Home alone

The housemate went off to a conference and calls from time to time saying how disappointing the hotel has turned out to be. She believes hotels should be fun, with huge beds to bounce on and big high-definition TV screens and   room service waiters popping in every few minutes with trolleys of cakes and  silver trays loaded with roast turkey and  pink champagne, jacuzzis brimming over with bubble bath, a yellow bucket and spade waiting  near the door to be taken to the beach the next day. Life, James, but not as we know it.

The pup is adorable but hard work, dogs all playing together now, feeding routines in place, where they sleep etc. Joyous volleys of barking through out the day.   I so like wandering around the garden followed by three  dogs, like a contemporary badly dressed Artemis or huntress Diana.

Home alone so I  made myself a smoked salmon and sour cream, capers, horseradish, yum yum supper, just enough for one person. Because I travelled so much on business  at an earlier stage of  my life, I have no hotel envy. Planned to stay up reading  and listening to jazz which the housemate doesn’t like, but got sleepy at about 10pm, so put the dogs down and went off to sleep.  Woke up just before dawn, thrilled  with the silence and an owl’s thin cry. It is odd that when I am alone, I revert to the person I was when I lived alone in my 30s,  enjoying the quiet morning, creeping around and hoping the dogs don’t wake while I have a pot of tea. Going to the living room window to stand and watch the dawn, the sunrise in African mountains, a fast blaze coming up in the east. That soft blued-over haze of mist on the fields, mountains black and aureoled by sun.

Then the dogs began to bark and jump around and the housemate called to say  she wants to get home earlier today, has found a small Italian deli with good biscotti,  is off to walk on the cliffs overlooking the sea — and for me, mouth full of toast, it is time to come online and find out what America etc has been up to overnight.

Thought that the real  appreciation of sobriety is so rarely there at the time — why stay sober again this afternoon, why not have a drink  this evening? but it is always there in the long term, to have stayed sober so many evenings and  to have witnessed so many dawns, so hopeful that chunk of life reclaimed, more dawns to look forward to, more evenings with books and Horlicks, more laughter and conversation, more clarity and  simple living –

What does not go away

The new puppy Satch is growing into his personality, more alert and curious and affectionate. When he sees me come into the room he runs to me  making excited noises with his clumsy soup-plate paws akimbo. All three dogs play together  happily. As yet the word ‘No!’ means zilch.

Went up to the main street cafe this morning to get milk and the air was thick with teargas after a protest march about  electricity costs got riotous. As the gas made my eyes burn and itch, I had flashbacks to all kinds of  traumatic memories of marches and rallies from years back. War never goes away. I came home and sat aat the kitchen table waiting for my breathing to calm and level out. By chance — serendipitous luck — I found this moving article by Janine di Giovanni about a two war correspondents settling down to a normal life in Paris and finding out that war casts a long shadow.

The trauma psychiatrist asked me: “How many dead bodies have you seen?”

I thought hard, trying to remember events and places; fields of bodies, mass graves, wells with blue corpses stuffed down them, the man in East Timor who washed up in the sewer, the slabs of dead flesh on my daily trips to the morgue in Sarajevo, the soldier in the snow in Chechnya, the miles and miles of dead Rwandans on a road near Goma. Skin stretched purple over bone. Bloated faces. How many? The fact was, I did not know. Dozens? Hundreds?

The psychiatrist was silent as he wrote in his notebook. After a while, he looked up. “Don’t you find that odd?” he said, not unkindly. “Most people only see the bodies of their grandparents, or their parents, and only at their funerals.”

Bright sunshine after a weekend of rain. Broken glass on the main street, lingering tear gas. But  women going out to shop, carrying babies on their backs wrapped in shawls, a tractor  rumbling down the road en route to vineyards. Small birds darting amongst the cotoneaster berries and the mountains still dusted with snow. Life going on, good, bad, difficult, incalculable.

A break in winter

The new dog aged seven-and-a half weeks is sitting on the kitchen doorstep, yawning. He is so bored. It is dawning on him that he is not destined for  serious watchdog status or edgy urban  aggro, just a sleepy household of  women and female dogs and his only thrill might be getting underfoot in the kitchen.

He doesn’t want to play with his knitted toy or his stripy ball or his  chew rope. He doesn’t want to chase dozens of turtle doves or house martins. Everyone else is happy to sit and watch the grass grow. Nothing much happens. His playmates are wusses. His food is gone in a flash.

