Saturday. We couldn’t make it out to the gathering yesterday as we had an evening dinner invitation with folks from the university. My folks sent around $40 with the Danes to buy two pot roasts and then to use the rest for ground beef (incidentally, they didn’t have any more ground beef, which is good, as the remaining $35 would have bought 55 pounds of the bleeding stuff). As the only Americans with a child at the international school, we’ve been asked to bring Sloppy Joes as representative American food to the International Night school get-together. Apparently, that’s what the last family of Americans got them accustomed to. My sneering inner food snob was appalled that that is what we are being forced to portray American food as. Sloppy Joes. So Red State. So white trash. Perhaps we should hand out Newports as well, and do re-enactments of Great Nascar Moments for the talent show. Luckily, some bakery-owning parent is donating apple pies as the dessert, so we were spared having to bring Rice Krispie Treats and Jell-O squares.”
“I decided use the afternoon to teach my niece how to bake bread. Oatmeal-honey-molasses bread. Basically, whatever I had around that would make it somewhat interesting. Fortunately, she really enjoyed making it and had a huge success experience. Excellent. It looks like I’m not going to be kneading any more dough, and I’m still going to get my fresh-baked bread here on the savannah. It’s so profitable, manipulating children.”
“Then I shaved my head. Coincidentally, I think it was almost exactly two years ago that I last (and first) shaved my head. That was in Acapulco where I was in port recovering my energies from a slightly traumatic and extremely exhausting sail from Charleston - and fixing all the myriad things on the boat that had broken on the way. Another somewhat colonial March in my life - less golf that time, more yacht club, but equally huge amounts of avocado and perfect weather.”
“Then Chinese for dinner with the family - octopus and vegetable stir-fry (amazing the ingredients you can get here if you try…) and dinner table conversation about Swahili grammar. I think my folks really are going to get the language down - at least the survival basics. So cool.”
“A good Sunday. Frighteningly domestic, but I suppose I’d have to rate it as a perfect day…”
