Litnet

Elise Bishop wrote on Facebook (Graaff-Reinet History Group):

Sometimes it’s just a word, an action or reaction, a sound, that sets off one’s mind traversing aeons of moons, millennia of blooms.

Reminiscing can put one entirely in a trance.

Graaff-Reinet surely weaves a tapestry of idiosyncrasies of life itself, all the threads of existence.

What set me up in a mood of deeply thinking how small our world truly is, was the comment of a friend this morning in a post on the Graaff-Reinet History Group. Many were contributing memories of Smiley Dippenaar of JGM Dippenaar General Traders, the business formerly owned by Albert and Madge Allistoun.

So was he, I was thinking. The tea was getting cold beside me.

It was so many years ago.

One would often sit on the curb on the corner of Donkin and Caledon Streets waiting to be picked up for a ride home after class at Union High School. The bicycle probably had a puncture.

One would wait, sometimes so deep in thought, pondering class that morning, sometimes planning afternoon chores, sometimes curious what the future held, even though it was still so far away.

Those days, one still wished one were older. At this stage of life, we’re in reverse gear and the converse is true.

Many years later, in 1988, my career took me to Cape Town. Since then, a particular gentleman has played a pivotal role in my life, directly and indirectly.

He appointed me to my new position. We became colleagues, even though he was very much my senior. Always a soundboard, a “manual of reference” with superior banking credit knowledge. Inevitably, colleagues become friends, especially when in later years we worked together at head office. And when he became the principal officer of the bank’s medical aid fund, he played an even greater role in my life. My health made so many demands over the years, and the medical aid was always offering some form of salvation.

This morning, I discovered that on occasion he’d visit his brother in Graaff-Reinet who ran a guest house from a property on the corner diagonally across from the school, and had been so enamoured by the water furrows of many years ago. I immediately recognised it to be the former Horwitz family home. They were, during that time, a very prominent family in Graaff-Reinet whom I knew very well.

Little did one know, those many years ago, that someone who would play such an integral role in one’s life traversed the soil one knew so very well and which one loved only as one could love one’s hometown – a sidewalk one walked on in those years, the furrows in which one searched for crabs under the stones. He saw my old school; I wonder whether he remembered me and that I had come from Graaff-Reinet.

So many memories juggle my mind: Graaff-Reinet, Namibia, Cape Town – there was school, a job, the sixties, the eighties and now the twenties of a new century.

The world can be so small, and life comprises so vreeslik baie onthougoed!

But then, in one’s dotage, memory seems the only sensibility one can rely on.