a pair of swallows doth a summer make (apologies to Aristotle, who no doubt is beyond caring now)

I’ve been creating “things” in my ‘monkey-mind’, and some of those have materialised in a tangible form. I think I need another blog for those, but then I can’t seem to get to this one, so having two might be a double whammy.

I have been breathing in the Durban spring, and we have had rain and sweet grey skies for a few weeks. Today the sun has recovered, and the humidity seethes and swaggers in typical Durban style. The summer is on its way and it isn’t my favourite time of the year. The curries seem hotter, sleeping is a torment, sweat is the order of the day, and it is joined by mosquitoes at night, but it is my Durban and I will find some grace in the long days spent in the furnace.

The leaves on many of the trees are luminous in the light today, still thin in their newness, or copper before the green returns. The yellow-billed kites returned in August, and it is a joy to see them command the sky. 

The swallows too, have returned, as they always do. “Our pair”, has been sitting on the phone line outside my door and making sweet “tchrits tchrits”. They have flown into the house and out again as they always do, and I consider this my gentle summer blessing. 

These little lesser striped swallows have had such a dilemma, and I guess I should give some background to their saga. They have been here every year for the 27 years I have been living here. There were two nests to start with, one in the front, and one at the back of the house. Works of art, spat and patted upon and worked with extraordinary patience into brown-hued mud “huts” with tunnels. Through the years the swallows have been duped out of their nests by white-rumped swifts who have thrown them out and taken up residence in a home they didn’t have the patience to build themselves (it takes a long time catching little bits of grass and fluff in the air to pad a nest). The swifts are wily, rather wondrous birds. They are built for speed and they are just a blur as they rivet straight into the tiny tunnel of a nest. They are unable to perch as their feet are useless. I guess evolution has not seen a need for perching feet in a bird that usually makes a nest on a cliff face and throws itself into the air. Swifts are aerodynamic machines flying thousands of miles without alighting. Swifts do most things on the wing, drinking, feeding, collecting nesting material, and are the only birds known to mate in flight. There have been a few times that they have landed on the ground, perhaps fallen from a nest when learning to fly, and I threw them up to freedom. 

this photo taken by Johan Grobelaar 

http://www.outdoorphoto.co.za/gallery/showphoto.php?photo=92973&title=white-rumped-swift&cat=500

I’ve had some moments of questioning nature and the ‘niceness’ of swifts, especially when the swallows return each year to the nest they built, and after a month the swifts evict them yet again. We had some alterations done to our house a few years ago and the swifts took great exception to this and moved along, allowing the swallows a few years of being at home. Speaking of builders, when they were here (the human builders), a swallow flew into the house and became disorientated, and I became distraught trying to encourage it out before “THE TART” (our dachshund, she’s material for another post) devoured it whole (she can). 

 One of the builders said he would help and I was so grateful, until he took up his broom and started swatting at the swallow as it flew in circles, bumping into the ceiling. I told him in no uncertain terms that he was in no way a saviour, and he should put down his weapon as I wanted the bird flying skyward not in a twitching heap on the bedroom floor. He looked at me aghast. I could see him thinking “ungrateful cow”, or worse. He was stripped of his shining armour and became surly and wounded, saying, “Okay, I won’t help then”. The bird did not leave the house but I couldn’t see where it had gone. I was worried beyond words and re-arranged the house looking for the little guy. Hours later, when I was outside, I saw the swallow clinging to the back of the curtain in my bedroom. Relief and joy flooded over me and I was able to release him into the late afternoon sky, and my blessing was intact.

look at that mud filled beak!

A few years ago I was washing the verandah wall (why would I do that? I’m not normally that way inclined) and some of the spray must have dampened the nest and it began to fall (clay isn’t what it used to be it seemed). I stood there horrified,  and in need of a Valium. What had I done to this painstaking work of art and home to my visitors? I found a piece of leather and hot glued it around the nest to keep it intact. Needless to say, the swallows didn’t like it at all and, after celebrating the departure of the swifts, the swallows still had no nest. They decided to build on the alarm siren (at this point I’m starting to think they are the ones who invented the term bird-brained). Well, I couldn’t have them build on the siren, as it would have had them shell-shocked when it went off in screaming decibels. We covered the siren with a plastic bag and so they began the building in another corner of the ceiling. This time they managed to build a rather unstable, but suitable nest in which to raise two beautiful young swallows, that took flight and survived to the great dismay of the snake-eyed “Tart”. 

