Dogged, that’s what she is

AND for once you’re talking about somebody else, somebody who has spent 14 years (pushing 15) in the service of sentient beings with four legs!

Yes, today The Traveller is not about four sleeps … (yikes, it’s that close!)

No. The focus is on Gerbien Fricke.

She’s top dog at .Gaga Animal Care, Skala Eressos, a seaside village on the Greek island of Lesbos.

You see, there’s more to island life than olives galore … and the Aegean contemplating a docile shore.

Vaboom!

There she is, looking after 20 to 30 dogs and pups, at any time you may care to enquire.

She’s got a compassion you can’t ignore.

Imagine that. Dogs chucked in bags at Villa Gaga’s door; strays, you name it.

Seventy two of them find homes in Europe, and the United Kingdom, in a year.

The Atlas Animal Project pitches in too, transporting pooches here and there.

Volunteer vets and assistants round up cats and dogs and give them the snip.

It’s a mission; trapping and sterilising, nursing, releasing.

The chub-a-lub cats stalk scraps on the cafes boardwalk … then, one after the other, oh no, the tips of their ears are missing.

You imagine cat ear triangles curling, dry on the ends!

They’ve been lopped off to identify the doctored ones.

It’s a big job, this animal care of Gerbien’s.

Dog walking, dog feeding, dog grooming, horse grooming, horse feeding, cat feeding.

Vet visits, nursing sick animals, holding one as it sighs its last; a scratch behind the ears.

Sterilisation. Transport. All that food!

Ellen has spent some months helping her.

Now she is leaving.

Gerbien would like a volunteer assistant, two if possible.

They can live her house at Villa Gaga, mahalla, next to the Kouitou Art Hotel.

Gerbien’s not there for the summer. She’s moved into the veld, to Camp Gaga, and that cost a bomb too, all that fencing and stuff.

It costs to set up secure accommodation.

One of Gaga Animal Care’s supporters is the Skala Women’s Rock Group, a posse that swims each day at 10am to The Rock, from Zorba the Buddha (you make your hands into a little temple, the prayer position, and you don’t know where it comes from, but you say namaste and feel very pious. Your soul skis along the sea. It bounces off the palm-leaf roof. Plop. A tear trickles down the straw and dents your smoothie).

Good vibrations include the Big Dog Splash that the Rock Group organises each September, during the Sappho Women International Eressos Women’s Festival. 

Gerbien takes the pups to Zorba the Buddha every day, to put them on display for possible adoption.

They’re in a shaded circle of netting wire near the top of the steps leading  to the beach in front of the café.

A woman stands ready to strike a big gong.

 Boooooing. The pups start and stare: WTF?

 It’s the Dog Splash, of course.

Why? Because money makes a dog’s life, in the hands of Gerbien.

(ends)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/gaga.animal.care/

http://www.atlasanimalproject.nl/

https://www.facebook.com/sapphowomen

Land ahoy

JUST five more sleeps … You count them.

You turn to your May’s Chemist calendar stuck onto the window frame in your beloved tin office-turning-storeroom, just to make sure.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

You stick out your little finger on your left hand, and squash the others into your palm with your thurmb.

You don’t want any miscalculations.

Your right hand index finger lands plum on the little one that’s sticking out.

One. Two  Your ring finger extends and your index finger lands on it.

Three. Same thing. Four. Five. Your thumb shoots off in the other direction.

Five sleeps!

You’re exhausted.

You could do with 10 sleeps. Followed by a bacon and egg breakfast.

.Oh, is that an eyelash on your yolk? 

You frown at it and loop it off with the tip of the knife.

Not that you’ve got much appetite. 

There’s no place for food in a guts.that’s gone nuts breeding butterflies.

Whoppers these things are too. Giants.

Batting about making you dizzy. Are these blighters stirring delight or dread?

You can’t tell. Both leave you breathless and bewildered.

You lie on your bed. Your fingers find each other behind your head.

Your legs snuggle into crossed (swollen) ankles.