Never mind,  puppy! In two weeks time we shall be going on holiday despite a somewhat ruinous financial year and he can run on the beach, chase seagulls and chew driftwood and sleep beside an indoor fire each night. Our friend Helena has assured us he cannot destroy anything at her beach cottage because it is basic stone and hardwood and  built to withstand the Cape of Storms as well as puppy mischief. So he can be bored there while we  grill fresh fish and  sleep late and  explore the  coastal dunes. If it rains we will all sit indoors on  comfy old sofas reading detective thrillers and watching rain fall on the grey sea. While the dog learns to exercise patience.

Here and now, the nowness

This is the rainiest winter in years: I fall asleep to the sound of rain falling and wake up to solid walls of rain outside. Not ideal weather for housetraining a new dog. Satchi is all teeth, drool,  sawdust and velvet and this morning I smacked him for chewing  electrical wires (live! connected!) under my desk. He licked my hand  enthusiastically, then bounced up and down, pleased to have a new game and not in the least perturbed.

So we are all confined indoors, three dogs and a faltering writer. There are dog biscuits, mugs of Horlicks, some Schubert playing, beany wonderful soup tickled with rosemary and black pepper  simmering on the stove, soft toys, floors that smell of Dettol and hasty scrubbing with soap and hot water, wodges of paper towelling in odd places. Sponges, mops, rubber balls, dog blankets, refilled dog drinking bowls. The rain beating against the windowpanes, lamps lit, chewed pillows, bickering dogs, intermittent Internet, workmen  clearing stormwater drains in the road. Dog mother trying to write sentences that somebody might pay to read.

Every writer has a memoir, a neverending fiction, an encyclopedia buried within. From the Imagist poet and  writer of long epics on Helen in Egypt, HD:

we pause to give
thanks that we rise again from death and live

And with the winter solstice we have turned towards seasonal resurrection, green spears of watsonia in cold clay, the knobs and stubs of new leaf on gnarled branches, red aloes blazing in the dark veld. Early this morning, I lay in the bath and watched through a small window the rain and wind shake the brittle branches of an old elder tree. The sky behind the elder tree purple and ribboned with storm. We don’t need to search for mystery in life, it is all there, waiting.

Winter breathing out

It is mid-winter already. The trees in the village are ghostly, grey and wandlike, and the leaves that flutter down are the colour of saffron. We took the new pup out for a walk and he behaved beautifully, trotting along on a lead and pausing to admire the scenery. Then he came home and tried to munch on  another dog’s tail. He excels at chewing.

Another season turning, fat waxy buds on the horse magnolias, clumps of crocosmia spearing their way up and soon to flower, strelitzia unfurling that glorious spiky riot of blue. black and orange. Blue skies, a freezing wind and thunderclouds towards evening. My friend Char  is to have an operation and  is worried about what to do with her timid fat ginger cats. I dare not bring two chubby moggies with fragile nerves into this bold and fearless household. The noise level alone is staggering.

And I have a leaking gutter. The local shelter for battered women is crammed to bursting with refugees and places must be found for  travel-weary rape survivors. This article on women in a Catholic shelter in Musina on the Zimbabwean border moved me. Most shelters for women and children here are also refugee centres for those fleeing war and starvation elsewhere.

Caretaker and housemother Asneth Msema says the numbers sometimes rise to 65 women on some nights, and the shelter, which had initially been designed to accommodate women for three days, had had women stay on for a year.

She said: “But they usually have no money to move on so they stay on for much much longer.”

According to Msema, the women who come through her shelter come from, among others, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Congo, and they all stay there while they either look for work or apply for South African documentation.

“We give them blankets and toiletries, including soap, toilet paper and sanitary pads,” she said. Disposable nappies were also given to those with small babies. The shelter depends solely on the church for this and the only meal, served in the evening.

“They arrive here hungry, desperate and very scared because of their experiences back home and along the way,” she said. Others arrived with swollen feet, respiratory problems or traumatised from being sexually abused.

We sober up to  so many realities outside of the small room at the back of the mind where once we obliterated consciousness. So many challenges and invitations to empathy, opportunities to be useful and even helpful. Then there is the mysterious forgetting of self as we engage  more fully in life, one of the key blessings of a new way of living.

The death of macho

I’ve never been a fan of Ernest Hemingway although some of the early writing is magnificent. I don’t like macho and sexist attitudes towards women and the glorification of violence that seems to go with being a ‘real man’. But John Walsh writing in the Independent  makes me wish Hemingway had conquered some of those demons and managed to sober up.

