Use it or lose it

He lay on the hospital bed wondering how on earth this had happened. He was a responsible man. He had never done this before. DUI? Why? How?

His mind travelled back to the time leading up to the accident. Jill had ditched him, but he had sensed it coming. So why had it impacted him so much? What was it that she had said that upset him?

She had been carrying on at him about his wasted life. She felt that he was allowing himself to be eaten up by his mundane 9 to 5 job. His life had become so predictable and boring. His job was uninspiring and did not interest him. But what the hey? It paid the bills.

Jill had moaned that his artistic talent was being abused, forgotten. How had she expressed it? He thought she had said, “Use it or lose it”. She had hit the nail on the head. He was very close to losing it. Did he even know where the paints were in his new flat?

He had sat at the bar of the restaurant after Jill had left. One drink followed the next in quick succession, only walking out when the bartender warned, “Five minutes to closing.”

He walked outside and stood undecided on the pavement. He took faltering steps to his car, pressed the remote, climbed in, and had battled to get the key in the ignition. And that was all he could remember.

When he came to in hospital they had told him that his car had tried to climb a tree, breaking his left arm and bruising a couple of ribs. He was lucky it wasn’t more serious. He was lucky that no one else was hurt.

His thoughts were interrupted when a nurse arrived and said, “Come, time to get up and exercise your uninjured muscles.”

He felt very wobbly on his legs as the nurse supported him on the slow walk down the corridor. They passed the recreation room. He looked in as his eyes widened with wonder.

“Can I use this room?” he asked.

“Yes of course,” replied the nurse. “It helps with the healing process.”

He felt his interest stirring – there were paints. There was paper.

 

 

Pennies from Heaven

I was standing in a field when I was inundated with money flying down all around me. In surprise, I stretched my hands out to grab onto the endless supply that heaven had sent me. Excitement was rising in my breast. My eyes sparkled. I began to feel an element of greediness climbing into my soul.

Money had never been important to me, so why did I want to grab onto as much as I could?

The money was forming a thick carpet around my feet as more and more rained down on me. As I looked up, there seemed no end. Notes were stuck on my head and my shoulders.

I had a sudden urge to roll around in it. I dropped to my knees. I scooped up handfuls and flung them all up into the air, laughing as they tumbled back down. I dropped into the pile, rolling around in it. I lay on my back and made “money” angels.

A voice came from far away. “Barbs, what are you doing? Barbs!”

Something was nudging me. Slowly I opened my eyes.

“Barbs that must have been some dream! You were rolling all over the place laughing.”

Oh, dear! Back to reality! How sad.

Smell/Aroma by Peter Moni

All my life I have been involved with food and farinaceous products like pasta, bread and confectionery. I grew up with food. I remember on my 21st birthday. I was working in a bakery called Manna, and my day began at 3 a.m. and ended around midday. These were normal bakery hours. We used to produce roughly 2000 loaves of bread an hour, it, strangely enough, today I battle to make one loaf of bread in my kitchen at home. With Covid, I have a lot more time to practice and today I have mastered the art of making bread, only to find that it takes the same amount of effort to make one loaf of bread as it took to make 2000 loaves.

Now with all the time we have for home cooking, I love to make the Bolognaise sauce my mother used to make when I was a child. We start at the beginning: we purchase two boxes of tomatoes and mix them. They are salad tomatoes and plum tomatoes. You clean and remove the stalks and boil the tomatoes in a big pot for about an hour. Once they cool down you pass the tomatoes through a mouillee. This removes all the skins and the pips. From here you bottle the pasala in containers with salt and refrigerate the containers. For every sauce we make we need about 500g of pasala.

To start the sauce you fry up your chopped onions and garlic until they become translucent, just about 8-minutes add your minced beef and oil (you decide on the cooking oil - we use rough olive oil). Fry the combination until the meat loses its red colour.

