It could have been worse: We spent the morning walking on the beach, building elaborate sand-castles and finding speckled crab carcasses at the drift line on the beach. We came home with the friends we had walked on the beach with, and then went to their house to burn some meat.
The day was filled with laughter, conversation and shared joy. I’ll take more of those. James was a bit sick and listless, but he’ll probably bounce back tomorrow.
My new job isn’t too bad either. I work at a bookshop at the most visited tourist destination in the country. At lunch I can sit on a small beach and watch the waves pulsing onto the shore, Robben Island in the hazy distance like a fantasy world suspended in the mist. The shop is busy, and I have been getting on with all the staff. Robben Island was the infamous site of the prison, home to that most famous of political prisoners, Nelson Mandela.
The evil that put him there still exists, covertly now, but NM has charmed the world with his statesmanship, his insistence on peace and his humour. I would not have left prison with the words forgiveness and peace on my lips. Our hero.
On the ‘Bears’ documentary we watched yesterday, we saw one particular kind of bear that, after having its young, keeps them in a cave for five months. Don’t bears suffer from Post Natal Depression? Five months? They don’t bundle them into little strollers, and parade them around Ursine shopping malls, for other mommy bears to ‘Ooh and aaah’ over their bows and rosy cheeks. None of that having the in-laws over to whisper curses of outdated advice, or whoring them to ‘Fuzzy Baby of the Year’ competitions.
Five months. No toys. No distractions of any sort. And yet that is the standard rearing technique. And those are bear-time months. If it were humans, an equivalent time would be eighteen months…
If you go down to the woods today,
You’re in for a big surprise
If you go down to the woods today,
You’d better go in disguise
For every bear that ever there was,
Is on the couch because, because
Today’s the day, the bears are having their cubhood traumas resolved…
Of course, during all this, the daddy bears are off drinking bear-beer with their bear-bear buddies, and doing sophisticated things like rummaging in trash cans.
I bet they tell lots of jokes, using the pun ‘bare’ as the punchline, too. The point is, I guess, that life may not be fantastic at the moment, but at least we’re not holed up in a dank cave with a litter of boisterous cubs, and no cleaning products.
