Blued Eyed Boy

Where does a life begin and how will I know when it will end? This life in particular could have had its start with a stripped jacket. It is something to smarten me up a bit while I do some teaching. But it is also something for me to wear through the cold and wet months. A warm thing that is a little tight around the arms and has a lot of pockets. On a weekday morning, one of these pockets produce a list of points scribbled onto  a folded paper to remind me what to cover in the lecture. Each time I copy this list of reminders onto the board at the front of the class and number them. The points then make up the structure of the lecture. The predetermined notes on the board and the stripped black jacket at the front give the air of authority and timeless truth. The charade must work some of the time, why else will some students insist on calling me sir.

There was a time when this jacket made life fresh and new. It made my feet quick again and held me together. With the jacket on me, my shoulders were bigger and my waist slimmer. It made me laugh out loud and smile when I spoke . Even a one man army needs a uniform. A mask to conceal the true man and make him.  But jackets fade. In the middle of the week my feet are not so quick. I begin to watch the clock in staff meetings. Back in my office the riot of paper on my desk has grown to a sumptuous heap. The laptop computer has lost touch with the wireless network again and I dread another trip to the IT help desk where the young woman there loathes my fumbling visits where I say “I can’t get this thing to work …”.

Laurence found me standing outside the department trying to persuade my phone to give life a second chance. He just casually walked up to me with a grin on his face and said ‘What’s up man’ like it hadn’t been months since we last met. Like he hadn’t been in New York at parties on rooftops overlooking central park while I provided emotional support to students who can’t factorize algebraic expressions. He looked at me straight in the eye with a grin on his face like it was Friday night. Floating in those blue eyes I saw a resilient determination.

At a Jewish cafe well out of the orbit of the mob of undergraduate students Laurence and I catch up over coffee, chips and a view of the mountain. We sit outside in the cold on a bench. Laurence wants to know what has been happening. He wants to know what the political scandals have been and where the ground zero of craven political bungling is. “What are the books to read?”, “what is the theatre to see?” and “how are all the friends doing?”  The truth is he knows it all and has read it all up by the internet from New York and his University’s library over there has everything we do here. He wants to hear it from me though. He wants me to make it real for him. I take a sip of my coffee to play for time and rattle off a couple of book titles and mention a good book shop. I mention the suggested National Health Insurance scheme and parrot a couple of anecdotes I heard on the radio. But then he betters me and tells me of the shocking antics of the american far right and their TV stations.

Laurence drives me home in his mothers car and rescues me both from the chaos of my office and the mess on the trains. In the house we catch Tobre watching Oprah on the television. Over half a dozen cups of tea and the chicken Tobre pulled out of the oven, Laurence and I get talking about our harrowing moments gone by. We laughed about how I drove his punctilious Swedish housemate in Geneva into are rage by leaving a hair in her shower (“You have no respect for me!” she yelled). We told of how we went to dinner with rich girls from a bank and couldn’t cover our end of the bill. I told Tobre about how Laurence would pick up girls at bars in West London at night and then be surprised to find that they were psychotic nuts who either fall in love with him or tell him to “stay away from me!”. He told Tobre of how I asked a girl if she was HIV + (“you should get your status checked … “) because she was so thin and I had to apologize afterwards. I told Tobre how Laurence had to have a doctor to beg him to take a day off work for the sake of his health. Laurence told me I could find a good job in Johannesburg.

Laurence drove off to meet an old friend from school at a bar. Laurence is here for three weeks to visit friends and family and teach on a course at the university. Everyone one wants a piece of him before he goes back to continue his adventures abroad. I put Tobre’s car in the garage. In the house Tobre had all the dishes in the sink and was snug in bed and half asleep already. I put my stripped jacket on the chair in the bedroom and thought Maybe I could do with another Jacket.