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1. He gave my brother a big black plastic tractor and a push-start for a Birthday present, and watched smiling as my round-eyed brother peddled furiously with fat toddler legs
2. Once a week my father and I walked together to the corner café in Piet Retief and he bought me a comic from England and a black gumball that plopped out th gumball machine into my hand
3. He never said no when the ice-cream man rang his bell. A fruit lolly cost three cents and a chocolate and mince Eskimo pie cost five cents in those days
4. He gave my brother a huge steel yellow grader for Christmas; I can still hear b-r-r-r-r-oom b-r-r-r-r-oom in my brother's baby voice
5. He told me I was a young woman now and needed to shower every day and use deodorant in such a quiet tone that no one else heard; I hardly ever forgot after that
6. He brought tons of old thrown-out lab equipment home for my brother's chemistry lab in our backyard
7. He had a printer's tray made for my birthday after I saw one filled with tiny beautiful objects on a family visit to the region of his birth
8. After my mother arranged it all he took me with him to a meeting with the Headmaster of a good public boarding school. Together we palely told a lie of divorce and trauma. All because we weren't on the right bus route for my brother's future. He didn't flinch; I was there. My brother was accepted
9. He had a ginormous fish tank made for me - it had its own stand and a painted blue roof that opened - because that's what I wanted for my birthday
10. He never once complained when I woke him up in the middle of the night to get rid of a fat Zululand cocroach scuttling around my room
10. He taught me to drive but was so nervous next to me I went to a driving school eventually
11. He taught me to dive at night with lights on at the local village pool, after I hit my head on the wall of my new school's swimming pool and swore I hated my swimming teacher forever. I came to love the cool smooth flow of water over my limbs as I slid head-first, down and under into the silky blackness
12. He bought my brother a car. That one still hurts; my father who made me feel I could do anything any boy could do, never asked me if I needed a car. Perhaps my brother asked and I didn't
13. He made things go away if he could. Things like a bully on the bus, that my mom must have told him about, who put fibreglass down my convent dress. The bully's father had also stayed at the bachelor mess where the young Italian men stayed when they came to South Africa to work at the paper mill
14. At night when he came home from work, stinky with the odour of paper bagasse on his clothes, we'd grab him and pummel him and make him play rough-and-tumble on the huge double bed. Our squeals and yells still resound amidst the pure pleasure of limbs entangled; from the epicentre of the mellée I hear my mother trying to stop us because she says it always ends with somebody crying. I remember how it always ended with somebody crying. How the next night we waited for him again, like young lions, eager to throw ourselves into the arena of battle with a close safe, adult
15. He was good with women because he enjoyed their company and respected them. He never once talked about his mother (he was a quiet man), but my uncle, his older brother, told me he took their mother everywhere with him in the last week before he left her forever; even to the snooker bars where he was champion. That's how everyone in his home town remembers him now
16. He loved beauty in all things although you'd never have guessed it because effusion was not his thing. It was easy for him to say I looked nice, in the very quietest way, sometimes just his eyes appraising me with love
To be continued when the tears have cleared…
HOMAGE TO A QUIET MAN
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