Hemingway’s taste for chronic self-immolation was matched by his prodigious feats of drinking: “The manager of the Gritti Palace in Venice tells me,” wrote Anthony Burgess later, “that three bottles of Valpolicella first thing in the day were nothing to him, then there were the daquiris, Scotch, tequila, bourbon, vermouthless martinis. The physical punishment he took from alcohol was … actively courted; the other punishments were gratuitous – kidney trouble from fishing in chill Spanish waters, a torn, groin muscle from something unspecified when he was visiting Palencia, a finger gashed to the bone in a mishap with a punchbag…”

The drinking got worse after his father shot himself. Ernest went to a doctor in 1937, complaining of stomach pains; liver damage was diagnosed and he was told to give up alcohol. He refused. Seven years later, in 1944, when Martha Gellhorn visited him in hospital, she found empty liquor bottles under his bed. In 1957, his doctor friend AJ Monnier wrote urgently, “My dear Ernie, you must stop drinking alcohol. This is definitely of the utmost importance.” But even then, he couldn’t stop.

Let it go

A sleepless night, so frazzled and not coping well with a madly energetic puppy and dog skirmishes. As well as extra work on my desk and a house that looks as if a bomb has hit it. Burned a pot of lentils and the house smells acrid and bitter.

Yesterday was  Soweto Day in South Africa, a public holiday commemorating the memory of those schoolchildren who led and were shot down in an uprising against apartheid on June 16, 1976. Some hard and  painful old memories of the years of struggle, dead friends, young lives wasted.

 It was also the anniversary of my housemate’s mother’s death and not an easy day for her. She has had bad angina pain for much of the night and is resting: right now I rather wish we did not have a frisky puppy chewing table legs and squeaking joyfully at the prospect of making mischief. The icy winter rain is falling relentlessly and none of the dogs can be let out into the garden. We sit cooped up together watching the new pup wreak havoc. I have written 3 000 words on a new chapter, so far sounding like  lumpy porridge.

Sober but a trifle powerless, interesting to feel this way again – the skies have just gone  black and there is ribbon lightning flashing  like a streamer of blazing mercury. So beautiful I  forget all my other worries.

From Paris Review, the writer Jim Harrison who wrote Legends of the Fall:

The best thing I’ve ever read on the subject of alcohol and the writer was by Walker Percy, who defined it as a “reentry” problem. The writer works in this totally solitary universe, and to reenter the world he has to have a couple of belts, then a couple of belts on top of a couple of belts. And most people drink for no other reason than that they started drinking. It’s essentially a sedative, and if you’re a manic depressive in the first place, which is basically my configuration, you sometimes need a lot of sedation.

Dog days

Opened the door to chat with a municipal councillor and forgot I had a puppy suckling on my earlobe as I burped him. And puppy puke down the back of my sweater.

”What a great brute he will be,” said the councillor approvingly.

No he won’t, not a brute anyway. I myself (like Lou and others) am wary and distrustful of large dogs especially more aggressive breeds. But I grew up with very  gentle and affectionate ridgebacks and dobermanns and  bull mastiffs, so I know that nurture and training is  key. And Great Danes are known for their sleepy sweet natures.

In between caring for the dog and playing with my other dogs and listening to the housemate praise the new  puppy, cooking meals and trying to  do professional writing, I read poems. And reflect on gratitude and, of all the impossible things, love. And patience.

Unanswered Plea
Aleš Debeljak
Translated from Slovenian by Andrew Zawacki and by Ales Debeljak
I learn things by myself, which is why
it takes so long. I’m asking you
to be patient. That’s not asking much.
I learn by myself, learn to cross the village,
it’s not every day I recognize you
in the timberwork of the roof,
the builders’ sweat alight in the air even now.
The river is sluggish here, the lake is asleep,
one’s step less heavy, but I’m no longer
convinced I’ve read it right: instructions
for painting a woodpecker’s wings in red
and black and red, and how to cast a spell upon
the ankles of a pregnant girl. I don’t know
nor want to know her name, and maybe that’s
the reason I can’t breathe, but I won’t forget
the way she makes me feel. Did I really
read it right? Okay, I accept these signposts
in the humid moss, in the backbone curving
throughout every season, in scarlet shells
cracked apart at the feast to which I’m called.
Yes, this I accept. But where in the language
should I look for you, when the language
is unworthy of what you are? It might be
that you assume a common form, such as love,
or maybe you’re something awful down the road
that will, after all, come to pass.

Snippets

How good to find Pam at 20 years sober, Mary-Christine and Lou all posting again. Every now and then I go searching for those who were posting when I first began back in 2007. I know they are out there leading full, happy and productive lives but  I still hope they are secretly itching to come back and blog again. I love the recovery blogging community.