Yesterday, ah the wonder of yesterday ….

You lips stretch and flatten over your teeth. 

It startles you, this smile. Just like that, your cheeks push in to the lines around your eyes.

No more turbulence. It’s plain sailing from here. Steady.

(ends)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mama mia

IT’S scary now. Only six nights to go and your accommodation plans are receding into the sunset.

That’s what happens when you mix romance and rentals.

Even on  a Greek island.

It never works.

Not even before it’s started!

You put an ad out for somewhere to stay, somebody responds, you talk, and the next you know, the rental is an afterthought and you’re planning all sorts of wonderful thing together.

Nice. You even decide to fly over seven weeks early.

It seems appropriate. There is more than rental going on here, she says.

Damn right. When’s the next plane?

Texting on Facebook is intense, intimate. Funny. It goes on for months.

You must see her.

So you lean into the computer screen, on Skype, and this face — yes, it’s an angel in your heart — it’s not very clear, except for the lipstick. The lipstick is vivid.

You wonder what you look like, to her.

You arrange your face into the sweetest of smiles.

She examines the picture. She’s intent in her focus, like artists are.

Your nose looks huge, she says. Is it?

Her head leans left, right.

You turn your face this way and that. You don’t realise you’re mirroring her movements while she’s gauging the dimensions of your snout.

(You want to smell that hair on that head.

(You want to put your face in it.) 

 You are careful, though, when you’re modelling your visage, not to reveal your two smoke-stained teeth, the muddy splotch leftovers, grubby blobs on the pristine shine of the ready-mades.

Ah, the excitement. The anticipation.

Then the Incredible Hulk lumbers into your sweet-pea landscape.

The butterflies cower wide-eyed and the bees forget to make honey.

There is a big shadow. There is no oompah band. This, dear readers, is The Ex.

Her recent ex.

Your feet turn cold. Ice. They freeze.

The Imagined Threat; The Monster, it looms.

It rips the guts from your gentle reality. It tosses it about, for breakfast.

You try to stand back, to dodge it. But The Monster’s unforgiving. Relentless.

It’s on a rampage to rout. You run. And run back again.

You don’t know. What is there to know?

Limbo is unsettling, a monster’s playground. In limbo you teeter.

It can tip you into heaven, or hell.

Peril lurks. Imagined or not.

Life’s like that, darling, in Shadowland. There are no angels there.

 (ends)

 

 

Seventh heaven

YOU guessed it. Seven more sleeps.

Abel’s here today. He’s patching some roof leaks, and your tin shack that’s going to store your worldly possessions, mightily whittled down in scale and  number, mind you; it’s also going to get some damp-proofing.

It has to be like that.

The shack you write in is only 2x5m, and it is the only place to store the boxes of odds and ends that embellish your home and fill your cupboards.

Abel, your right hand man, will make sure it is waterproof and that the boxes are raised and covered with black bags.

There are papers too, that await your attention, sometime in the future. 

One A4 envelope is full of Loeriesfontein. You’ve wanted to travel to Loeriesfontein, for a long time, since you lived in Cape Town in the early 1990s .

The village, in the Hantam district of the Northern Cape, is exquisite in spring; the wildflowers roll out in luxuriant carpets of exhilarating colour. They make the most of their August/September display.

The intensity of the bright blooms is enhanced if you look at them by bending over and peering through your open legs!

It’s true. You do it in Namaqualand; you stand with your legs astride and let your body flop forward. Your face must point to the sun before you start, and your back must be turned on the flowers. This is because the flowers look into the sun.

And now, they’ll be looking at your bent over bum! 

The rush of blood to your head enhances the thick fragrances of the flowers, and the bees buzz louder.

For now, your wooden hat stand full of hats is already hooded in the corner of your shack.

Hats vanish under a black garbage bag,

You pack things, cover things, tick off items on the to-do list.

Your heart quickens.

It’s not long. Today week you’ll be on the wing.

Flying to your future. Your love.

