Runner's World

My dad starting running when he turned forty. He'd always been fit and had played squash (I used to collect his leftover squash-balls) and cricket (once). I'm not sure what prompted him to start running. Maybe age? I think forty is a good age to start something that you have not done before. My dad also started playing piano a few years ago, when he was fifty-two. With the piano, he had always wanted to learn and take lessons and become a grand-pianist, it had just taken him thirty-something years to do so. Perhaps the same was for running (I should ask him).
And so my dad became a runner. There are lots and lots of runners in South Africa. It is a beautiful place to run in. My dad used to run in the shadows of a towering Table Mountain. He was late for every appointment but punctual for every date with the tarmac. I remember my mom and dad's fortieth birthday party very clearly, although I was only five years old. I helped our friends Debbie and Robert with the catering preparations  They even let me grate the cheese. My parents seemed very old (but now I am halfway to this point already).
I remember watching my dad in races. It was marvelous and exciting and wonderful. I think my favourite in South Africa was The Two Ocean's, an ultra-marathon (fifty-six kilometres) that stretched through Cape Town and finished kind of near our house, near the Kirstenbosch Gardens. We used to wait in the fork of the road with our friends and my mom would cheer embarrassingly loudly for all the runners, even if we didn't know them. She would say: "good work, keep going, you're nearly there!" which was true, because we were probably only five kilometres from the finish. I think the runners appreciated our cheering. We used to wait by the spot where the mountain looked like teddy bear ears. One time we waited and waited and my mom went to a portaloo and my dad ran past while she was in it (but my sister and I cheered on her behalf).
It was always exciting waiting for my dad to pass, peering at the never-ending flow of runners trudging towards us. He was part of a running club called Varsity Old Boys and he wore a singlet with blue and white stripes. Sometimes, there would be false alarms, when his friends would approach in their own sweat-infused singlets and our excitement would mount. But then he would arrive, cresting the corner, with his hair tufty and sweaty and we would wave and shout and clap and cheer and he would wave at us and I would be so proud  of him. We would often go to the finish line and watch him finish, sprint like a crazy-man towards the line and we would all hug him even though he smelt like salt and tired. He'd take off his shoes and hobble because he'd probably just run forty-two kilometres and was tired.
My dad is tough you know. He tallies up all the kilometres he's ever run, and he's covered over thirty-thousand kilometres. (That is a lot). He has even done the Comrades, an ultra marathon that is eight-six or ninety-two kilometres depending on the year. I think it is exclusively reserved for crazy tough beautiful people.
I sometimes worry about his running. I am worried that he might hurt himself. He is very stubborn and sometimes, if he trips, he just keeps on running and does not even cry as I might.
The bomb at the end of the Boston marathon made me very very sad (and a lot of people very very sad too). This is because I have waited for my dad at the end of so many marathons and I know how exciting it is and there are so many positive feelings of happy in the air. There are so many emotions on the faces of the amazing people crossing the line and the people cheering and crying and clapping and waving. Ends of races are about joy and achievement and journey and family. I find it so horrible and beyond any any understanding that someone might want to hurt people at the end of a marathon. It doesn't make any sense to me, it makes me kind of sad for the world, or for the people who do such senseless things.
But I know that in spite of this cruel-crazy, people will keep running and running because it is invigorating and freeing and it makes people feel joy. And I know my dad will keep running too, in that same tatty singlet, with those same sports sunglasses and I will feel that same tingly happy-proud feeling in my tummy when my mom and my sisters and I see him spring across the finish line

The Pigsty

Can you hear them, can you hear them in my room? They sniffle and snuffle and shuffle: sometimes it seems like the floor is alive with them. They are all different colours: they are an ember charcoal black. They are pink too, but not that fluorescent pink like my sister’s Barbie blanket. They are a more mellow pink: maybe a fleshy transclucent pink, like the bottoms of your fingers when you happen to flex them. Or maybe like your lips when you smile too much. There are some that are pink and black: blotches of mottled grey on a pale and vulnerable back. They’re mammals you know, and their bodies, if you look so closely, are covered in fine tufts of hair. Whales are mammals too, they’re also quite hursuit creatures. Which seems like quite a think to consider, don’t you think?