In the next year, for some misguided reason, they decided the entrance to the nest needed lengthening and added wet mud to the dried mud of the previous year’s structure…. clay/mud shrinks as it dries and they built it to the size of the existing tunnel so, once it had dried,  it became too narrow to fit through. The following year, when they returned, I noticed them battling to enter the nest. Sadly, I discovered a baby had become stuck in the narrowed entrance and had died. I removed the feathered bones and chiselled off a bit of the 'tunnel' to make it wider. They didn’t like that either, so they didn’t breed last year although they spent a great deal of time circling the verandah.

In September they returned, gave the blessing, and started building a nest on the siren AGAIN! The siren was re-covered in a bag, and I gave them a talking to. I told them that I am overjoyed to have them choose my home to build their home, but they needed to stop being push-overs and to wise up, because it was just getting silly. I then took down the leather-bound nest and sprayed down the narrow-tunnelled nest that was stressing them out and was now useless. I felt so guilty, but they had seemed to be so frustrated with these nests they didn’t approve of and wouldn’t use. After a few days of circling and ‘tchritsing’ endlessly, they came with mud and started fixing it to the wall where the original nest had been…. their place of choice before their eviction by swifts. The architect wasn’t present quite obviously, because the mud was spotted all over, above and below the corner. Then they had a light-bulb moment and followed the "mud sketch": on the ceiling made by the original nest (see below)

Finally it started to take a cup form and was on track.

The pair worked tirelessly, following the plan and creating their home.

Before building the entrance tunnel, they brought grass and feathers (dropping many bits below the nest and then going off to find more). 

before the entrance tunnel was built

what a mouthful!

 building the tunnel!

Once it was padded and soft enough the perfect entrance tunnel was built. Hopefully they don't decide to make additions to it. 

I am hoping this nest is stable and will be suitable for a good few years from now. I will not be washing the wall (ever), and if I see a swift needling its way towards the nest, I will be ready with the broom, that’s if I am swift enough.(you know me better than that though)

She flits and dips.

Makes a small rip in the sky.

A tiny tear in the fabric.

Only she sees the other side.

 Heaven for a brief moment.

 A swallow and her sky. 

 J M Kisch

If you would like to hear their “tchrits tchrits”  you can hear their call here http://www.productiontrax.com/sound-effects/305895

Simply Seeing

I hope you haven’t given up on my ever writing another post. My mother’s house, the home I grew up in, has sold and the pain of all that has passed. I have done so much that I found both difficult and sometimes outside of my comfort zone. Now I walk away from it and into something brand new. I just turned 51, and all that has been, has placed me right here where I am, living in a suburb called Sea View, a suburb that is steeped in history, but is often frowned upon because it is perceived as a ‘dangerous place’, a place where poor people live. I am now claiming it with all its faults and all its beauty. 

end of day at the end of my street

My home is here, and even with holes in my floor boards and wood borer in the timbers, I have earned it all. I will no longer feel embarrassed when I tell someone I live here, and I will not want to disappear when I watch a lip curl at the thought of being here. I still yearn for a studio though, or an attic overlooking the sea (there is a sea view in Sea View if you can rise above the trees), a library filled with wonders or an apothecary’s jewel-like storeroom. For now though, I am here, and I have earned this and it hasn’t been easy.

 daybreak from the vacant lot in my street...yes that's a sea view.

I have been watching a warm Durban Winter creep over us. Cool mornings and warm days with huge skies. I have been taking photos whenever I had a chance and have made a collection of them; skies, some visual oxymorons, and some moments of soul warming. I am very aware that sunsets and sunrises are perceived as over-done and clichéd, and it’s almost a sin to post a photo of a sunset. Bearing this in mind, I still couldn’t help myself, and I challenge anyone with a camera who is faced with a punch-in-the-stomach sunset to not shoot it. 

So this is my sentimental, no-excuses-made, personal record of my sunrises and sunsets, and the breathing space between them over the last two months. They are taken close to where I live, they are my everyday skies.

