Going over sixty batting on forty

There are times when I just

Know that

I am tuned in

To the universe… or perhaps

Multiverse.

For instance two months

ago, I was

reviewing the course requirement,

for my students, for a new programme

called for by the State in

its revised schedule of life skills. These are

now a mandatory requirement for all

emerging new adolescent citizens. They deal with physical fitness

personal identity citizenship and job seeking.

It’s a huge programme loaded with usable stuff. Problem is the course is bigger than the time allocation allows for any thing but a taste.

So one has to be relatively selective

about the range of tasks one chooses from those

spread out on the table

like an enticing delicately shadowed smorgasbord.

One is obviously guided in these matters by the textbooks. It’s a new twist on an old subject that I have never presented, formally, previously

notwithstanding my elderliness [sic].

Textbooks are prolific albeit not prescribed, and so it is over to me to choose something and develop something because the modern textbook is primarily an “ideas’ thing, containing little content

and little  in the way of direct assistance.

They are however generally most useful.

for their primary function: ideas.

A chapter heading that caught my eye

shouted  “dealing with ill health,

accidents and disasters”.

Having somehow survived to my middling sixties

notwithstanding a

long history of disasters, ranging

from

a home being burned down, being shot, beaten many times and

kicked  sometimes;  fleeing a country with family

and pitifully

few

possessions

living like a

refugee

a few times,

half a dozen retrenchments

and all  the normal accoutrements of living

in a region at

war with itself,   I felt

that this was undoubtedly a

chapter that

was almost mandatory for

a youngster living in

our totally cool but nonetheless bizarre

City… Jozi.

I read the three

page

minimalist chapter.

It contained: a picture of Indonesians

walking past the rubble left by the great

December Tsunami, an image of two people

staring at each other in what could be an accusatory manner

and a cartoon style sketch

of six people, of varying ages gathered around

what could be a kitchen table with the dominant figure

of a man in the foreground holding a page

with the words

Disaster plan

A checklist of five numbered unintelligible items,

and a phrase

‘Find out about the types of natural disaster’

in your region.

Then there was a heading:

‘Discuss ways to deal

with an accident’

containing a story about an incident on a beach.

Our city is about 600 kilometres from the

nearest beach, and we do have some flooding issues at times

especially this past summer, which in my view, is the wettest

I remember experiencing [although like most people

I romanticist the past].

According to the ‘aged one’… the surviving matriarch,

who adamantly keeps records

of rainfall

in her garden

over the

past many

decades

we

have had more

than twice our usual

Volume

Of

water pour on us.

Now, ‘though it will be much

Colder, I

like

many others I’m

sure, look

forward to our usual

gloriously

sunny

May, having somehow

Gone through an almost sunless summer.

[So: If you are one of those readers coming

to our city for the World Cup, prepare to stock up on warm kit for night wear as the temperature

falls faster than a figure from a skyscraper roof when

the sun goes down

leaving you from roast

to freeze in minutes. You don’t have to bring it with you though…

because Jozi is one of the world’s great shopping malls where you can

buy stuff for almost nothing or for

millions

whatever

your preference.][end promo.]

We do intermittently experience earth tremors from the deep

level mines that honeycomb the southern

part of the city, some two

to five kilometres

down below

ground

level

These have become less as the old

mines closed down although

there was a

“scare” earlier this

week when a flurry of

relatively

low scale

‘tremors’ were

experienced.

So we are unlikely to experience a major

earthquake, or a tsunami.

We have no mountains to send these now notorious

mudslides

swooping down

on the unsuspecting residents

perched in shanties on their sides.

We have no big rivers that overflow their

banks and roar through the whole

city like we see in places like New Orleans. We do have

many wetlands that have been built over and little

streams that turn to raging torrents

in a thunderstorm and do harm

those who live in

precarious

squatter accommodation

on their edges. Only this week

the local rag ran a story about a local resident

who finds that his smart home, that

he thought was on the edge of a stream, was actually

built over a land filled tributary

now undermined

fatally by this hundred

year high

in the water volumes

for normal summer rainfall

So what could I realistically do with heavily pressured students that wouldn’t seem like an almost criminally capricious waste of time… Prepare a disaster plan for the Apocalypse predicted for 2012. Oh yeah!

And then the voice spoke… ‘My speak’ for that in

spiration that … Bang…

that… just arrives.

Our city does have one mega natural disaster type of river flowing through it and every day

People are killed by it.

And like the storms that lash our city sometimes for minutes at a time this river roars too.

We have what could be the world’s most unruly traffic flow.

I have rarely driven much elsewhere in

the world

but I have known people, long standing urban driver

visitors who have returned their hire or loan cars in return

for chauffeured transport

because our driving habits terrified them.

I do remember once having to

drive some four

miles through London

from Earls Court to some place

wherever.