Now you add the chopped mushrooms and let them soak in, if you have any intention of adding chopped chillies or dried tomatoes this is the time to add it. From here you add the pasala and all your spices. I normally add oregano, garlic salt, garlic pepperdew seasoning, paprika, mixed Italian herbs, a touch of cayenne pepper, salt and pepper to taste. At this point, you can add spices of your own choice like marjoram. But don't over spice the sauce, you can always add more later, but you cannot take anything away. Coming from an Italian family, the meat in Bolognese is not as important as a good tomato. Our preference is to have meat that is very finely ground, and in some cases, many like to add a portion of pork mince, to the beef mince. You can use the same sauce for making lasagne, the only difference being that the sauce must be slightly thicker. This source needs to simmer for anything up to 1½ hours. Many would love to add a glass of red wine to the sauce, the belief being that it enhances the smell and when the aroma of the wine disappears, the sauce is ready for the meal.

Whenever anyone mentions to me about smell and aroma my thoughts immediately drift towards food. Our smelling senses need to be trained just like our taste buds, we need to treat them as an integral part of our cooking, but there's one thing that we must always be critically aware of and that is we actually eat with our eyes.

In the meantime, you will cook 1 kg of pasta. Don't forget to add salt to the boiling water at least 2 tablespoons. Now add the spaghetti to the boiling water, but don't break the spaghetti - nothing does more harm to a good pasta dish than a short length spaghetti. In my mother's house, if you did that, you would be forced to start all over again. When cooking spaghetti you never leave the start, you get the water to boil rapidly and you stir the spaghetti to avoid it sticking. It helps if you add a bit of olive oil when you come to drain the pasta. The oil prevents any stickiness. The whole cooking process should be over within 10 minutes, the spaghetti has to be tasted whilst cooking, you want spaghetti al dente - which means it must be cooked, but still has a bite. Save a cup full of the cooking water, to be added later. Now we need to add butter and/or olive oil and 2 raw eggs, and stir, all the eggs do is add to the flavour and ensure that your pasta stays loose. Whatever happened to don't want the pasta sticking together? You are now ready for dinner, dish up the pasta and the Bolognaise sauce and some Parmesan cheese, and you now have a meal fit for a king.

© Peter Moni

Forest Fire

 

The animals twitched their noses, some turning towards the smell of smoke. The older ones gathered the youth around them. The rabbits hopping around stopped to sniff the air to find the direction of safety. The leader of the group found the safe passage and as he was rounding up the family a herd of springbok bounced past heading in the right direction. Mice were also gathering, squeaking directions to the rest of their horde.

Soon the forest was alive with animals running towards safety. The smell of the fire became more intense as it progressed towards them. An elephant stopped and trumpeted to his herd. The females surrounded the young ones, edging them all to safety.

Soon all had made it to the clearing by the dam. It was a wonderful sight to see. Enmity was forgotten in the midst of the danger. Mortal enemies stood tightly together, united in their fear of fire and the fire continued to eat up the forest.

© Vera Alexander

Living behind a mask by Frances Roberts

It's a whole new world living behind a mask. To make mine more interesting I cut out a template, copied off Google, and, digging through my large collections of fabric scraps, cut out four. I sewed them and attached the elastic. One pink mask, one green, one blue, and one yellow. I wash them after each time they come off my face.

I quite like the mystery of masks. It's no longer, “How are you?” when you see a pair of half familiar looking eyes, but “Who are you?” I'm sad to say the eyes do not always have it, and the hair may have changed its color, shape, or length.

There's also the risk of giving offense to a dear friend as you sail past him or her in the shopping mall. But there are more upsides than you can poke a stick at. Just think about it. No more colds and flu, after queuing at the hypermarket on a patch marked STAND HERE, no germs flying up your nose as you jostle your trolley through the narrow aisles at Checkers in search of a two-for-the-price-of-one bargain. The coughing, the sneezing and guttural clearing of throats are no more a threat to your health: the dreaded virus has no chance of sailing up your nostrils and creeping its way down into your lungs. Your mask is a brave soldier, guarding your fragile immune system from all attacks. You can safely hum Amazing Grace as you wander along the avenues in the Botanic Gardens, inhaling the sweet scent of jasmine near the sunken garden or rosemary or lavender as you wander past the herb garden, touching their leaves briefly and holding them close to your face.