 

I was so aware of the contrasts I saw and the moments of glory in the mundane. We so often live like prisoners in our own homes here in South Africa, and we live angry lives because we are not free to walk alone, or go to the beach at night, or even to wait in a car outside a school, without being aware or suspicious of other cars or people approaching. Life has changed and we remember what it was like when we were children. When we played in canals and stayed out until bath time and came home with grazed knees and dirty faces, and so now we live with anger, because we have been victims of a great theft, that of personal freedom. 

I have been aware of this personal loss of freedom as I travelled through the last two months of sun-ups and sun-downs in Durban. I would see the blues and ambers and darkening purples, like a child looking through a piece of coloured glass, and even though it took my breath away I would think of the city skyline and the people living there, both the compassionate  and the black-hearted. 

The sunset on the last day that I worked late clearing out my mother's house, taken on Bluff Road

I saw fences with their barbed tops and thought of those living behind them and those lurking in front of them. The barbs themselves, became something sinister in my mind. I realised how much I was losing by doing this and I tried to just ‘see’ without commenting. In rusted barbs of wire, tall fences, and in the veneer of our city itself, I found a strange and compelling beauty.

I looked at the surface of things, and these surfaces became artworks that had their own tales to tell. It is difficult to see past our attachments to things, and our pre-conceived ideas of how things should be. Nature re-invents our shining, barbed-wire armour, and over time, without a sound, it is changed into ragged, rusted wire, and there is glory there too. The elements change things - wind, rain, salt air and time, they become the artist’s hand. 

In a sunset, a city seething with fragmented life, disintegration and lack of services, can become just blocks glinting against the sky, architectural shapes that lose their shabbiness and become part of a painted Durban, a story book page in which all of us have a part to play. Sometimes it is cathartic to just see the surface, the shapes, the light, the textures, and to leave the complexity of life out of the vision.

In these past few mild Winter months, I have watched our Durban and have tried not to comment too loudly, the whispers were still there at times, so both an ache and a sense of wonder was in much that I saw. I have seen old men sleeping on benches and children cold and wanting, lizards basking in the sun, brilliant Erythrina and Leonotus flowers dripping nectar and sunbirds.

a sunbird outside my window

a skink in my garden soaking up the sun on the Erythrina

A vervet in my garden eating flowers in the Erythrina tree

 There have been car-jackings and burglaries in the neighbourhood, while small birds had sand baths under my trees. There have been hungry monkeys at my back door, and hungry people at my car windows. No matter how we feel, we cannot stop things from changing or staying the same, and we so often forget to look, or hear, or see those brief moments of magic. I feel it is often in our quest for new and better and more expensive, that we lose great chunks of our lives and of everyday magic. Perhaps if we looked for the ironies in our days we would be more creative, perhaps laugh at ourselves more and see art in everything. 

Life certainly presents us with small ironies and bitter sweet contrasts, the obvious ones like the sunset resting briefly behind the harsh spikes atop our walls  or the barbed wire reeling across the gates to protect monuments for the dead, even a police van parked under a flowering tree. 

protecting the dead

Another little irony...flower power?

I had to smile at one such irony when I parked outside the cemetery to take a photo. I parked under a Natal Mahogany tree and next to me was a sleek silver Jaguar, glinting and almost sidling off so as not to be seen too close to my dirty little 15 year old car. I smiled to myself because, although my car looks like it’s barely survived the digestive systems of a multitude of birds during a mulberry season, the affluent owner of this low flying machine was not spared a small indignity. On the bonnet, right next to the polished, leaping silver jaguar, a bird had dropped its effluent and flown off unaware of the comment it had just made.

 

When bad things happen, life-altering things, we may be angry that the sun still shines, that it has no comment to make on the happenings in our lives, yet there it is, changing the colour of the sky, rising and setting on us daily. It just does what it’s always done, quietly and with dignity, whether we deserve it or not.   

When I admire the wonders of a sunset

or the beauty of the moon,

my soul expands in the worship of the creator.

- Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi 

Selling memories

My old home, where I grew up, is finally being sold. The house was brand new in 1954 when my parents moved in. It was home to three children, but my sister died at just 5 years old, before I knew her. My paternal gran (Nana) lived with us, as did my maternal grandfather. 

