On balmy evenings in the summer when the weather permits, Naomi and I sit out on our tiny balcony with a small libation in hand and experience the warm embrace of the encroaching dusk and, if we’re lucky, witness a full moon rise out of a misty sea to spread its golden benediction over a troubled world.
We talk of this and that – past and present – over a lifetime together.
As a matter of interest, in a few weeks we will have been married for 60 years.
Of course, there have been trying times but these are greatly outweighed by the good times.
My fiery little English rose has on occasion been known to throw plates and ripe tomatoes at my head in a fit of (justified) temper, but has taken care of me and our three sons like no other wife and mother could. What we would have done without her I don’t know.
Sometimes we go inside and I put on a gentle Bruce Gardiner or Mike Sokolitch CD, take my beloved Naomi in my arms and we circulate slowly round the lounge – her precious, now time-worn grey head on my chest, my head in outer space with no-one to talk to. Naomi is 5’2’’!
One evening close to Christmas last year, while we were doing this, I looked up and there at the open front door stood our three handsome, 6-foot tall sons – applauding softly and smiling at the antics of their elderly parents.
“Watch out, Dad, lift your feet and don’t step on Mom’s toes,” teased Jason, the laat lammertjie to whoops of delight from his older brothers.
This never happened, of course. One is now 6,000 miles away in London, one down the road in Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth) and the eldest is now with the Lord. But it was a lovely image.
How tragic and sad it is when one thinks of the gender and child abuse rife in our community in this day and age and the tragic alcohol and drug abuse which blight the lives of so many young people.
When Naomi and I were young, there was nothing of this sort. OK, I smoked for 10 years after leaving school but where I lived in the Rhodesia of the time, cigarettes were dirt cheap and smoking was in fashion with fancy lighters and cigarette-holders and so on.
I gave it up smartly in East London later, when an eye specialist told me that if he cut my chest open, he could scrape the nicotine of my lungs with a knife. I came home, gave Naomi a half-finished pack of Peter Styversants and have never touched a cigarette since – and that was more than 50 years ago.
Naomi has never so much as puffed a cigarette.
As far as alcohol is concerned, on the copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia in my young days, we used to give it a full go after rugby matches at the mine club dances on a Saturday evening where the only chance you had of a dance was in the “Paul Jones” roundabouts.
And on the way back to Ndola in the kombi from the outlying towns, sore, tired and inebriated we would be falling over each other, belting out Doris Day hits on the remote central African strip-roads. But it was heads down and back to work on Monday. Those were the days my friends we thought they’d never end!
As we got older we found wives, settled down and started families. Alas, many of those who made up those free-spirited halcyon days of yore are gone now, bless them.
But what has happened to the youth of today?
We pray for them and their families every single day