My passengers were locals, who,

for reasons I don’t

remember, were only capable of telling me where

I should go not actually driving there themselves. They

arrived at our destination declaring

themselves petrified at what

I had simply regarded

as normal

driving

behaviour.

So I presented a task. With a concocted case study, based

on the stereotypical life

style of a party

happy

city; in which a night of pleasure

ends in a bloody

nasty

car smash.

I’ve dealt with enough

to know that

deciding

what to do when it happens

is not the time to start on a learning

curve from scratch…

It is already a steep curve: just knowing.

The outcome:

This past week I have spent some

Fifteen

to

twenty

hours grading first class submissions

from classes not normally

noted

for enthusiastic

contributions.

Enthusiasm is perhaps uncool.

I seem to touch a point of relevancy

and was happy.

As the man once said it’s great when a plan comes together.

During the follow up review of the

result we dealt with certain

matters arising.

• Do not get involved in Blame.
• Remain silent.
• Go into grunt mode.
• No Licence! No one leaves

the scene until the cops arrive.

• Turn off the engine

when the event is over, and

you stop.

Surprising how many people forget that: and it was

the one thing no

one mentioned on their checklist.

The class ended at 14.20 on Friday

23^rd April… a four-day long

Independence holiday weekend

loomed.

At 14.55 I was proceeding

east

along Empire road a

major arterial, cutting east west across the

northern border of the

spine ridge that bisects our region and

gives it the name Witwatersrand [‘Ridge of white

waters’ for the frothy indulgences that flow profusely

after the storms].

An unsighted vehicle popped out from behind

another

that was waiting at the edge

of a side street,

Hillside road,

to enter the main stream and cross to the other side…  darting as is the pattern.

The vehicle,

a gray Mercedes station wagon

appeared in front of me and

notwithstanding that such a thing is normal and I

have probably avoided fifteen to twenty a day seemingly for ever

as people dart through the morass of steel that make

up our plentiful overloaded rivers

of tar

on this occasion the driver’s judgement was in error

and although I almost managed to pull up, I was trav

elling at about forty in

relatively moderate traffic for a Friday

buzzing with a frisson of expectation. And

BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!BeGan

What followed amazes me so much still that

I am writing it down. We met. I

was in grunt mode. Why he did it was

irrelevant: shit had happened as they say. We exchanged

details. He was a policeman, a Brigadier….

[We changed all the titles last week in a relatively unheralded and apparently unpopular return to the brutal military titles of our past existence as the world’s last formal slave state after sixteen years of 'nice' inoffensive titles have left us with a morale free force and plenty criminals.. ]

He presented a driver’s licence… The last one

I was presented with

in a parking lot incident some years ago on

St Patrick’s day night, turned out to be fake…as was the id and

the licence plate

and the registration notification disc that

must legally be affixed to the left

hand corner of the windscreen.

The damage was relatively minor and we had to bear the cost… sa la vie.

I hope this is not the case this time. The damage to his

car, which I Tee

boned pretty square on, was more than

the apparent damage to mine, although being a

long weekend it will only be

next week that I can establish that

for sure. I lost no teeth nor windscreen.

So I am left with this amazing

sense of being in tune with

the universe… or multiverse… following

the inner voice, trusting the messages that flow through our

existence…

An inspirational decision

to deal with the immense,

traumatic and common consequences

that could result

from a car wreck;

being forced to evaluate the response to the situation,

critically,

during the process of grading paper after paper containing the question

“how to respond” prepared

me never mind

my students.  The teacher

was taught.

As recently as a few years ago my

response

to

the

event

would

have

been

violent,  emotional and enraged.

That

confrontation with someone who in this situation, could easily destroy my life, given that the return to the brutal titles of the past suggests a return to the brutal methods of the past, with which I, like most older citizens of our country, were all too familiar, would have been

as they say now…

inappropriate.

[it was then too of course.]

Listening to the inner me… what I call

“the voice’ in my head, that I have

reasonably established is a common

enough occurrence in fellow humans, to assume

that I am not crazy… the

Limbic brain on steroids perhaps… has again and again proved

propitious.

Like some sixteen years ago when I was about to leave

the house, as I normally do, without

a firearm… The “voice” said imperiously: ‘Take Oscar

[the gun]

and spare ammo’. Twenty minutes later I

was in the fight of my

life… and survived, massively

wounded by gunfire, but alive

albeit pumping blood, because the assailants

weren’t and because I had
taken note of that occasionally insistent voice.

This event has the same sense of orchestration that has baffled me for years and which I do not ascribe to some bearded player offstage manipulating events. Rather, it is as though an inner me moves ahead from a higher vantage, as It rides a sixty metre wave like a fish eagle, surveying the ground ahead: passing messages that few of us respond to, can respond to, and continue to live happily.

~ by blogroid on 24/04/2010.