Dad,
One year and four months have passed since you left us and a year and seven months since mom did. Of course we are still thinking a lot about you and mom.
We are a little worried about Matumi. A few people would like to buy it, but not just yet. Someone wants to rent it. We are reluctant to part with it, but know that you would have wanted the best for the eco-reserve which you and your valley friends were so keen on preserving.
You told me about your dream dad, of making Matumi into an ideal "green" house and use it as a model home for other people who wanted to help fight global warming. I think one of our last conversations was about the environment. How the Sahara could be made into a massive solar power generator and how, for the first time perhaps, countries in North Africa like Morocco, Tunisia, Mali, Chad and Algeria could generate income from solar power.
I'd love to follow it up. You also had plans for a book on Gordon. We chatted about it a lot. There was one particular scene from it that was very evocative for you and I wonder why. It is the scene where Gordon falls in love with a coloured girl, and the most erotically charged moment is when he looks at her neck.
He was a real historical character and corresponded with some French writer. Who was it again. I have all your notes. I think I would have asked you if you had fallen in love with a coloured girl when you were young. Or why that image was so important. Or if it was just about writing.
One thing I do realise now is that, of course, I only knew you and mom as a son. I don't know about all the things you and mom were up to when you were adults and we were growing up. None of my business. Or in fact, all about your other friendships and experiences. I have all your letters, though, and have read a few of them, but do feel, sometimes that I am prying.
I have discovered things about you and mom that, although they are of little consequence, I don't think you would have told me.
And so it's a difficult thing to write about you and mom. Perhaps I should take inspiration from Gillian Slovo, who together with Linda Grant offered to help mom write her memoirs. But of course you both died peacefully, touching seventy, in a sort of earthly paradise; where Earth and sky meet.
Who was it who said be careful of mirrors because you can disappear into them. I am sure it was Vonnegut. Well be careful of Matumi. Luckily Chris can get down their occasionally and Andy does pass through. I am due to go down, but don't know when I can.
Pam is coming to see us soon. She has promised to answer all my questions about the early days in Jo'burg. I hope she spills all the beans. What an incredibly exciting scene that must have been in so many ways. Pam says I won't get back to normal until I have written about you both. Perhaps she is right. A sort of magical diary. But I can't be bothered with conventional formats.
On your birthday we send you a kiss and our love and we miss you and mom like hell. Fingers crossed that Pascal won his wager.
John/Chicks has A'level Chemistry today, Carmen has Science and Eve has French. Wish them luck.
All our love.
Phil and family.
BTW You'll be proud to know Chicks won the chemistry prize at the Oratory.
One year and four months have passed since you left us and a year and seven months since mom did. Of course we are still thinking a lot about you and mom.
We are a little worried about Matumi. A few people would like to buy it, but not just yet. Someone wants to rent it. We are reluctant to part with it, but know that you would have wanted the best for the eco-reserve which you and your valley friends were so keen on preserving.
You told me about your dream dad, of making Matumi into an ideal "green" house and use it as a model home for other people who wanted to help fight global warming. I think one of our last conversations was about the environment. How the Sahara could be made into a massive solar power generator and how, for the first time perhaps, countries in North Africa like Morocco, Tunisia, Mali, Chad and Algeria could generate income from solar power.
I'd love to follow it up. You also had plans for a book on Gordon. We chatted about it a lot. There was one particular scene from it that was very evocative for you and I wonder why. It is the scene where Gordon falls in love with a coloured girl, and the most erotically charged moment is when he looks at her neck.
He was a real historical character and corresponded with some French writer. Who was it again. I have all your notes. I think I would have asked you if you had fallen in love with a coloured girl when you were young. Or why that image was so important. Or if it was just about writing.
One thing I do realise now is that, of course, I only knew you and mom as a son. I don't know about all the things you and mom were up to when you were adults and we were growing up. None of my business. Or in fact, all about your other friendships and experiences. I have all your letters, though, and have read a few of them, but do feel, sometimes that I am prying.
I have discovered things about you and mom that, although they are of little consequence, I don't think you would have told me.
And so it's a difficult thing to write about you and mom. Perhaps I should take inspiration from Gillian Slovo, who together with Linda Grant offered to help mom write her memoirs. But of course you both died peacefully, touching seventy, in a sort of earthly paradise; where Earth and sky meet.
Who was it who said be careful of mirrors because you can disappear into them. I am sure it was Vonnegut. Well be careful of Matumi. Luckily Chris can get down their occasionally and Andy does pass through. I am due to go down, but don't know when I can.
Pam is coming to see us soon. She has promised to answer all my questions about the early days in Jo'burg. I hope she spills all the beans. What an incredibly exciting scene that must have been in so many ways. Pam says I won't get back to normal until I have written about you both. Perhaps she is right. A sort of magical diary. But I can't be bothered with conventional formats.
On your birthday we send you a kiss and our love and we miss you and mom like hell. Fingers crossed that Pascal won his wager.
John/Chicks has A'level Chemistry today, Carmen has Science and Eve has French. Wish them luck.
All our love.
Phil and family.
BTW You'll be proud to know Chicks won the chemistry prize at the Oratory.
Beautiful, wise and sad ... but I suspect that you're meant to look your resistance to writing about all that in the eye and do it anyway. You're a writer and the son of two gifted writers. . . and I think that Pam, whoever she is, is right.
ReplyDeleteNot that I think there's anything wrong with you ... it's just bound to take a long time to get over losing parents to whom you were that close. Lucky that you have your lovely Tere and those gorgeous children.
ReplyDeletePam is Pam. Thanks for your very kind support as ever Wordy. I do appreciate it Wordy and if ever I do finish it it will be in no small part thanks to you.
ReplyDeletePhil,
ReplyDelete... I'd be thrilled to be hounded by any such accusation to the end of my days ... which means, of course, that you _must_ finish it ...
Saw this after my last post ... radically different parents, of course, and you almost love yours too much to be objective about them, but some interesting parallels all the same -- as I hope you'll agree:
=== In “Losing Mum and Pup,” the younger [Christopher] Buckley has written a strangely compelling book about an awful subject: the terrible, painful deaths, within a year’s time, of his parents. It’s an honest, occasionally too honest, memoir. He tells us his last words to his mother, just moments after she has been taken off life support at the hospital: “I forgive you.” He reports that his father’s only comment on one of his novels came in the form of an email P.S.—“This one didn’t work for me, sorry.” Bill and Pat Buckley were larger than life, but they were less than ideal parents.
There’s a bit too much dirty family laundry aired here, too much detail on the parents’ physical and mental decline,
[…]
Why did he write this book? “I’m a writer, for better or worse, and when the universe hands you material like this, not writing about it seems either a waste or a conscious act of evasion.” By material, he means his parents’ deaths. ===
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204456604574205693086824098.html