reading | Red Boots

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This is what life does. It gives you four children, spread over eight years, and you wonder how you got yourself into this mess and if you’ll ever, ever get out of it and you pray to G-d to clean it up so that you can take a small break, just a breath really every so often, not even that often, but enough to take in small sips of quiet air untarnished by squeaky cries of “mommy mommy mommy…” And then one day you realize you don’t want it to be clean. You look up from the apple you’re slicing – “with cinnamon please Mom” – and see four faces, so different yet all undeniably yours, and you not-so-suddenly but very, very completely understand how much you love this mess that’s yours and oh please G-d keep me in it, just like this: slicing apples, spilling milk, “Don’t hit your brother,” school lunches and a new pair of shoes every other week.

This is what life does. It gives you a friend who gives you a mug. Olive green and cream, monogrammed with a swirly lower-case burgundy ‘n.’ It’s slightly rounded in the center and a little larger than usual, and is the perfect size and shape for holding in your two hands. You drink tea from it every single day, and every day you marvel at how she knew you always wanted that mug. Even though you never told her.

This is what life does. It wakes you with an alarm that sounds like loud crickets chirping in your ear. Rude. It’s still dark outside and you wonder, not for the first time, if you are certifiably crazy. It’s 5am and if you hurry you can make it to the supermarket and get your grocery shopping done before your 6am workout. That is crazy. But doable. And no fight for parking. It gets you in a dark, candle-lit spin studio with ten other women way before the sun rises and there is something warrior-like and badass about it. Maybe it’s not so crazy. The spin instructor is the perfect amount of inspiring and kick-your-butt and she urges you to “take ease in the recovery” and to appreciate what it means to “endure instead of push ahead or back off.” These are wise, essential words to hear at 6am… or any time.

This is what life does. It makes you smile and remember your grandmother whom you loved with all your heart. She was the only gran you knew who said “shit” and she let you stroke the soft, crinkly skin under her neck. She wrote you quirky, amusing letters which she would fax to you across the miles. Her fish ball recipe is included in one. You make them a few times but they will never taste as good as hers. Nothing will. And that’s okay. Life gives you memories of Granny Mary’s ginger cake and long, meandering walks with her on the beach, collecting shells. And a blanket that is over 20 years old crocheted by her long and knobbly fingers, the ones that look exactly like yours.

This is what life does. It hands you a book and says, “Read this!” So you do, and you are lost in the world of its words and images and characters and story, and reading is easily your greatest and simplest pleasure. You never want it to end and you hope that one day you will write a book that people will love to read as much as you love to write.

This is what life does. It holds you in a time zone on the other side of the world, far far away from the ones that you love. And no matter how hard you try to catch up to the time difference between you, it’s always too early or too late and days and then weeks go by without hearing her voice and your one urgent hope is that you get to talk to each other before the baby’s born.

This is what life does. It draws you to the scale day after day, weighing and measuring and calculating BMI and body fat percentage, and did the red wine and dark chocolate last night show up on your hips this morning. And what if it did? Would that be so terrible? And you know without a doubt that it would. It would be terrible. And the next morning you step on the scale again.

This is what life does. It presents you with every possible opportunity, affords you luxuries you take for granted like water and electricity and soap and Internet on-demand and TV and a car and easy access to any food you want and and and. And it gives others nothing. And when things go wrong for you, you say #fwp (first world problems) and feel bad and uncomfortable for having when most of the world does not.

This is what life does. It gives you a page and you write 800 words on it and you want so much to make a difference in the lives of thousands but all you can really do is make a difference in your own.

Inspired by the poem “Starfish” by Eleanor Lerman and by the prompt “What Life Does” by Linda Schreyer.

ONCE upon a time, 20-something and newlywed, I made my way north and west to begin a life atop a hill swirled in pale gray fog and clanging cable-car bells. Far, far from the early morning hadedas and hot African sun of my home, my future sparkled before me bright as the white sails that dotted the Bay, expansive as the red bridge I crossed to go to work. As strange as those hilly streets and twangy accents were to me, I was cheerily confident this too would become home.

But I was a South African in San Francisco – possibly the furthest in the world I could be from the place where I’d lived most of my life, where I had befriended Anne of Green Gables, and met Moon-Face, Silky the Fairy and Saucepan Man in The Magic Faraway Tree. Where I had fallen in love with Jane Eyre and Mr Rochester, and where I took a book with me to almost every family gathering, because I am the eldest cousin and the worlds created by Judy Blume and Mary Higgins Clark were far more exciting to me than playing hide-and-go-seek in the garden.

I was far away from that place and from the parents who taught me to read, from the friends who shared their books with me, and from the aunts who passed on their favourite titles, but I clung to my literary worlds. Armistead Maupin brought the beautiful city I now called home, to life. His delicious descriptions of characters and encounters in his famous Tales of the City series were more colourful on the black and white page than they were in my real life. Those books made San Francisco home to me in a way my job and apartment and going to the gym and buying groceries didn’t.

I wanted to write like that. I wanted to create worlds that eldest cousins could escape to, write words that were cozy and comforting and settled over my own babies like their warmest, fuzziest blanket. I wanted to share my thoughts and ideas and seedlings of creativity on the page.

My adopted, faraway home has indeed become home. I am raising four loud and wonderful children who clamor over each other like wriggly puppies to be the first to read the Sunday comics. I fight against the restlessness of being a stay-at-home-mom and delight in the endless moments of kids and dog and chaos. And I continue to read, and now I write.

I watch my son trip over the dachshund because his nose is buried in his latest sci-fi journey.The words are everywhere. I write them and read them, borrow them from libraries, and share them with my children at bedtime.

The words, read and written, transform my space: my special spot on my grandmother’s couch in Pretoria, my tiny res room at Rhodes or my son’s bedroom in San Francisco, the bench I sit on outside the school library or the parking lot outside the ballet studio. All of time and space, imagined or real, are contained in those words, and no matter where or when in the world I am, when I am reading – or writing – I am home.

NickiGDD

This post originally appeared in South Africa’s The Daily Dispatch and The Herald as part of the Nal’ibali literacy campaign. Nal’ibali – it starts with a story. #Just15Minutes