 

It has been an epic journey sorting out 50 years of ‘stuff’. My father was a hoarder of note, buying just one of something was not an option for him. 

He had two workshops and a workroom, and all were filled to overflowing. There is still so much to sell, dump and get rid of, and I’m finding it both painful and cathartic.

Sitting in the lounge on a plastic chair, I think of how it was. How the Bluff was when I was a child and how our house was filled with things and love and arguments and some hard times, and how, when I was very young, I thought that what was just a middle class home, was actually a palace. My mother was always there to calm the storms and keep us together. She sewed, and cleaned and would  give me the last piece of crackling from her Sunday lunch. She is 90 now and I take care of her instead.

My oldest friend comes into my thoughts. I can see her clearly in my mind’s eye, her dark shining hair in a bob and her beautiful eyes. I recall our first meeting, she just four years old, and I five. I stood on the little verandah at the back of my house and she stood below in her driveway. I was stricken and painfully shy, and she was relentless in her greeting. Eventually I managed a “hello” and the rest is our history. We ran and hid and swung high on swings, had tea parties at a little table and chairs made by Zulu craftsmen. We drank Oros out of tiny cups and laughed until it spilled over like our joy. We made mud pies in my driveway with Bougainvillea flowers, that sat like butterflies on their tops.

 This one's for you Z, decorated with the flowers from the shrub at the gate, it's still there.

We sat on the pavement and ate ice-creams that dripped down our chins and between our toes. She would run over to my house to play and her Ouma would scream for her until she returned home, but my friend always won in the end and as soon as Ouma looked the other way she would come back and we would play until we disagreed, enemies until the morning. We fought and played daily, but it is the play and the uncontrollable giggling and just knowing she was there, that I recall.

It is bitter-sweet sitting here in the silent lounge, imagining shouts and laughter and jazz on New Year’s Eves. Those New Year’s parties were legendary. I can see my father with his arms around his double bass, he would sweat from both effort and joy and the heat of our Durban summer, and by the end of the evening his fingers were all in plasters, not used to the strings that were a daily part of him in his youth. At midnight we would go out onto the lawn and form a circle, arms interlinked and sing Auld Lang Syne, and standing between two adults my small arms would be stretched to the limit. The ships and tug boats on the bay would sound their horns, and they bellowed and sighed mournfully for half an hour after midnight, calling in the new year and all it had in store.

I recall so clearly, my father, on a whim, decided he wanted a grand piano, and once decided it was a sealed deal. I look over to where it stood, an achingly empty space. It had to be sold as there was no space for it in my home. My daughter (the musician) cried to see it go. She had grown up knowing it well, practising on it and passing her piano exams with distinctions, and the “Grand” was always there for her. It was part of her grandpa and his dreams for her. I remember all those times that my father’s friend, a master of the Fats Waller’s slide piano style, rocked the house with “Your Feet’s too big”. Oh, for just one more time.

The old sofa is still here and I look at the worn fabric. I remember sitting on it with my late husband when I was just 14 years old and he 18. He would run up from the Naval camp (Salisbury Island) to see me. We would hold hands and kiss and listen to the clock ticking and striking until way past midnight, because it was just too hard to say goodnight.

I remember so much of the pain and joy of growing up there. Sometimes feeling like an outsider, not quite fitting in, other times at home in my skin and in my little world. I remember cycling all over the Bluff, taking buses into town and walking home from Bluff Road. I remember the canal and the bay, and the smell of death from the whaling station. I remember chameleons and legless skinks and the warm sand in my hands as I tried to capture ant lions at the bottom of their little sand funnels, teasing them with blades of grass. I remember dogs I loved and lost and my friend’s dog who had a “J & Z” haircut, very short and in steps, produced by little hands and blunt scissors on a workbench in my Dad’s workshop. I remember two little girls who were in big trouble. Ticky didn’t seem to mind though, and it all grew back.

I remember walking to the corner tearoom and buying so many sweet treasures with my 20 cents. I also remember ‘whites only’ entrances at bottle stores and ‘whites only’ bus benches and buses, and I am so sorry things couldn’t have been different for South Africa right from the start.

