Big victory today.
My new SA ID and passport are in hand. I applied for both several months ago when I was visiting for a week. I went to an Home Affairs location in the late afternoon and was overwhelmed with the service.
This morning the line was at least 100 strong (and that was outside the building).
Anyway — they’re secured.
I’ve witnessed several times over the years that Safricans tend to greet each other as long lost friends once they assemble at the departure gate for the flight home.
Dulles International’s Gate 8 became a reunion of sorts as South Africans of all ages merged after their separate but shared experience of ‘Merika.
I heard the chatter, even joined in.
“Whole neighborhoods with no fences or even security,” says one.
“My sister doesn’t even lock her house,” brags another.
Then, after the 14 hour flight, I found it rather beautiful when “Drift Away” played on the walkway speaker system and several over-tired travelers sang along as we entered the airport building.
I confess I did a little “wanna get lost in your rock and roll” myself.
Perfect flight, warm welcome at immigration, and now to get a little rest.
Talked my ear off. And, I loved it. And, well, I confess, I did my fair share, too.
[I can hear Morey in 10th Grade English yelling at me for starting not one, but two sentences with “and” and I whisper mind your own business.]
Topics covered: insurance industry (he’s off to Rhode Island); having a new grandson (he has one); adoption (he’s adopted); rearing boys (he has two, both of whom are “launched”); Memphis (a city he associates with fabulous memories and he met his wife there, one son was born there); car trips, Sedona, Harry Potter, The Hobbit, to name a few……
I told this fabulous interesting man a few things too.
As my mother would sing, “a stranger is just a friend you do not know…..”
On a practical note Dulles is huge and it’s not uncommon to land at a gate that’s miles from your next departure gate. Not this time. Landed at C21 and departing from C8…….. just down a short drag.
Heading to South Africa I stopped at the bookstore in Concourse A before my first flight and saw Malcolm Gladwell’s “Talking With Strangers.”
I decided against it.
This was for sheer care and concern about whomever would be seated next to me on the long-haul from Dulles to Cape Town ‘cause if I sat with someone reading a book with that title I’d go into immediate oh-no-please-don’t mode.
It’s not that I won’t or don’t talk to strangers but when you have to read a book about it it’s likely you’ll want to get your money’s worth and practice on the first one you see and before you’ve even finished the book and haven’t gotten to the when-not-to bits.
Oh, I know, people have met their Dreamboats on flights and are ever so grateful for Pan Am’s delay between Idlewild and Fort Myers 45 years ago when the stranger to whom they chatted is now still by their side.
I know it happens.
Most encounters are short-lived and, thankfully, benign.
I’m glad I didn’t get the Gladwell book and I’m sure it’s as good as all his others but I couldn’t.
Just couldn’t. Sheer care for the man or woman with whom I’m about to sit just wouldn’t permit it.
Sorry, Malcom.
In a world where you and I and children are often told we can be anything we want to be, I’d suggest we all:
Are you discouraged? Are you at the end of your tether? Looking for answers? Seeking questions?
Look for the spark, the spark of life, it lies within, deep within you – and it is a good place to start when wrestling with discouragement.
Finding answers, uncovering the antidote for whatever is at the heart of discouragement is not somewhere “out there” as an empowering truth hiding in a new, or old, book you are yet to discover.
It is not in some powerpoint presentation from a speaker you are yet to hear or on a social media platform seeking to solve therapeutic issues.
It’s not lurking to be revealed in some undiscovered podcast.
The spark is deep within you.
It is located within you in the place where spirit meets soul, the ven intersection where thinking, planning and your longings, even confiused longings, overlap; the place where desire for worship and the need for vulnerability and transparency merge into one large inner-venue, the place we typically call Self.
The deep place – this beautiful and holy atrium within you – is not easily identified or accessed and yet it drives everything about you (and me).
Also, although it deserves full attention, it will, ironically, not be found in a hurry. Oddly, we are usually very familiar with this place in the inner-Person and yet can live long lives offering little or no attention perhaps in the manner an indifferent spouse may do in a failing flailing marriage.
The spark within the Self, the beautiful Self will not race nor be rushed, but while it is raced, rushed, scheduled, it is unlikely to turn from spark to a comforting, leading flame.
Want to find it?
Get a pencil, paper and a quiet place and sit, sit, sit and think and resist the urge to pick up your phone or check your email.
When you have calmed your inner-being, try to answer these questions:
What do I really want?
What do I have to offer?
What am I really good at?