Life with a mask has its humorous moments. I sometimes find myself halfway to the shops without a mask, having forgotten to put the spare back in the cubbyhole after washing it. Worse still I arrive at a shop’s entrance blissfully unaware of my naked face. I’m brought up short by the sanitizer-wielding guard who refuses to allow me in to buy a mask. How reassuring to then enter a nearby coffee shop, ask if they would sell me one, only to be given a clean mask from a pack by a gracious waitron.

How easy it is to avoid your grouchy Uncle Percy when you catch sight of the wispy fringe around his bald pate. What fun to just sit and sip your freshly brewed mocha java at the Mug and Bean and contemplate the lives of the customers as they wander in, sanitize, sit themselves down, study the menu, and place their orders. When you finally reach the shelf where milk is stored no one no one can hear your muttered curses as you find that the dairy section has reached its looting zenith. And you must try another shop or shopping center, or go home and do without it.

Storms by Nicola Rodda

There is a storm raging within me. Or rather, there is a whole weather system of storms, all of which are separate fragments of a greater whole. The members of my inner family are changing. I’m not sure if maturing is the correct description, but definitely changing – just like storms and weather systems do with time, sometimes with frightening speed.

Officially, my inner family goes by the label of dissociative identity disorder – or multiple personality disorder, if you prefer the older, more melodramatic name. To me, it is not disorder at all. It is a clever trick of my mind that allows several individual storms to occur simultaneously without allowing the overall weather system that is me to escalate into an all-destroying cyclone. Perhaps a series of tsunamis would be a better analogy. It is the children of my inner family that are storming right now, the ones that hold the individual slices of my childhood self which would obliterate me if I were to try to hold them together simultaneously in the greater reality that is the adult me.

Why the multiple storms? Why now?

There was the writing of that letter to my father which my therapist set me as homework; the letter that would allow my inner little girls to place the blame for what happened to them squarely on my father’s shoulders, where it belongs; the letter that would allow them to begin to feel and express the anger they felt towards him. Sounds simple, yet like in so many cases of therapy homework over the years, it has plunged them and hence me into this weather system of swirling individual and interlinked tempests.

The therapist is new to me, and I to her, so she is still getting used to me, and especially to my inner family. She is feeling her way through the revelation of how easy it is to pitch its components into parallel, and sometimes conflicting, spirals of turmoil. No wonder she has to write so furiously on her notepad when we meet. Lots to keep track of. The children can be confusing, even to me. As with all children, whether in the outer or in an inner world, they are constantly changing focus, speaking over each other, jumping from one part of each of their stories to another, often without any apparent logical connections. That, with the added complication of the release of repressed memories through the children - those disjointed fragments which pose so many questions. Which parts are semi-objective truth, if such a thing exists? Which parts are the imaginative attempts of a child to make sense of overwhelming and often terrifying sensations and experiences which she has neither the knowledge to understand nor the language to express?

Beyond that, there is always the frightening prospect that none of it represents any true experience of mine at all; the prospect that I and my therapists – the new one and her predecessor – have made it all up out of some perverted thirst for sympathy and attention on my part, and for professional validation on theirs. After all, there have been those around me who have tossed the label “false memory syndrome” around with a firm sense of security in their superior knowledge and understanding of how these things work, regardless of the extent of their psychological training – or lack of it. Foremost among them was my then husband, who eventually found my divided self too much to live with, and left. But he was far from alone. There are plenty of “normal” people out there, including in my ever-shrinking circle of friends, who find the concept of an attention-seeking histrionic fake far more comfortable to comprehend than the mind-bending possibility that both the multiplicity of me and the years of abuse that created it, are in fact true. No small wonder, then, that periodically I commit the traitorous act of doubting my inner family and wondering whether, just maybe, I am a far simpler case of outright insanity.

