This is the tale of my life. It’s told to give context and color to my life, mostly I am writing this with my kids in mind. It occurs to me that they don’t really know that much about me. I realized that my kids really have no real understanding about my youth, where I came from, what my experience of life has been and what drives me. This blog is meant to fill in gaps and give context.

Two verses of Maya Angelou’s poem And Still I’ll Rise resonate with me as a poetic summation of my entire life:

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

My story is broadly divided into my time in South Africa, and then and my time in America.  My time in America is divided into the period from my arrival thorough my marriage and up until the birth of our first child, Sam, and then the period of being a couple with children, and finally the period following my divorce. This first section covers the years 1959-1988.

South Africa: 1959 – 1977

I was one of the very last colonialists in South Africa.

I was born in Joberg, Joes, Johannesburg – Peter Tosh sang “what’s the word? Johannesburg”.

For me, Joberg occurred as a big dirty ugly city with no redeeming value. It was originally a gold mining town, and large yellow sulfa filled mounds of sand are dotted around the city along with the sometimes still active gold mining derricks. These mine dumps, so called, are the major feature of the city. It was also the case that the deep mine explosions when the miners detonated the dynamite to break up the rock, would cause tremors through the city like an earthquake.

I lived in the suburbs north of the city. Bramley first and then Glenhazel where I lived till we left. Unlike the bushveld, which were rolling grasslands with occasional trees, the suburbs of the city was heavily treed with a large variety of trees. The northern suburbs were also quite nice, filled with stately homes by any stretch of the imagination. The northern suburbs of Johannesburg certainly spoke of opulence compared to the squalor of the townships not far away.