I recall stories from the neighbourhood, some tragedies and some scandals, friends living there and then leaving. There were the boys who broke my heart, and those close friends, made in both childhood and in adulthood, who are always with me. None of those I grew up with are there now, all of them re-invented and fitting into their adult skins with all the pain and loss and great joy that comes with the growing years. Although they are no longer in my neighbourhood, the few I’ve kept contact with are strong, courageous and compassionate women, and I love them all.

I thought I’d take a drive around the Bluff and take some photos of the homes of a few of the friends who have left, their homes now in far off places that I know I’ll never visit. 

Fiona's house

I feel their memories are in some way held in those homes where they lived and loved and fought their wars. They lived in neighbourhoods like mine, and their neighbours also had secrets and stories and real lives lived or lost. 

View of the lighthouse from Gray Park Road, a butterfly popped in, he looks as big as the lighthouse top!

 Lieutenant King Crescent, I know it as "the circle"

I go out to my car, locking the back door, out through the gate with the 'beware of the dog' sign that hangs rusted from just one hook. This empty house is a little tired and in need of young laughter. My thoughts and all those young dreams that were so much bigger than I will ever be, will no longer be held here, it is as though it is waiting, breathless, for a new family who will begin their journey here.

“Everything flows, nothing stays still.”  – Heraclitus

Trees are for the birds

I started this post 10 days ago and I am only now finding a few moments to get it posted.

This past week has been a very emotional one. My dear mum fell on Sunday and broke her arm. She is 90 years old and other complications have come up in the tests they ran. She is unable to have the op she needs to correct her break as her heart is not doing what it should, it is a 90 year old heart after all. So for a while I will be a 24/7 caregiver as she is helpless without her right arm. Hospitals aren’t what they used to be, and sadly the nursing care isn’t as compassionate as it should be. In my comings and goings twice a day to the hospital, I have experienced a sad, quirky and wonderful Durban once more.

 The hospital is on the Berea, high up on the hill. The view from the hospital is one of a sprawling Durban with all its wonders and hidden treasures, as well as insidious grime and crime. Looking out across this bland autumn skyline with its buildings tall and dim in the haze, it is difficult to imagine a Durban forested and with African Big Fivers roaming freely. 

Still standing

breaking pavements

Driving through the suburbs, some of the old Natal mahogany trees (Trichelia Dregeana) still stand, some fractured and with missing limbs, and some dangerously hollow inside and liable to crash onto a car in the next wind or heavy rain. These trees spring gnarled out of tarred pavements, but they flower and seed themselves yearly and their dark foliage still blackens parts of the Berea. It is said that the first explorers were astounded at the blackness of the hills as they looked out across the Berea from the sea. They referred to these trees as “thunder trees”. These miraculous seething Durban coastal forests housed a wealth of wildlife, but now they have been razed, tarred in, trafficked and peopled. It has taken less than 200 years to become something outside of Nature’s intentions.

In 1839, the Swedish naturalist Johan Warlberg (the Warlberg’s Eagle, is named after him) got lost in the forest near Mitchell Park and had to fire shots in the air to call for help. Elephants wandered down the Berea to the Umgeni river just 150 years ago and, not that long ago (1884), the last recorded lion left its prints on the earth near the Botanic Gardens.

Durban’s wealthiest built and lived in their huge colonial mansions right up on this Berea Ridge. Some of these beautiful Edwardian, Victorian and Art Deco mansions still stand, and some have been pulled down to make way for modern homes, blocks of flats and 

offices,and the Berea has become somewhat tired and far too busy.

I don’t want to focus on the destruction of this beautiful forest, but rather on what is still there, and a lovely early evening I spent there. After a hospital visit, I left, to the sound of some disturbing screaming by an elderly woman who could not be consoled and for whom my heart broke, leaving me helpless and aching. I couldn’t face the thought of my dirty house and making something to eat, so my daughter, Mandy, and I went for dinner at Nino’s on Problem Mkhize (yes, the same street I wrote about in my “Problem” post).

 Although this is far from a scenic spot as it overlooks the street and parking lot, it has a Trichelia growing right there in the parking lot, and several others lining the balcony edge of the restaurant. 

A loud and trembling Trichelia

These trees are the chosen roosts of the Indian Mynah birds. These Indian or Asian Mynahs were introduced to Durban around 1902 when captive birds were released. They are closely associated with human activities, and, like humans, are opportunistic. They are loud, cocky and always ready for a fight. Anyone who has been dive-bombed by a Mynah will know exactly what I’m speaking about. They are one of the most successful bird species in the world. 

