Ninety-five, we're alive!

So it will have to be a 364-day challenge, or maybe even a 360 day challenge, which gives me four more days off along this year. 

Some days are just too long.  But they still keep racing eagerly by.  Luna is nearly fourteen months old already, Ella almost eight!  The boys are almost finished their junior/third year in college, which seems utterly bizarre, and I have about a year and a half to go before I turn 60!  I have known Tim for 30 years now, more than half our lives.  The rapidity of all this is very disconcerting.

Rewilding yesterday.  My eight little 7th-graders came bouncing in after lunch, anticipating something wonderful.  We talked about how everyone had felt on Tuesday going for that walk/run/lollop.  The main words which came out were "happy" and "fun".  "It was such a beautiful day, and we spend so much time in school sitting down,", "It was so nice to run about!", "I thought we had to notice things, like the pollution."  They all had really interesting and thoughtful things to say about why people should get back to nature. 

There are helpful activities recommended for each day of this rewilding challenge, but as I only see my kids twice a week, I can pick and choose.  There was a whole write-up about how it is therapeutic to walk barefoot on the earth because of the electrical impulses that can only enter your body when your naked feet touch the earth, a kind of grounding, which might be true, I suppose.  I just know that in South Africa we spent a lot of time without shoes on and that my feet are unhappy during the long winters here.

The students could barely believe that a teacher was commanding them to take off their shoes outside!  On a fairly cold day, too!

So we went out, everyone racing again (with me, the old teacher, bringing up the rear), to a little brown patch of grass which will soon be green, and several kids barely stopped to pull off their shoes, and then off they went, running, exclaiming how wonderful it felt, that it wasn’t prickly at all.    A few were less keen but all complied and suddenly there was a game of tag, which was exhausting, because as the slowest there I was constantly being tagged!   And then there was just time for a thrilling race, and afterwards, as we all sat and reluctantly clothed our feet again, they were all talking about how even ten minutes running around makes a huge difference, and that their feet felt so good, and that they were going to brag to their schoolmates that we had the best advisory.  I suggested that they just explain what we are doing, the back to nature theme and all that. 

But of course it feels so good to have everyone so happy, to be the facilitator of that delight.

And then Tim fetched me from school to meet up with friends and attend a concert by Johnny Clegg, a very famous South African musician, the "white zulu".  He is an astonishing performer still, after all these years, even though his 60-year old body has widened as many of us in older age do.  He still dances energetically all over the stage, demonstrates the Zulu warrior dances, and is generally a very enthusiastic performer, belting out the beautiful songs which are old now, from that familiar country which is no longer ours, songs which rend your heart.  

Johnny Clegg tells wonderful stories before each song, about the birth of the song, or how it came about, and he is an excellent storyteller and reminds me of Keith James, our friend in South Africa who Nicholas is named for in his second name.  

The entire packed theatre went wild at the end, and of course there was an encore.  Tim wanted him to play Impi, which is the song that blew him away when he first heard him in concert in 1982 in Cape Town, and I wanted Asimbonanga, because of Mandela's recent death, and because of its grace.  And I got my wish.  He ended with Dela, which went on and on, to crazy clapping and stomping and dancing.  

And being there, I thought what an amazing life Johnny Clegg has had.  To be a link between black and white, to blend the musical cultures of two segregated and diverse races,  to bulldoze his way against the apartheid laws, to travel all over the world and have people fall in love with his music.  

And I thought too what an amazing life I have had, to have lived 45 years in that astonishing, crazy, awful, beautiful, messed-up country, to have worked for years and years in black schools, to have loved those students, and proudly seen some of them go on to great success,  and then to have left our home and trekked across the world to settle in a new strange country.  

We have been brave pioneers in our own way, all six of us travellers.