Have you ever looked closely at their noses? They are so marvelous, far better than human noses or dog noses, or horse noses – which scare me a little.  This nose is a wonderous and curious object. Removed from the face, it seems like the most peculiar of objects, perhaps an alien belonging. But then, attached to the face, it is at once endearing and repulsive and fascinating. It is most like my dog’s noise, but it more obtuse and clown-like. They are even more pink, and the pink of the nose is like fairy-floss and marshmellows and whispy dreamy clouds framed in a sunset. They are the colour of musk stick, and even though they always tasted too much like perfume, they were a delightful shade of pale pink. Their nose is moist and covered by miniscule hairs that sniffle and snuffle.

And their tales, they might be my favourite. As I sit I watch them, their whirls of skin and cartilidge that seem not even real. They seem to be from a picture I drew when I was four, because their tales seem to defy physics. And I never did study physics and maybe you did, but surely you must agree. They are such realisations of childhood dreams and plasticine models of curled up earthworms. Do you think they can wag their tails? Sometimes, I stop for the briefest of seconds to imagine what it would be like if we had tails, and I know there are some people in the world with skin protruding from the coccyx – as if a tail, but it is not the same animated living bodypart as a dog or cat has. I think it might be the most profound or the strangest experience to have a tail for a day.

So maybe you guessed it and maybe you knew, because you’re my friend and you’ve visited my house. My room is a pigsty. My mom always used to say it to me with startling exasperation and rage and fluster. She’d say: “Erin your room is a pigsty CLEAN IT UP!” And I would most often shrug and laugh nonchalantly and gaze at the piles of clothing and discarded kiwi fruit and empty mugs perhaps sprouting a questionable white substance. And then one day I woke up from a particularly deep sleep and there was this sniffling and shuffling and a smell that wasn’t quite mouldy coffeecups or degrading fruit. It was something real: it was organic and musty. I opened an eye so slowly and it very soon appeared to me that my room was, in fact, a pigsty, of the more literal sort. It was filled with porcine friends who seemed content and satisfied with life in general. I thought “oh”, and then my pig playmates and I had a great chuckle and snuffle and snort and laugh.  

Cross-country

DID YOU know I am an immigrant?

Perhaps or perhaps not.

Nevertheless, listen to my story here.

The Bed.

She could feel and see herself shaking: small tremours that rocked her hunched body and rattled her pores. The tremours were intermittent: they came and they left her battered, like a hurricane or the-cold-beofre-the-hot in a shower. It made her feel weak and young and soft and wishing for warmth.
To the touch, she was hot, she was burning.
Maybe, she thought lazily, idly, maybe if a drop of water were to fall on my head it would turn to steam.

She'd seen in a film how you could cook an egg on a car bonnet in the heat of summer on a dry barren desert-side road, perhaps this was a scenario her body was emulating. Perhaps she had watched too many hazy Western films, where such scenes (although not always played out with such similarity) were commonplace. She loved the Western films because of the cowboys. She loved their faces: the sun-filled wrinkles, the brown faces contrasted so breathtakingly by these sharp and sudden blue eyes. Their accents were always so drawling and laconic and leisurely. It was like they had every second of time to say what they wanted to. But often she couldn't understand what the cowboys were saying, because the drawl was so thick. But this did not bother her too much.

She was hunched on her bed, cowering against the wall. The wall was a pale baby yellow, a colour that only looked good in the dark. She had often wondered why such a hideous colour had ever been foisted upon the world. Was God inflicting some punishment upon a particularly wicked person? The colour could be described as:  not-even-creme, vomit white, off white, dirty white, soiled white, dirty hanky, jaundiced skin, sad sad sunshine. Can you see it in your mind? I bet you're grimacing. The girl refused to look at the wall in the light, which is why she now needed glasses.
She said to her parents when she was old enough to talk:
"This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me."

She was loath to even decorate the walls, for this would have seemed like an okaying of the foul shade. It would have been like saying: Hey Wall, you're ugly and I hate you but that is okay, here, be friends with my poster of Azealia B." It would have been like losing some ultimate big battle: herself versus Wall. And she couldn't lose, because she had to live in this rectangle room every day and she would have to see it sneering at her, with such an invisible expression of scorn and something.

