Marriage and Injury

When I married my first wife, Laurene, 22 years ago, we both moved from very small living quarters to a perceived huge 2 bedroom flat on the 16th floor of a block of stack housing.  This was in Sunnyside, Pretoria, which nowadays appears to be a suburb of Nigeria.  We did not have a lot of money, but those were carefree days, when we walked everywhere, and both her car and my pick-up stood forgotten in the basement parking area.

We would walk to the nearest supermarket for weekly groceries, to the movies and coffee shops at night, and even to the Union Buildings for the view.  The biggest problem with this flat was that it was located right next to a church, and the bells would toll right up against the building at the most unexpected times, and frighten us to the edge of insanity.

As I said, we did not have a lot of money, and one of the problems that we faced was the floorspace, without the immediate means to furnish it.  No problem though for an enterprising young man, in love to boot, I would make a plan.  I would build furniture myself.  On the 16th floor in the lounge.  Without any power tools.

Needless to say, this was obviously not an easy task, as I had no training, no experience, no plan and no power tools.  The friendly salespeople at the hardware store cut the planks to exactly the correct sizes as I ordered, and I then just had to assemble these pieces in the the lounge, and glue and screw it together.  The problem was that I did not have a drilling machine, and had to turn the screws through the first piece of wood into the other by hand.  It all worked out well, as it simply made the pieces fit snugly, and made the overall unit much stronger.  I made a TV/music centre unit with a telephone seat, a small corner pub and a coffee table in that lounge.

Once that was done, I had some steelwork to do, which is obviously much harder if you don't have power tools or a fancy welder like my friend Kurt has.  For this purpose I borrowed a grinder from work, and that is where my problems started.  One Saturday afternoon, I was grinding away in the lounge, when a piece of steel flew off the grinder wheel into my right eye.  Beside being very painful, it was also annoying as I could not see properly.

Laurene insisted that we go to the eye institute in Arcadia to get me fixed up.  I must confess that I am not overly fond of hospitals, but this place was amazing.  The machines and equipment they have just to fix
eyes are absolutely incredible.  In order to remove the small piece of steel, they placed me in front of this huge   X-ray type machine with an electro magnet to extract the steel from my eye.  When they pulled the machine away from my face, everybody was amazed to not only find the small splinter of steel on the magnet, but also 8 nails of about a centimeter long each.  Nobody could understand where these came from.  It only dawned on me when I walked out the foyer and both my shoe heels fell off....

Today the coffee table is as sturdy as ever, and serves it purpose in the pub in my business.  Oh, and Laurene is still my first and only wife.

This is a true story except for the nails.  And the grinding in the lounge.

Hunting...

I had just turned 12, and we were on holiday visiting family in Botswana.  Botswana is a paradise for any adventurous kid.  My family stayed just outside of Serowe, a town then, of some 50 000 Local Population, LP's, as we called them.  There were only 6 white families in the whole Serowe area then, and very little rules.  My aunt was getting married in a week or two on the front patio, and many guests were expected, including the President of Botswana, Mr Seretse Khama, and his British wife Lady Ruth.  In light of the many guests, my uncle decided one morning to move his entire back fence out by 6 meters, and by the end of the day, it was done.  Simple as that, no council, no permission, no sweat.

All of these activities, of course did very little to impress the 4 boys, my 2 brothers Pierre and Leon, my cousin Andries and me.  We had rabbits and small antelope to hunt, a mountain to conquer, a dry river bed (that's another story) to habitate, a foefie slide to build, and lots of adventures that our imaginations could conjure up.

A neighbouring son, David (not his real name) met up with us on occasion, and we would go off on another adventure.  Through the battle lines we received news that David was not well, and is prone to fits of rage, but we had never witnessed it.  This specific morning, we were looking for something to shoot for the pot, and were walking around for a few hours hours without any luck.  After a while we decided that we were hungry, and all but David decided to go home for something to eat.  This is where we got to learn about the fits of rage.  David wanted to prevent us from going and insisted that we stay, by pointing his .22 caliber hunting rifle at us.

Now at this point in time I decided that I was not going to be threatened by bushboy, and turned and walked away to return home, when David started shouting that he will shoot me if I go.  Now let me tell you, I have never experienced a nutcase in my life, and wasn't sure whether he would actually shoot me or not, but up to that point in my life, I had never been so scared.   Thinking back on it today, I knew then what all the poor animals that we had been hunting must have felt like, being hunted down like that.

That day was the first of two occasions in my life that I had been shot at, and as the bullet slammed into my left calve, I knew that I would never again point a rifle at an animal.