They are considered vermin here and thrive at the expense of other bird species. So for the purpose of this post I am ignoring the very real, complex and worrying fact that these birds pose a serious threat to bio-diversity in Durban and am focusing on their bold behaviour and how they have become part of our city landscape. These birds have bred profusely in typical opportunistic style, and have taken over the city (a bit like an Alfred Hitchcock movie). Their brazen character has become very much part of the Durban buzz.

Not long after we arrive at Nino’s the Mynahs begin their cacophony. Just after 5pm they start descending on the trees to roost. Their own darkness cloaks them well and they are barely visible, even when the trees shake with their flapping and pecking and raucous shouting for a space to sleep. It is deafening, and any Durbanite (wherever they are) will immediately recall this sound as I describe it here. 

They fly in, the white on their wings like flitting sparks in the dimming light, and then they leave again to perch on the office block window sills alongside, only to return in a huge flock back to the branches so it seems like some isolated wind rustles and tugs at the dark old tree. 

With the dark Mynahs unseen within it, it is as though the tree itself shudders. We can’t speak at our table, we can’t hear each other, so we watch and take some photos.

The light slowly dims, and high white clouds slowly grow brighter and turn from blazing gold to orange and then faintly pink, and the Mynahs seem to settle, still calling and tugging at their roosting tree.We have an odd but kind, chatty waiter, who informs us that the cooking staff has no idea what a foccacio is, and somehow I don’t care the way I would normally care, but I do point out it’s in the menu and this is an Italian franchised restaurant. Instead of a rant I just smiled weakly and opted for garlic bread (to regret it later). Mandy and I look sceptically at each other as the waiter waxes lyrical about parrots that descend on the same Trichelia housing the roosting Mynah birds. Green parrots, he says, and they stay on the outside of the tree. “Oh, how wonderful,” I say, noticing the condescending tone I take on. “That must be a sight” (too much talking to old people in the hospital ward perhaps?). As our food arrives so do the ‘parrots’. If my thoughts about the waiter’s story of the parrots had been words, I would have been eating them with my pasta. The sky is filled with a flock of birds, fluorescent green and yellow. Their flight and landing is positively parrot-like. They land, true to the waiter’s observations, on the outside of the tree and begin that shuffling-sideways parrot-walk, along the branches, holding onto leaves and twigs with their beaks as they scramble along. 

 

They too fly off and back, giving us a dazzling show of streaking greens across the sky. They are Rosy Ringed Parakeets, and I’ve never seen them like this. The lights in the car lot shine on the parakeets, and it seems as if they glow from inside, like Christmas lights on the dark leafed branches. The Mynahs still shriek together, a grand choir of failed singers, and if they are aware of the parakeets on the outskirts they don’t seem to mind. It all seems strangely dreamlike, and rather bizarre; thinking about my mum who has been part of Durban all of her life, the birds, the odd waiter, all woven together at the heart by a flock of luminous green parakeets.

I looked out across the parking lot to the glaring Caltex sign on the other side. The unpredictability of life tugged at my thoughts, yet I felt a small smile within. There was a spell in the air, a strange ending to a trying day. 

 
This had been a moment, no earth shattering event, nothing that could change anything, yet I will remember that blink of an eye in the day with the Mynahs in the trembling limbs of the aging tree, and the bright green henchman, hanging on the outer twigs. Just another “Durban dazer,” when just about anything can happen… and does.

And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.  ~William Shakespeare

p.s. the parakeets also come from India, escaped pets that have bred profusely all over the world including London. Perhaps this is why the Mynahs and Parakeets are such good bedfellows? Here's a link to them with a close up pic. http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/kwazulu-natal/getting-to-know-durban-s-little-guests-1.1214995?ot=inmsa.ArticlePrintPageLayout.ot

Small change

The time is marching, the mundane has tripped me up and stopped all creative thought. It has been three weeks since I wrote. Oops!