Snips and snails and puppydog tails. No pics of my new pup are possible because I don’t have a camera or the kind of cell phone that lets me do happy snapshots. The image above taken from Google is the closest I could get to the sublime ugliness of  my little Great Dane at six weeks – he isn’t brindle but that squinty mean-eyed scowl is about right. I am nearly as besotted as the housemate and  my small female dogs have begun to play with him, in a condescending manner. The house smells like a kennel.

Puppy love

On Saturday we went out to a small fishing village on the Overberg coast, eventually located the talkative Namaqualand breeder and fetched our new Great Dane puppy. His name is either Satchmo or Sakkie or Sylvester. He answers to Satchmo. The housemate has bonded joyfully and he follows her around everywhere. When she  is not here, the puppy follows me and I am undergoing that myserious bonding of humans and  animal companions. The two small dogs are appalled and disgusted but ignore him, are waiting for him to leave.

Got up at dawn to mop up puppy widdles and the smelly brown stuff. Not something I could have done in the drinking years and not exactly something I dreamt of doing in sobriety! Satchmo/Sylvester is teething his way through chewed-up table legs. House training may take a little time.

He is a kind of dusty charcoal with a white blaze or diamond on his chest and one grey and white back paw and handfuls of rumpled velvety skin around his neck that he will grow into. Paws like soup plates and a huge appetite, very friendly and eager to drool on you. My neighbour said he is the ugliest dog she has ever seen, small squinty eyes and a broad shark-like snout. I assured her that he will make up for his lack of handsomeness by having a winning personality. Great Danes are sweet-natured and gentle but their size and deep bark scares off intruders. (Not to mention a truly killer fart.) They defend people not property because they get so attached to their owners. And vice versa.

Wonderful day travelling down to the coast — I can’t give the name of the village because the tourist search engines will pick up the post and display it in all kinds of places. We started out in dense white fog which fortunately cleared a little before we reached the national highway, sheep wandering  across the roads, blue cranes flying low – then we cut down through back roads amongst hills like a green wave breaking, driving down past winding and overflowing streams, farm dams and patches of roadside yellow-flowering Bitter Bessie bushes, to S__ on the river and then to the coast. Drove slowly through the Grootbos reserve looking at milkwood trees. The Platbos indigenous forest is the largest fragment of the original Swartkransberg forests, deep and dark with wild olive, white pear and stinkwood trees, many more than a thousand years old. In the heart of the forest there is a pathway labyrinth outlined in mother-of-pearl shells that shine in the moonlight and are often rearranged by the Chacma baboons.

The village, named after colonies of Egyptian geese, lies at the foot of the Duynefontein mountains. Old fishermen’s cottages from stone, daub and reeds, numerous jerry-built holiday homes, a messy clutter, together with shark cage diving ventures (not eco-friendly), fishing tackle shops and a wonderful scruffy ungentrified harbour. Just next to the jetty there is  a small shop that sells fresh fish, fish biltong, dried bokkoms (winddried southern mullet) hanging from hooks, jars of homemade kerrievis and sousboontjies (curried fish in turmeric and vinegar, bottled beans in a vinegar sauce) together with tall jars of pickled perlemoen or periwinkles. The day’s catch of mackerel, haarders, maasbanker, red stompneus, geelbek and sole on ice, cleaned and gutted. on the walls, red and white liferings strung up in a row next to photographs of drowned fishermen and a monster 6,2-metre Great White Shark.

It was humid and warm down beside the sea, salty air like rough flannel. A lone Southern Right whale lobbing out beyond the harbour, colonies of African jackass penguins on the needle-sharp rocks. Bottlenose dolphins leaping in the surf across the bay. We ate lunch looking out over red spires of cliffside aloes down to the needle rocks and beyond that the great blue bay. Empty dunes in the distance, deserted beaches, the indigo scribble of mountains.

The bay is known for its population of Great White Sharks and the  Danger Point Lighthouse, looking out to where the HMS Birkenhead was wrecked in 1852. The horses on the ship swam ashore and became a pied-coloured feral herd that ran wild — I saw the last wild horses there in  the 1980s, running free in the dunes, their manes streaming grey and white.

Humans have lived in Klipgat (Stonehole) cave for more than 70 000 years and there are many archaeological digs around this area. The indigenous Chainouqua tribe of Khoisan people are no longer here, but fishing communities have always  lived on the edge of the bay and there is an old disused whaling station. On the small islamds out in the bay there are threatened colonies of African jackass penguins and Cape fur seals, so the islands are official nature reserves or sanctuaries.

The new puppy slept on my lap as we sat looking at the sea and talking, grunting in his sleep like a small walrus.