My mother will be 87 in just over a week. She is old and frail and dangerously unsteady on her pins. She is occasionally rather otherwise. She keeps me busy doing her various biddings and at least once a month she insists that I drive her around her old beat in order for her to a) locate and then b) check up on two homeless men in whom she has been involved, in some undefined capacity, for the last approx. 15 years.
Usually, they are nowhere to be found. I drive up and down a grid of about 8 busy streets at snail’s pace with my mother issuing last minute instructions forcing me to turn in front of motorists with no warning or indicating or risk incurring her displeasure. I narrowly avoid numerous pileups and drivers shake their heads, roll their eyes or worse. I feel them making unfair assumptions about women drivers. My mother doesn’t care. She is steely eyed and single-minded in her determination to trace Bongani and Jonathan.
Often, we are unsuccessful in our search, and I am obliged to call time out before someone has more than one encounter with my driving and alerts the traffic department or performs a citizen’s arrest. On these occasions my mother is tight lipped with disapproval for the duration of the return journey to her current care facility. It is entirely my fault that we have not met with success – all this silly insistence that we can’t risk non-compliance with road rules for an indefinite period. The ridiculous suggestion that I may have something more pressing to do than endlessly trawl the grid representing Jonathan’s turf. But sometimes, we are more fortunate and on Thursday I hit the jackpot. We found both Jonathan and Bongani within 80 meters and 15 minutes of each other and the connection between my mother and these men is an extraordinary joy to behold.
Bongani spots my mother (How? HOW?) across a crowded street and races between the cars in a death-defying dash waving his arms in delight. He is suddenly very visible in his neon car guard’s vest. My mother identifies him at exactly the same moment and is infused with immediate vitality. I have to restrain her from leaping out the car. I pull over and double park apologetically with my hazards flashing as the hooting and gesticulating begins. But I am mesmerised now by the exchange taking place through the window. My mother is embracing Bongani who is beaming from ear to ear. ‘I am so glad to find you well, I worry about you’, she croons to him in Xhosa. He is gazing at her with undisguised adoration and she is radiating tenderness. Their words tumble over each other in an effort to exchange a month’s worth of relief and news in the few minutes I am able to double park. I grasp with a jolt of recognition that this is love. I can’t help staring. ‘I’ve known him since he was a teenager, you know’ she says matter of factly as she reluctantly disentangles from him and we ease back into the traffic.
We have not yet stabilised from the high of encountering Bongani when I spot Jonathan. I can hardly believe my good fortune. I am momentarily thrown by the fact that today he is wearing pants. (He often overlooks pants which makes him easier to spot.) Jonathan is regal and wild and beautiful and also completely mad. A kind of Jack Sparrow of the streets. He speaks English with a French accent and for some reason I have always imagined him to be from Senegal. He is idiosyncratic and charismatic and charming and has the confident, careless bearing of a celebrity. He clasps my mother’s arthritic hands through the window, fixing her with his penetrating gaze: ‘I am so very relieved and grateful to see you again mama (French intonation), I have been at church in America for too long,’ he says with such intensity that my no-nonsense mother appears to swoon. Again, I am left with an overwhelming impression that I am privy to an uncommon display of love.
[She nursed him through the episode of the gangrenous arm (while he charmingly resisted her attempts to have him hospitalised), delivered bedding to him in under a bridge in winter, fed him hearty meals and tried every means to get him off the streets. Jonathan tolerantly but firmly resisted any effort to domesticate him.)
As we made our way home, I kept glancing at my mother’s contented expression. I have felt glimmers of joy every time I have recalled these extraordinary encounters. Love takes many unorthodox forms and ‘joy slithers through the cracks of our imperfect lives’. I am unable to shake the idea that tragedy and hilarity, poverty and treasure, fear and sanctuary, certainty and faith flash like tiny silver fishes through my fingers, defying any attempt to make orderly sense of it all. The endless juxtaposition we are obliged to live with renders me elated and insane in equal parts and I am reminded of an extract from ‘Mzansi Zen’ by Antony Osler:
“The news tonight is a recital of collapsing infrastructure, financial mismanagement and violence. It feels as if we are sliding irreversibly towards a precipice. I am overwhelmed by discouragement.
Because I have nailed my flag to the mast of things as they are, I can’t pretend all is well when it isn’t. I can’t run away from the suffering or deny it; I can’t invent a silver lining. No going forward, no going back. I am stuck. So what now? How do I find my life in the midst of all this? Here is the only thing I know how to do – I get up from my chair, I take a deep breath and I walk beyond argument into my Zen practice. When I am here I sit very still. Then, without looking for any particular outcome, I let myself down like a plumb line, inch by inch into the very heart of my discontent.
It is dark in here. Completely dark. I wait. And I wait. I listen, past what the voices are saying, tuning into the voiceless. The words grow softer, less insistent. The blaming subsides. And the fear. Faintly, in the far corners of my ear, a sweet and unnamable singing…. slivers of blue sky appear and possibilities – the healing balm of a wider more forgiving view. Once more I inhabit the sacred ground where my connection to the world is restored. From here I can open my eyes. It is true we have bad governance. It is true we have great music. It is true my heart is beating and that the cat is sleeping in the apricot tree. It is true that the small boy at the corner of the supermarket in town has no shoes. Now I know that I am facing home. And from here the direction is straight ahead, right into the arms of the world.”