76

I ran 2.28 miles today on the machine at the gym.  Yes, we went back to gym, yuk.  But I skipped out of that building afterwards feeling wonderful, so I know it is good for me.

I am reading the most beautifully written book and can't believe that I have never discovered it before.  Of course I have read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  This book is Dandelion Wine, by the same author, very autobiographical, told from the viewpoint of a twelve-year old boy, Douglas Spaulding, about the magic of childhood and summer and realising you are alive, and the gradual discovery, as one becomes aware, of the realities of the world.  It is written in the most alluring poetic way, and here is an example of its lyricism:

"Dandelion wine.
The words were summer on the tongue.  The wine was summer caught and stoppered.  And now that Douglas knew, he really knew he was alive, and moved turning through the world to touch and see it all, it was only right and proper that some of his new knowledge, some of this special vintage  day would be sealed away for opening on a January day with snow falling fast and the sun unseen for weeks or months and perhaps some of the miracle by then forgotten and in need of renewal.  ...
And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine.  Peer through it at the wintry day - the snow melted to grass, the trees were re-inhabited with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind.  And peering through, color sky from iron to blue."

Dandelion wine.

I went to a girls school a few suburbs away from my own, and there was a school bus which took us there and back, which I caught on the main road near my house from the age of six.  I was extremely short and tiny for my age until I reached the age of about fifteen, when I suddenly grew into a normal person.  There was a big hibiscus bush growing next to the bus stop, and often the driver would not stop because he hadn't seen me behind the hibiscus, even though I stuck my arm out frantically!  So I would walk disconsolately home to my mother who would have to get in her car and drive the 5km to my school.  It happened so many times that eventually my mother came with me to the bus stop, stopped the bus and gave the driver a severe talking-to.  Unfortunately there were sometimes different drivers and so it did happen again, but much less frequently.  The power of mothers.

View of Devil's Peak from my bus stop.

When I was about nine or ten, we had afternoon sport twice a week, and then we would not be able to take the school bus home, as we finished too late.  So we would have to take the green bus along Main Road, then walk down to the bus terminus at Mowbray Train Station, where we could catch an orange bus, with the romantic logo of the Golden Arrow bus company, to Pinelands.  The trouble was that the road to the station was hard to walk down without being assailed by the sights and smells of so many enticing shopfronts selling all manner of services like shoe repairs and radio and vacuum-cleaner repairs, tailors adapting patterns, convenience stores or cafe storefronts.  Then there were the wonderful smells of the Indian shops, selling samoosas and curry-bunnies, and the fish and chip shop,  and we were always hungry.

But there was a strict school rule (there were many) that you could not be seen in your uniform eating in the street.  We never had any money anyway, but on this occasion, there were four of us and somehow we put enough cash together to buy one bag of slap-chips, a kind of fried potato-chip which was not crisp as you would expect a chip to be, but soft (slap, in Afrikaans) and oozing oil and vinegar.  Utterly delectable to a ten-year old girl!  We merrily shared the greasy delights while prancing down the road to catch the bus at the station, all in our bright blue school uniforms with our white Panama hats of summer.

The next morning at the very end of assembly, during notices, the headmistress, who seemed to constantly have trouble parting her upper and lower jaws, hissed through her teeth that there had been an incident the previous day, in which four girls had disgraced the school by being seen EATING IN PUBLIC!  She added, viciously, "We know WHO you are, so those four girls are requested to meet me after assembly in my office!"  My legs quaked, but I was not standing near any of my friends and therefore could not see how they were feeling.  So of course I believed the headmistress when she said that they knew that it was us, never questioning how they could possibly know our identities or who would have betrayed us.

I dutifully filed silently out of the hall and made my way to the office.  No one else did.

I was questioned and cajoled and threatened but I knew the code of silence.  You never "told on".   But it was while I was standing there all by myself in the worst trouble I had been in since climbing the rope to the high ceiling of the gym, that I had an epiphany which fascinated me so completely that I quite forgot the scolding of the clenched-tooth woman standing before me.

I was alive, hugely alive.  I had eaten the chips and loved them, revelled in their greasy ambrosia and in the lovely sharing of food with friends.

And, I was all alone in the world.

Even though I had a mother and father and family and friends, it was only me who was experiencing this particular day in this singular way.  I would always be like this.  I would suffer alone, I would feel elation alone.  It is a most peculiar feeling, this knowing you are alive, really knowing that you are you and no one else, that you are the only one who will go through your own life-experiences, all those moments of elation and ecstacy, and also the saturating sorrows, with the ordinary days in between. I think it always comes as a sudden shocking revelation to people.

I was punished for all four girls, because I would not give up the names of the others.  My punishment was nothing violent, because little white girls were not beaten.  (I was horrified to discover, when I became a teacher, that beating had always gone on at black schools, and still did, in the 90's, and still does, I expect.)  That was also the punishment which made me realise that they couldn't really do anything to me that I couldn't bear.  As soon as you realise that, you are up and away beyond them.

I had to stand with my face to the wall in the outside corridor which led to the playground at each break-time/recess, so that every girl in the school would walk past and see my disgrace.  Only it wasn't really difficult, standing for half an hour or so, thinking wonderful thoughts, flying off on my imagination and entirely forgetting my surroundings so that the stares of the girls could do nothing to hurt me.  I had to do that for four weeks.

It was four weeks of discovery.