Day 64

Getting weak-willed in my old age!  Couldn't quite get it together to go out into the snow to gym early this morning before school, so did a few exercises at home instead.

I had an avocado for lunch.  We always call avocados the food of the gods, because they are the most delicious fruit, although they are not like apples and oranges and the rest.  Botanically, the avocado is a large berry! 

When I was about sixteen I went to a winter-school at the Space Theatre in Cape Town, recently opened and run by Yvonne Bryceland and her husband Brian Astbury.  It was the first non-racial theatre in South Africa, defiant of the apartheid laws of the time, and we were about 50 school students, mostly white, but a few of different races, learning to trust one another, with strange trust-building exercises that I had never experienced before, and so at lunchtime I would leave the building and walk down through the Gardens in Cape Town and buy an avocado from a vendor for my lunch.  I would sit alone on a bench under the beautiful avenue of trees, and savour the deliciousness of the avo, cutting it open with my penknife and eating it off the blade like my dad had taught me to do.  I would think about all the huge and difficult things in my life, and then I would go back, to try again. 

In the magical 16 Cross Street Bouwer-house, we had a huge avocado-tree that was prolific in its fruit-production.  We had a constant supply of avos, and a fat black labrador called Skye who loved avocados even more than we did.  Sometimes the high ones were impossible to pick, and so we would wait until they fell down themselves, but we rarely got any of those ones, as Skye would sit and wait for them to fall on the ground and then pounce on them and consume them rather like a hippopotamus attacking a bunch of grass, with great happiness.

(The closest relative to a hippopotamus is a whale.  They diverged from cetaceans about 55 million years ago.   They are very aggressive creatures, and are known as one of the most dangerous African animals.)

We used to call Skye the canine seal, because she was this little fat black waddling creature who loved water and wallowing.

My friend Cindy had made a wonderful avocado dish for a dinner party, and told her little daughter to carry it in carefully and give it to the host, and say, "Here you are, this is the food of the gods!"  So the little girl went off very proudly, balancing the dish very carefully, and announced, "Here you are, this is the food of the dogs!"

I have to get up very early for parent-teacher conferences, and I am so so tired, my weak will has continued into the night, and so my man-made thing today is an old painting, called Childhood.