This week while driving in traffic and thinking, it struck me: the people who beg at robots (we call traffic lights “robots” in South Africa) are actually working, as in, this is their job. They get up early and head to their spot, come rain or shine or melting tar beneath their feet. Their work is to manipulate us into giving them money. It’s their place of employment. Some of us do give them money, and some give lots of money, and some curse out of the window shouting “get a job”. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m just like most of you who slow down before the robots, hoping they will change to green before we reach them, thus relieving us of the guilt of not giving money for food to someone who has less than us. It is this guilt of ours that keeps them employed.

These people sometimes become urban heroes because they have staying power, and smiles and posters that endear us to them. There is a black man in sandals (the only reason I state colour is so you can paint a picture in your mind) on the Berea who has been there for many years with his sign, stating he has no job, no money, no home, no wife, no car and no Tracy Chapman. Lately he seems to have taken some rest, as I don’t see him that often now. For him to have done this for so long, I assume his employment has paid for whatever lifestyle he does own, even without Tracy Chapman. Also, he can’t be a boozer, cos they don’t last that long on the street, although I do believe his wages have paid for some exceptional Durban poison over the years. Close to this guy’s robot there is another man, he’s white, although now he’s the colour of rust (all that Durban sun). He changes his sign almost weekly, and it is adorned with glitter and written in coloured pens with pictures and outlines, and it sparkles in the sun. I had often wondered if he spends his ‘donations’ on embellishments, until a friend told me otherwise. She said he has children in a good school and that these embellishments somehow come from school stock! Also that he doesn’t need R10 to cover his shelter costs as he has a home to go to. Perhaps this is just part of his 'legend status' and all legends have stories woven about them, true or not. His ‘robot employment’ obviously covers his living costs very well, thank-you very much. He makes us smile and believe him, and we pay for that.

 A tongue in cheek pic borrowed from the inimitable musician and proud South African, the late, Syd Kitchen. He is so sadly missed in SA and particularly in Durban where he was an institution. Musos have a tough time making ends meet and in this case selling CDs!

The robots closest to my home, and the local bottle store, sure have had their comings and goings. Cast-out men (mostly white) who deteriorated slowly from their first day there, from clean clothes to unwashed bleary-eyed husks of men with wasted lives. People saw them, and not knowing what else to do, gave money to feed their habit and ultimately to bump them off thus relieving their guilt and helplessness at having to see them like this each day. Men and, less often, women, with stories to tell about how they came to this employment. Lately at my robots there has been a very hairy, late thirty-ish, white man (also gone dark). He dyes his hair black and wears a cowboy hat and vests and he is covered in dark body hair. He seems to have an affiliation with the truck drivers as he always gives them a thumbs up as they drive past, even though they don’t donate anything. Truck drivers are in a position of power and do not suffer the same guilt as us folk much lower and closer to street level and eye level with the robot workers. Also new at my robots is a young black man with a rubbish bag – he takes the bottles and sweet papers littering your car in exchange for a few rand. Now this chap seemed fine the first time I saw him, but by the end of the week he was limping and his right foot faced his left foot, toe inwards, and this week he had the facial jerks of someone suffering from Parkinson’s. Oh my God, I thought, what has happened to him, he can’t possibly find a job like that! Silly, billy, gullible me, this is his work and he’s making a damn good job of it too. When I glanced back at him when there were no cars left at the robots, he walked over to the island in the road and it was a miracle…no limp, no head-shaking. Hell, he’s good. My concern is, that with time, he will damage his foot and possibly his balance with these antics, but in the meantime he’s young and it’s working for him.

There is a couple who beg on the Bluff;  the husband has one leg and the other one has been amputated at the knee. He wears a steel ‘peg’ although I’ve heard he has an expensive prosthetic leg at home. He rolls the leg of his pants up to expose his ‘peg’, and he and his wife cover two robots at once earning a double wage. I have seen people give them big guilty bucks. I’ve been told this man abuses both his wife and children who sometimes have to hide outside in the dark from his rantings. I have seen his wife’s face bruised and blackened, and this may or may not be testimony to this story. If this is the case then this man has neither my sympathy, nor do I have an ounce of guilt for him. Apparently both wife and husband have been offered jobs, but neither would commit to them… the robot pickings were more profitable and less restricting. I’ve seen them out shopping, he with his pant’s leg down and wearing two shoes. The deception is part of the job, and I can accept that, but if he is abusing his family after downing alcohol that the public has supplied, it's unforgivable.