Do this for a few hours every week by lingering in this holy space and let the words flow into phrases until they find their sentences and let the sentences run free, unmonitored, released to declare whatever it is this deep place within you wants to declare. Do this for a while – days, weeks, months, make it a repeated retreat of habit – and there is a real possibility your anxieties and any sense of desperation will find inner-calm and your inner-spark will emerge and build into a guiding light to renew and refresh your life and connect you with things far more important than the distractions your phone and so much else, will persist in providing.
Of course I believe in Santa
I saw Santa at the Children’s Museum with a feather of a child pleading her case. They were locked in discussion, a confessional of sorts, as she entered into detail of her every Christmas wish. Hands, eyes, and all of her face enticed Santa closer lest he miss a detail living so clearly in her head.
“Oh, you want, oh, I see it. Why yes, of course. Perfectly,” Santa said, his voice tapering off into her ear, “I will see what I can do about that.”
Then she nestled into his side, her shoulders comfortably enveloped by his plush red suit as if to declare her mission accomplished. He was a perfect depiction of everything I imagined him to be and the sight easily immersed me in the voices and music of my own Christmases past.
Santa came all year round to our home. I’d look through the window in April or mid-August and Santa would be strolling up the driveway on his return from visits to every home on the street. He’d be wearing dad’s shoes and one of his ties underneath the tatty red coat, but I knew better than to expose his identity. I wanted to believe in Santa and he in turn needed me to believe. Such faith had rewards. I knew better than to dash my own hopes. I wasn’t ready to lose my trust in Santa for anyone and certainly not by my own hand.
He couldn’t resist visits to the whole neighborhood and would drop in from time to time and inspire children toward good behavior, perfect obedience at school, and remind them to count their blessings one by one. At every appearance in our home we’d sing “The Little Boy that Santa Clause Forgot” and we’d all have to cry. He insisted on it.
The lines “he didn’t have a daddy” and “went home to play with last year’s broken toys” really got us going.
It was clear he sang to all the children of the world who’d had to skip childhood and who had known poverty; children who’s fathers had gone to war or whose fathers or mothers had fled their families.
Donning the suit, surprising the children, was our Santa’s way of making the world right.
His visits created intrigue in the neighborhood, and to every child he repeated the promise that this Christmas, no child on this street would be forgotten. As far as I could tell none ever was.
The last Christmas we had together was in August of 1994. We were riding in a car and in the curves of Bluff Road when spontaneously he began to sing, “Christmas comes but once a year.”
The car became a holy place as I heard once more of the boy who “wrote a note to Santa for some soldiers and a drum and it broke his little heart to find Santa hadn’t come.”
The tears we both shed required no encouragement for we both somehow knew this would be the last time he’d sing this nostalgic hymn.
Now this old song is top of my list of Christmas songs.
The melody emerges randomly in my awareness, most particularly when faced with children who are in need. I have had to silence it at all times of the year.
It was the little girl’s confidence, Santa’s grace, and the loving parents looking from the side that caught my attention last week. She touched his flowing beard and told him her every Christmas dream and I found myself listing my own requests with childlike zeal.
It gave me renewed hope that you and I, the real Santas of the world, could deliver a more hopeful tomorrow for “those little girls and boys that Santa Claus forgot.”
(First published December 9, 2000 in the Indianapolis Star)
Thulani woke from an afternoon nap and came down the stairs and screamed siren-like and sobbed using his whole body.
By the time I reached him, tried to comfort him, my hold had to shift from hug to tight restraint until he convulsed a little less then relaxed to reveal a carpet nail in his underfoot.
Nathanael’s breathing had been bothered and when I mentioned a musty stairwell carpet, Dr. Yancey wanted it gone and I spent the afternoon ripping, tearing and hauling the carpet off a stairwell and repeatedly examined the newly exposed hardwood for missed nails. I ran my open hands carefully over each stair but missed the one which sat flush and satisfied in Thulani’s foot.
The boy hung from my neck until we reached the living room sofa and I used my full body weight to lock his kicking legs. He froze seeing I was about to remove the nail and watched me remove it and puked into my chest. The warm flow spewed, two or three reverse gulps, from his anxious being and eased its way down my shirt, the sludge forming a sloppy mucus curtain which dangled between us, the closeness trapping the flow as I waddled to the basement and stripped him. While maneuvering his frame from arm to arm, I removed my soiled shirt and dumped our soggy clothes into the washing machine. We got upstairs and when I had drawn a bath I eased Thulani off me and into the warm and soapy water.
“Daddy,” he said, “that’s why I need a mommy.”
When the tensions had eased he was sorry for saying he needed a mommy. I told him he was right, that everyone needs a mommy, that some of us could do with three or four while some have none.
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