Latest update April 30th, 2024 12:59 AM
Mar 22, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column
Everyone when they reach a certain age say that life is short. I am now saying the same thing. I now discover that my youthful days, which were only yesterday, have gone and all I have left are memories. It isn’t that I long for yesterday, except for those days that offered the most fun.
As a boy I learnt to swim and when I did I had a lot of fun. There was the thrill of jumping from the top of the koker into the outflow channel at Den Amstel. It was dangerous because beneath the surface of the water could have been any floating object, but we young boys never considered the danger.
I remember flowing with the water until the edge of the groyne and grabbing the concrete before I could be swept out to sea. My mother would have caught a fit if she had seen me.
There were other dangerous things like climbing a tree and hanging upside down from a branch.
Girls were frightening objects then. They hated boys with a vengeance, and only God knows how we both changed as we got older. I still remember my first close encounter because it was such an unforgettable moment. The nervousness and the anticipation; then the kiss. That was some kiss. She had experience, but poor me never noticed.
I still remember going back hoping for more and every kiss after that was just as sweet. By then I was living in the village of my birth.
I still remember the first real dance with a girl. She was my cousin; it was Christmas Eve night. I was 15 and the song was Helen Shapiro’s Queen for tonight. Again, that was only yesterday.
Sex followed a few months later but I am not going to talk about that because it is my secret, the thing that still makes me smile. All I would say was that it was at about the same time Lord Inventor or Eddie Hooper did Where are your friends now and Passing Memories.
And there is a story to the song, Where are your friends now. I was at Bartica serving as a teacher. In those days, dances were village affairs and the jukebox was the instrument (if you could call it that) of choice.
Phil Hinds (a woman) gave a dance at the Bartica Community Centre. The sponsor of the dance would not know if the dance is going to be a success until after midnight and it was not until I went to New York that I realized that people go to dances after midnight. The hour came and went; so too did some other hours. The dancehall was empty.
Joris, the musician decided to play Where are your friends now. Paul Keens-Douglas would say, “Who tell he play that?” Phil hit the roof. “Tek that f@@** thing off.” And her tirade continued.
Anyhow, back to my memories. I remember the envy and the dislike whenever I did what people expected their children to do and didn’t. This was more particularly so in the academic arena; not that I was a bright boy.
Today, a lot has changed. I have written before about not being in tune with the music of today. Had I been a youth I might have enjoyed it because instead of a waltz you bubble, and there are so many eager young women presenting various portions of their anatomy to you on the dance floor, teasing and offering nothing when it is all over, unless she belongs to you.
In my day, men fought because one dared to hold his woman too close. I know people got beat up for wining on another man’s woman as though the woman was not the one to initiate the wining.
I still remember my first drink—real drink that is—and I vowed never to touch the stuff when I grew older because it tasted so bad. Something must have gone wrong because these days I have no objection and on occasions I have had more than a few.
There was the crab catching and the trek to the backdam to steal mangoes which you ate until you had the runs—they called it slash. Fish was there too as were the snakes, which for some reason never bit any of us.
There were the bush cooks that featured the neighbour’s fowl. Sometimes they belonged to your friend who would be part of the action and would only know after consuming it that the meat he ate came from his yard. There would be a fight with the angered youth picking on the weakest of the crowd.
Those were fun days. The only rumours were about liaisons. These days I notice that I am accused of writing some blog, of changing political alliance, and of even being gay. These are different days—days when if you stop doing what you did you get accused of something ulterior. But I do not hate these days because they offer another kind of fun.
They allow me to see the nonsense my grandchildren do and evoke memories of my young days. They allow me to remember my mother who once said to me when she sent me to sleep during the day: “One day you gun glad fuh de sleep that you don’t want now.” In fact, she seemed to know what I would be glad for when I grew older. Sometimes she would be one of the things. Food was another. She has been proven right. I can sleep all day except that I am not allowed to.
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