She was hot to the touch but cold so cold. She wished now that she'd made her bed because her duvet lay lumpy and unwelcoming on the floor. It required a certain dexterity and drive to make her bed. One that she was yet to really find. She was kind of at that age when she was maybe meant to find herself, but such revelation was yet to occur. Especially in the bed category. Sometimes she even slept on her bed without a sheet, because she was too lazy to put it on. The corners, especially, were hard to do. She liked to wait for her mother to get so mad that she would make it herself, but this time had not yet come to pass.

story of some girl

Once upon a time, in a land quite far away, a baby was born. In this land – a particular continent called Africa, many babies were constantly being born, and perhaps this pink infant was not starkly different to any of the other thousands of babies that were born at the same instant as she. However, to a particular pairing of people, one Barry and Debs, this baby was rather spectacular and special and quite extraordinary. This bawling youngster was the first grandchild of Diane and Sonny, and Freda and Barney, so all concerned parties were rather thrilled.
The young tyke was a good-natured child, with blond locks and a tendency for falling asleep in her food. Erin and her parents lived in a nice 1-storey house in St Lukes Rd in Claremont. They had a grey mazda that was at least 100 years old but still ran OK and a red little Toyota that was the car that took Erin to the hospital to exit her mother’s stomach.

They got the most delightful of dogs: Jasmine the golden retriever. She was the runt of the litter, but not actually very small, and was a very good-natured and agreeable hound. Jasmine liked to snap at bubbles in some vain hope of achieving something great. She also occasionally killed pigeons for her owners’ delight.

In 1997, Mother Rosenberg got pregnant again and had baby Lauren. She was premature and very tiny. Erin got a new Ken doll in compensation for not being an only child anymore. New baby Lauren was also a fun new toy.
A few years later, Erin started primary school. How big and old she was getting! A prominent memory from the first day of school is Klara Scholtz being able to spell cat and Erin being suitably impressed. Oh how far she has come since such days. Another sister was also born in this year, although she was not accompanied by any Ken dolls. And then in the Rosenberg household girls outnumbered boys 4 to 1. Jasmine the dog was a girl too. Poor Barry.

In 1999 Erin performed in a school play lamenting the incoming invasion of the Y2K bug. She wasn’t too sure what it meant, but the costumes sure looked like ladybugs. She played an orphan. She managed to survive the y2k bug and made it into the new millennium!

Debs and Baz took the family on a trip to Australia. The flight was very long, but fortunately there was a Pokemon game on the aeroplane screens. Whilst Down Under, Erin and sisters saw fun things like Australian animals, the Sydney Opera House and similarly exciting landmarks.
The parents were so enamoured with the land that they thought they would try to emigrate there. South Africa, for all its breathtaking beauty, was a dangerous and scarred place: perhaps Australia would yield a better future for their children.
At the end of 2004 Erin had her batmitzvah. In Orthodox Judaism when a girl is 12 she becomes a woman, and is rewarded with lots of presents and endless gefilte fish. This occasion was particularly auspicious because it was a batmitzvah-cum-farewell party, so, although everyone had fun dancing the horah, a few tears were shed.

On the 19 January 2005 the Rosenberg family left the beauty of Cape Town and moved to Melbourne, in far-flung Australia. Erin started high school, Lauren and Hannah integrated into primary school where they weren’t allowed to say ‘mom’ anymore, but rather were forced to say ‘mum’. They got a new doggy, a most rambunctious Labrador/spaniel/mutt called Daisy. She was joyous.
Time passed and the childrens’ Australian twangs increased, although their affinity for Vegemite did not.  Everyone grew a little bit older, a little bit taller. Erin finished high school, which seemed like a strange thing. School was forever, or so it had seemed. She even got to wear a graduating gown, which was all a little High School Musical. (Zac Efron was not present).  Real life seemed to be starting. She got into a university course that seemed relevant to something she may wish to pursue in some far-off adult future, and travelled to far-off places in the world. She saw things she had never seen before, and experienced wild adventure. She was overcome by this revelation: that the world is a huge and wonderous place, merely waiting to be discovered.

And then she went back to university and real life again, and her baby sister started high school. Her parents asked her scary questions like, “What are you going to do after university?” and she thought, “I am getting a little old now.” She wished for a blue genie to appear and guide her, but this seemed an unlikely scenario.