(ends)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ready, not so steady, go.
EIGHT more sleeps.
Sleeps? Not with these butterflies igniting a nerve highway to a burning adrenaline rush.
Life’s blood. It throbs.
The scales are unsteady. Heaven or hell?
You balance on the dream of typing in 20kg of words on paper while occasionally rising to blink at the Aegean.
It almost forgets to nudge the shores of Lesbos, so reluctant is it in its summer stupour.
You swat away a fly. It nestles on your hat.
The words were scribbled and crafted on all sorts of bits and pieces of whatever that responded to the scratch of a pen.
They represent more than 40 years of your life.
There are some stories, complete and incomplete. There are lots of other words, one after the other.
Two boxes of this stuff are on their way to Eressos. In your suitcase, the one that goes in the hold, you put four A4 packets full of the most exquisite love letters to you, mind you, and poem-notes you wrote or scrawled on the impulse of haste.
In bleaker, more drunken moments, words lurch into the dark to light the way.
The outpourings of a blind boozer, the pitiful squeaks of sad sorrow, fumbling for freedom.
You travel, not only to relocate your physical body.
You travel to grow, to learn. More and more.
About yourself.
The long love. The love of self.
You say goodbye. Dislodge. Eject.
There is a lot of casting off and throwing away.
Your carapace of complacency, it melts to fuel movement.
You go from Johannesburg to Eressos.
You open your eyes. But your heart is locked.
It’s scary. Travelling promises nothing.
Travelling promises everything.
it also has beginning and an end.
Butterflies. They flutter.
Tickle and taunt.
Your stomach stutters, in a flap
Anticipation bleeds from pulsing cells
Panting
Your heart flounders.
It thunders, roars, locked in its cage.
(ends)

The Traveller.

Nine more sleeps … yawn … so what?

THE single digits have kicked in; the drum roll’s quickening. Louder.

Just now the pilot will be in its it seat, adjusting its cap for take-off.

Its peak points forward, the same way as its eyes. Sharp!

This baby’s not going to go down on you, oh no.

She’s not going to go splat into the body of Africa somewhere, and spill a cargo of charred corpses.

Oh no. You’re very calm. Air France? Never! Not on the way from Joburg to Athens…

A rising hoot and toot of cars reminds you that it’s morning, so early the birds have yet to peep.

The cock crows when you open the door to your tin office. You think: JUDAS.

Does morning betray night?

(ends)

 

 

 

 

Forget about 10 sleeps

YOU’RE thinking of a friend, on her 55th birthday today.

It’s the first thing you realise when you open your eyes: it’s May 1, a special day

Yes, yes, Workers Day too, but the real significance for you is the enduring friendship the date trumpets; you consider the qualities in that person that make an enduring relationship possible.

She definitely does not throw fuel on a fire.

You picture her and see a treasure; a rare gift more valuable than any jewel.

Priceless.

You remember her 45 years ago; a schoolgirl, considered and almost cautious, but always ready to laugh.

Her shoulders know how to shake, and boy, can she drum out a beat on a tin — anything really, that’s flat for a slap.and tickle twee do.

You sit at a separate table with her, banished to a corner during meal times, the two of you giggle too much. You barely can close your mouths long enough to eat, for fear of choking on a clod of  laughter and Miss Hills’ lumpy Scottish oats.

The separation from the other tables increases the intensity of this mutual and prolonged release.

But you beat the system, too, with this friend.

You collaborate to ensure that on visitors’ weekend you both have both days out: Saturday your parents, Sunday her parents.

Oh, those long car drives to get here or there. Handsome friendly dad, a beautiful elegant mother, you think you’re an extra in a chic magazine ad, sitting there all observant. Your tummy squeaks and squawks.

You hope the movie stars in the front seat can’t hear what you hear.

The next time you look, you’re not 10 years old anymore. You’re not 18.

You’re into the final third of your lives on earth. Together.

You get the feeling she understands, though she tells little and reveals less.