There was also a window washer at the very busy South Coast Road robots. Oh my, we did try to get through that robot without him catching us. You could tell him you really didn’t want him to wash the windscreen, but he would proceed anyway. Then he would swear profusely and spit on the glass if you didn’t pay him. He told me I was a white devil and wailed at the sky when I said my bag wasn’t in the car (we’re told not to have them in the car, rather in the boot for safety). The police dragged him off a few times but he always came back to torment us. He has vanished now and is replaced by a much kinder washer, who doesn’t wash if you don’t ask, and last week I saw someone nod at him to wash their windscreen and then drive off without giving him a cent…SIES!

A while ago I was touched beyond words, by a black youngster asking for money at a robot in Morningside. He stopped at my car window and showed me he was hungry (this always works). Something jerked me rigid - it was as though I were looking at a young Jesus, some Messiah who had more stories to tell than anyone his age should have. I asked him if he smoked glue (sniffing glue) he said no, but I had no way of telling, he didn’t have that wasted look, nor had he started to show the signs of the crippling that this glue sniffing causes. I wanted to take him home, to read to him, to bath him and dress him in new clothes, but I was helpless. I gave him money and had to drive off because there were cars waiting and the robot was green. Before I drove on, I held his look and said to him, “Oh God, don’t do this, try to make something, you are an artist, make something.” He nodded and said, “Yes mommy” (they always do). I felt stunned and with hindsight should have gone back, but if I had I’m not sure what I would have done. I feel arrogant and stupid for saying ‘make something’, how was he to do that? I know some have, and have become world renowned artists, street children just like him, but they had the will and the lucky break to do it. Glue deadens the pain, once these children are in this addictive clutch it is too late. Shop owners sell this glue to them knowing what they will do with it. I am haunted by this youngster who stood silently piercing my soul with his eyes at the robot. I look for him every time I go that way, but have never seen him again.

These youngsters don’t like the discipline the shelters offer, and the shelters in most cases are not stimulating or inspirational places in which to nurture rebellious, wounded boys. Some of these boys are from abused backgrounds and live with more abuse on the street. They are cold at night and live with burning feet in Summer. They steal from the weakest boys and from unwary tourists, they prostitute themselves, and they become numb and fearless and dangerous. Whenever there is a conference in the city they are all bundled into police vans and taken away, so they become invisible, this blight on humanity.

There are also mothers who employ their own, or others’, children to work for them at robots. This is illegal, but it happens anyway. Some women hire children from neighbours (who are also in need of food etc.) and these children, as young as three, weave in and out of the traffic while the women sit on the roadside a block away chatting and socialising. These children should never be given money, no matter how our guilt tugs at our hearts; we cannot feed this abuse, condone it. If they get no money, surely this despicable act will stop. It seems that there are no simple solutions, or any solution for that matter, and we are so quick to judge, with so little understanding of complex family disintegration in a non-functioning society.

While businessmen eat sushi off naked women, and politicians are driven in cars that would feed a village for 6 months, most of our next generation is losing itself, uneducated, hardened, and uncared for.

I remember as a child we would shop in the predominately Indian area of Clairwood. That’s where the fabric shops were and lots of bargains to be had. I remember an Indian man who walked the streets and my mother said he was a ‘tramp’. He had little clothing and his hair was matted and dreadlocked before it became fashionable. He had a long white beard, and I can still see him in my mind’s eye. I never saw him beg, and he lived and slept under the South Coast bridge close to the river. I remember feeling afraid of him, yet in awe, as though he were a magical creature living under a fairytale bridge. Now in adulthood, I realise he was a holy man, someone who lived off the generosity of a community; a community who may have felt blessed to have him in their midst. He may have had nothing, but he was no tramp. He was a Guru, someone of wisdom, someone close to the Maker. How I wish I could sit with him now, under his bridge, with my feet in the clear water that was the river then, before it tired of its toil, weighted down by its polluted load. Its clarity lost in time’s passing and now with no Guru to dip into it.

What a complicated, jewelled, wondrous, heart-aching, sometimes compassionless place we share… our Durban. 

We are all beggars, each in his own way ~ Mark Twain 

And to quote my 90 year old mum…If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride!