First cut is the deepest

There are many firsts beyond the obvious. The first time he comes bounding through your front window wearing a leather jacket at the start of winter, a jacket that you will remember through the years, the feel of it, and what it all meant. The first time you stay up till three, four in the morning, talking, and then more...Read more here

You simply do not exist unless you ‘like it’ online

I left my cellphone at home. Racing out to an appointment mid-afternoon, and then I was off to a writers symposium that began at five, there was no time to retrace my steps, although I thought of doing so and knew that I’d be caught in hideous peak hour traffic and would no doubt be late. So, reluctantly, I accepted that I was going into the world naked, so to speak.

And naked I felt. As others around me clicked – taking photos, tweeting comments and images, uploading same – I sat there, feeling powerless and cut off...read more here 

The Milky Way fairytale

The constellation looked like a small cluster of cotton wool through the telescope. “Relax your eyes,” said astronomer Vincent Nettman. I didn’t know how to relax my eyes, I strained a bit more, clouds were coming, obscuring even the brightest object in the sky, the waning moon, and I joined my friends inside instead...Read more here

Landmarks rekindle memories of the way we were

SITTING in the Bioscope in Joburg’s CBD took me back. Beigebrown leatherette chairs, hard neon lighting, and an industrial grittiness to the small cinema.

Even the name took me back: the Bioscope. It was what some called the movies way back when – I don’t think I’ve heard the term since the 1980s, perhaps. This was when mall cinemaplexes started ruling the roost and independent movie houses – aha, another word I haven’t heard in ages – started shutting one by one.

But what did it take me back to? I couldn’t say exactly. French film actress Simone Signoret famously called her autobiography Nostalgia Isn’t What it Used to be, but sometimes there’s another word for it, a word that English doesn’t have. No, it wasn’t nostalgia, but a vague sort of memory perhaps, a memory you can’t always put your finger on, something that shimmers out there, until you can grab it, date it.

Places do that to you – bring you back to the past in ways you had never considered. That’s one of the beauties of having lived in one city most of your life, or most of your life. The past fuses, and little things bring it all back.

I went to a new friend for lunch one day, driving back to Highlands North and on past Balfour Park and my old high school, Northview. Turning from Louis Botha Avenue I passed the corner where Bimbo’s used to be. Suddenly, in my mind’s eye, the current fast food establishment – I think it’s a fish joint – disappeared, much as Bimbo’s disappeared from that spot years ago.

Memories I hadn’t thought of for years came back – being 14-years old, ordering Bimbo’s burgers after school or on Saturday nights. They came with a pink sauce: a combination of tomato sauce and mayonnaise, and very deliciously lapped up then. Afternoons of sitting at the table at Bimbo’s, watching Madonna on the television set, discussing such matters as the right age to lose your virginity.

I hadn’t thought about pink sauce for years, in fact, I was half tempted to try it again, but perhaps some things are better left to a teenager’s memory.

Similarly, visiting Norwood, again now off the beaten track for me, is another jolt into and out of the past. When I was growing up, living in a home just off Grant Avenue, there were two restaurants on the strip: La Lampara, since relocated to KwaZulu-Natal and the Drug Store. The Drug Store was an institution, it lasted long into my mid-twenties: a place of fries, burgers, milkshakes and memories, not least of which was trying to stretch our rands between a group of us. Nobody shares a burger better than teenagers and university students.

But by then other restaurants were beginning to mushroom along Grant Avenue, and the Drug Store was no longer unique. Still, I drive past the place where the Drug Store used to be – a secondhand-furniture, clothes and odds and sods sorts of place – and I’m looking twice. The Drug Store stands there still – so ingrained in my memories and experiences.

Kensington, Bedfordview and Edenvale provide another sense of déjà vu for me. I lived in Troyeville then – on the same street that David Webster died, and around the corner from the famed Gandhi home. I was a reporter for the community paper – and knew the area, like, well the back of my hand. Driving down that broad sweep of Langermann Drive is like driving into another decade, a time when the golf course still existed and hadn’t yet become a site for yet another shopping mall.

In yet another restaurant on yet another corner, three of us chums, all only children, debated our psychologies, wondering how growing up without siblings had affected us.

Days later it came to me – why the Bioscope seemed so strangely, vaguely familiar. Two years ago in the US a friend took me to see a movie in an art deco cinema in Oakland. The foyer was grand, impressive with sweeping architectural curves, but the cinema itself was strangely bare. Hard seats, black scuffed floors, like the back of a school hall. Again, there was something familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Days after going to the Bioscope the memory returns. At the age of seven my mother took me to see the movie Odds and Evens. The film has made no impact on me, beyond the fact that we had to write about what we had done that weekend.

I pondered how to spell the name of the movie, thought I had it right, but also thought it best to ask my Grade 2 teacher. It imprinted the memory onto me – a movie house where smoking had just been banned in cinemas, a fact my mother, as a smoker, remarked on, and cartoons and news took up a sizeable time before interval and the main show.

I had forgotten all these details, but they came rushing back, piling up on each other,  layering, unlocked by the fact of having sat in another old cinema, the past unlocking like a jigsaw.

Published in The Sunday Independent, May 8 2011

You're married, it happens

Strange things happen when you go on leave. You come back married, with a brand new name and absolutely no idea who your new husband might be.

Going online, your bank cheerfully welcomes you with a "Welcome Arja!", but your name is now Mrs A Coetzee.

The customer care woman at the other end of the line is not only mystified, but also doesn't seem to care. You tell her there's no Coetzee in your family, never has been and you've never been a Coetzee - how could this happen?

She doesn't know, suggests you get in your car and drive to your nearest branch to sort it out.
The cheery poppie at the counter assures you it's nothing to worry about, it happens all the time when a bank updates its software and records and, not to worry, her colleague is going to sort it out. You still have the same amount of money in your account, don't you?

Yes, alack and alas, you do. The new name didn't bring a rosy glow to your bank balance, and the last thing you want to do while you're supposed to be away from the hurly burly of life is to encounter it at your nearest bank.

Back at work, a colleague asks if you've checked your status at home affairs. What if you have been married off secretly somewhere offshore? You turn ice cold for a minute. It's nightmare territory - proving you're not married is like proving sky is blue.

Holding your breath, you check - no, home affairs hasn't married you off; it's only the bank that is determined to see you with the knot tied.

Friends don't understand why you are not livid with rage, why you haven't demanded to see the bank manager... Truth is, you're tired. When you're not fighting name changes, you're fighting a cellphone company over their 3G service that doesn't work, or holding on to the phone while a bored oke at DStv is telling you to pull out the red plug and replace it with a yellow.

No, it's your Jewish mother who comes to the rescue. When she tries to deposit a cheque for you and the bank won't accept it because it isn't in the name of Coetzee, she goes into action. Thank God for Jewish mothers who don't take no for an answer.

Days later the poppie from the bank phones to say that your name has been changed but now they can no longer investigate the matter because it would be too difficult because you are no longer Mrs Coetzee.

You stare down the phone. You can just imagine the face on the other end and barely manage to splutter out that you don't care how difficult it is, you still want the matter investigated.

As you put down the phone, a messenger brings you a little black box. Inside, with a press release inviting you to a bridal expo, a fake diamond ring in a black velvet box winks up at you, and nestled further down is a little plastic statue of a man and woman in wedding regalia, the kind that you plop on to a cake.

Finally, you howl.

Published in The Sunday Independent, October 19 2008

Nature proves you can step in the same river twice

There's the old saying that you cannot step in the same river twice. It’s credited to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher who lived from 540 BC to 480 BC and the full quote is: “You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”

Meaning, of course, among many other explanations, that you can’t try and retrieve or recover the past – the current has flowed on, there is another sense at play, you are a different person, you cannot grab at the intangible, at what has been and is over.

I thought so, too. Recreated experiences fall flat and yet, I think, after several experiences this year, that you can succeed in nabbing back a bit of the past, and making sense of what has been.

The experience will be different, you look on with older eyes, perhaps less naive, and you must make peace with that. For you can step in the same river twice, and sometimes the experience is ultimately satisfying. I attended a 20-year school reunion earlier this year – and found that while we had all moved on, a different sort of connection was achieved and ultimately cemented.

A few weeks ago, I returned to Utopia. I first went there at the age of eight with a large crowd of adults and children. Set within the mountains of the Magaliesberg, there are more than 100 self-catering, rustic A-frame chalets dotted around the wild nature reserve.

A river runs through it, you can hike the nearby mountains, swim in the pool, play tennis near the clubhouse. The name Utopia is aptly chosen – it’s an idyll. And never more so than for an eight-year-old child running wild, swimming the river that’s flanked by dusty pink and golden rocks.

I’ve never forgotten my time there, through all the years and subsequent travels to other places and other continents, although I did not consciously plan to return.

But a few years ago I was asked to write a short story for an anthology, and the place came back in my imagination. It had been too long – the story didn’t gel, memory really had dimmed the tarnish and the details – but the seed had been born.

I had to go back. Instead I went overseas a handful of times, travelled around the country, and always the memory of Utopia remained, I even Googled it a few times.

But the idea had taken root and one day I was explaining this place called Utopia to a friend, telling her all about it. She interjected – she knew the place well and had been going since a decade before. She had bought one of the units with her husband.

A hushed silence followed this statement. A plan was born.

Weeks later, we made our way to Utopia for a weekend. As soon as we drove through he gates and I looked at those strange, almost eerie looking -frame homes, most constructed of stone mined from the area, and topped with charcoal wigs of hatch, I remembered. Entering her unit, the place simple in its usticity, views of mountain, bush, trees, I remembered.

We scrambled down to the river to swim after lunch, and there was the same road, undulating slabs of rocks, the deeply flowing river, the natural cool of water, darkly inviting. I remembered. I had stepped back in time in some strange way.

I had managed to step in the same river twice.

Yes, it was 30 years later, but memory had sustained me, vague and shimmery as it was. I really had stepped back into the same river twice, and found the same source, the same strength. There are times when you experience nature in ways that you can’t quite describe. Going to Death Valley in the US produced a similar feeling in me: a sense of awe, a sense of homecoming, a stillness, and also a deep longing to return to that place of parched landscape and salt flats.

Similarly, sitting on the rocks at Utopia, taking photographs of the clouds moving across the water, the green reeds shimmering hazily in reflection, I’d stepped back, and yet also forward.

(Published in The Sunday Independent, November 21, 2010)