She is a beacon in  your life. A tenderness lived, and loved.

You say a heartfelt Happy Birthday, to a beloved and dear friend.

You say Thank You x

Lucky number

UM …. 11 more sleeps!

Until you lift off into the sky and wave Joburg’s twinkly lights goodbye.

They’ll blink, you know, as you turn to the window and peer into the dark; a lingering look at the pulsing metropolis.

One last cheerio as emotion rises, higher than the Brixton tower, and Jozi coughs under the night’s coal-smoke blanket.

Your face turns to the summer, where your heart already is.

Kewl.

Today, though, you’re thinking Legs Eleven (11), a term you heard as a kid, when there was dice or a card game of Bingo going on.

Now, you’re in the grasp of the paranormal, of numerology.

So you look it up, on the internet. 11.

Ah. A master number, doubly potent because it is a reflection of the other, but separate.

Intuition. Patience. Honesty. Sensitivity. Spirituality.

It is an idealistic number, says greatdreams.com.

The Twin Flames. Parallel. Transition.

Higher ideals, invention, refinement, congruence, whispers loveandlivedivine.wordpress.com.

Balance, fulfillment and vision.

There’s more. she sighs. The number’s vibrational frequency balances masculine and feminine traits.

The sages concur … sun and moon too, perfectly aligned, balanced.

Yes, 11 means you’re on the right track, with integrity.

You can hold your head high, yes, but don’t put your nose in the air and think you piss eau de cologne.

For the number 11 is not significant only in numerology. It lives in all sorts of things.

Such as the Mariana Trench, in the Pacific.

It includes the deepest part of the ocean, an 11km drop into the darkest of the dark, called the Challenger Deep.

The GPS coordinates are 11″ 21′ North latitude and 142″ 12′ East longitude  for this 2 542km x 69km trench that, apparently, submarines like to negotiate.

You can pack away your little snorkel and goggles though, and instead, ponder the beliefs and knowledge around the number 11.

The 11th hour. Elevenses for tea, and so on.

All you know is that your flight leaves on the 11th, on the cusp of a full moon, a symbol of a beginning.

Destiny’s got your number.

(ends)

Ka-boom

UM … 12 more sleeps. 

You wake up smiling. Changing your Athens to Mytiline, Mytiline to Athens flights was easy peasy, one, two, three.

It didn’t cost a bomb, either, a paltry E10.

Thank you, Aegean Airlines. 

(Bow, and blow a kiss to the smooth operator.)

So far so good.

Much better than so far no good, which can happen sometimes and draw a cloud across a wrinkled brow, a woolly scalloped cloud.

It darkens the horizon.

Today though, Tuesday, has no shadow to eclipse its imminent glory.

It shines. It promises a chance to exercise jaw-grinding patience; there are queues ahead, today.

Drum roll. 

You submit to the demands of bureaucracy … you have to. You remember the word meek.

And think of Sybil MacMahon, who worked on the make-up counter at the chemist in King William’s Town.

You rent a room in her house for the last quarter of your matric year, the final year of high school, 1977.

She teaches you to make chicken casserole, to pour (and swallow) drinks and to light cigarettes for damsels in distress: you strike the match and light your own cigarette so as to gallantly inhale all the sulphur, then and only then — once the head of the match has burnt off and the wood is burning madly — only then do you offer it if to your eyelash-batting beauty.

Meek.

You open the kitchen door for Sybil when you hear her car is in the driveway; you step out, take her coat (or a grocery packet or the cat food, whatever). She sighs all the way to sitting room and flops onto the sofa.

She eases off her shoes, all day behind the counter she stood,  you know.

Up goes the skirt,so she can peel off her stockings, then she loosens the hair that’s packed around her head.

It’s a style that’s bordering on beehive but not quite. Definitely unique.

She smiles at you there, leaning against the door jam.

Where’s that bluddy drink? 

Meek. You turn and pour whisky into a crystal tumbler. You hold up to the light.

It sparkles. Like today.

(end)