Storm by Peter Moni

This takes me back to 1980 when I joined a family friend, Lee McGregor. He was a Springbok swimmer in the backstroke at school and his career began when he was still 15. In the days because of sports isolation, he did not go to the Olympics or any major sporting competitions. But when allowed he excelled and did well. Lee left school at the end of standard eight, coming from a tradesman family. His father, Bill owned a very successful excavation business. He levelled the playing fields at school gratis and for nothing. This was my alma mater St. David's College, Inanda in Sandton. From this point onwards Lee became a professional swimmer. Taking part in events in the US at the university level, and he achieved great success.

I was to run into Lee about 15 years later, when he had returned to Cape Town with this yacht, Stormkaap. This was an ocean-going keelboat, with a wooden hull a classic racer. This yacht did leisure cruising in the Caribbean. The cruising season in the Caribbean is a full summer fun program. Families charter the boat. The guests decided the route and itinerary. Lee and his wife and crew did the rest. Normally, you collect the guests in Miami and the cruise begins.

During the winter, he would sail up and down the East Coast of the US sightseeing with his wife and family. In 1979, during winter, he returned to Cape Town with Stormkaap, to refurbish the butt. Up to that period, there was a fair bit of work that they need to do to bring the yacht up to standard. Lee McGregor's father Bill was getting on in years, and he wanted Lee to come into the business. Still financed by his dad he was now at the crossroads. Sell the yacht and return to Durban to take over the reins of the business.

It was at this point that I met up with Lee again, one of the dreams he had was to take part in the Cape to Rio race of 1980. A precursor of this race was the Cape Agulhas race. A successful Cape Agulhas race would mean automatic entry to the Cape to Rio. We prepared for the race and took part. As always in those days of keelboat racing, the favourite yacht was Voortrekker. Sailed by the Bertie Reed. This yacht also had a long history of success in ocean-going racing. A yacht prepared by the SA Navy and always very competitive.

The race started at midday in Cape Town and we set sail to round the Cape of Good Hope heading for a turnaround beacon in Mossel Bay. The Cape of Good Hope, otherwise known as the Cape of Storms was very calm that he and he decided on a course where we would sell close to landfall and was his experience. He guided us through some very tricky waters, avoiding the rocks as he rounded the Cape. This did give us a decided advantage, Voortrekker had decided to take the longer route around the Cape of Good Hope and we gained a big advantage.

In preparing for this event and knowing where we were sailing. We had to prepare for the worst weather conditions. So we packed all our heavy weather gear and prepared for the worst. The sailing went well and at nightfall around 20h00 hrs we could see the black clouds gathering out to sea and the wind started to pick up. Within half an hour we were now faced with a raging storm and thank goodness for the heavy weather gear. As the night went on, it raged with all hands on deck. We worked with the hatches battened down to avoid any water flooding into the boat. This carried on until about 04h00 hrs the next morning. If you're a good sailor in a storm, you have a great advantage. Lee understood this heavy weather and handled it well. We were well on course, but as quick as this storm came up, it disappeared. Come the sunrise and the wind went with it. Leaving us completely becalmed off Cape Agulhas, the crew one by one disappeared.

We had to forgo our dinner in this stormy weather. The crew exhausted, wet and hungry went to eat before retiring to bed. They all one by one disappeared. Leaving me to watch the sunrise and I was quite shattered with this responsibility. Now having to navigate this yacht further with no wind, and no one to help. The sunrise dried the boat and it started to warm up and I was now able to remove my heavy weather gear. When the crew came back on board, they had no idea what happened whilst they were sleeping. They looked at me in astonishment when I said I was hungry and I needed to rest.

The weather for the rest of the race was great. The wind returned. The rains disappeared and we rounded our buoy in Mossel Bay, at 20h00 hrs. - Third in line and we were about two hours ahead of Voortrekker. This meant another 20 hours of sailing and we needed to keep this advantage. We made sure that we keep ahead of Bertie Reed. He was also keen to catch us. And so for the rest of the race, we concentrated and whilst Voortrekker reduced the margin. We still happened to finish the race in Simonstown, about an hour ahead of Voortrekker.

© Peter Moni