Family Friday

It's a bit ironic that it's to my parents' detriment that they live in the same city as me. They'd love to see me more often, but the thought of trekking up to where they live lessens the want to. My place is off-limits, of course, for now. If they were elsewhere, I'd visit them whenever I was in town. Now it's a roughly quarterly affair.

My mother contacted me to tell me that we were having a confluence of cousins in the Cape. My mother's sister's daughters were in town on a holiday, as was the son of my mother's brother. Her brother's youngest daughter actually lives in Cape Town, having moved up a while back.

I tend not to think back to my time before going to university. It's not that it was traumatic so much as I wasn't really able to be myself. At school, you face the task of finding friends amongst a tiny population - 120 or so boys in my case. That's not to say I didn't manage to find a few, but it does mean that one has to conform to a degree.

The thought of having to go to university in Port Elizabeth probably should have been more of a driving factor in my matric exams. Thankfully, I did well enough for Rhodes to accept me (after, thankfully, UCT thought I'd not make the best actuary). I found Port Elizabeth stifling in a way, and leaving my historic behaviour baggage behind was liberating.

So, my poor extended family, predominantly in Port Elizabeth, hasn't seen much of me. This leads to slightly embarrassing artifacts like the picture a cousin was forced to show her mother what I look like since ten years ago. If I'd known, I'd've had a haircut and shaved. Or, more likely, tried harder to avoid the picture. (Having woken me up before 11am on a weekend had stripped my defences.)

These particular cousins didn't include the one I probably would feel more common cause with, as we'd both been to university, and work in a more corporate environment. Probably, as I also haven't seen her for nearly ten years. And who knows what marriage would've done to her...

My mother's brother's daughter, hereafter "Angela", was unable to make it. She was helping out at her boyfriend's restaurant. See what I mean about living in the same city making it harder to see your family?

Her brother, Mark, was in town for a few weeks, apparently as a stopover on his world tour, before he goes to Bali. He's always been an aquatic sportsperson, which has the disadvantage of me associating them with the worst of surfers. Despite his blond hair, that doesn't seem to be the case.

My eldest cousin (my mother's sister's eldest daughter, hereafter "Mandy", but more properly "Samantha") is still in the catering industry, and still has a good story-telling personality. My condolences on working with brats at her elite private education facility were well-received.

The youngest cousin (of my mother's side), Cheryl, is still a bit shy, just short of 21. I wasn't able to find out all that much about what she's up to. She managed to quietly contribute just enough to make it feel we weren't leaving her out of the conversation.

The conversation was surprisingly wide-ranging and informative. In some cases, the smaller-town origins were apparent in a few areas, which left ultra-liberal Neil uncharacteristically quiet, but we did manage to have an entirely non-violent discussion on religion and the effects on governments and the worlds, and obscure cults and sects. The conversation began during the Olympics opening ceremony, as the various countries were announced, and continued thereafter.

There was some excitement when Mark was leaving and managed to dislodge the security gate with his car door (Whose bright idea was it for the security gate to freeze as the car is travelling through the gate?! Surely it should continue opening, and just not start closing while there's an obstruction?). Anyway, I helped reseat the door (I'm sure making my parents confident again in my macho manliness, as well as engineering skills) along with the rest of the family and some tenants of the complex.

Thereafter, my mother and Cheryl went to sleep (bored, perhaps, by the rest of us discussing the relative merits of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, and The Illiad, and the quality of literature presented at school. This constitutes only the second time my father has mentioned his fostering (something I first heard about when I was 14), and he even let slip his age when his foster mother died, and so forth.

Besides a few uncomfortable pauses and non-specific shrugs at questions on why I need an 102 square metre flat for "just you?", and queries along those lines (which, interestingly, my parents never ask), it was unexpectedly enjoyable.