The Last of the Bad and Ugly…

Okay, I don’t care if I get tied to a stake and torched but, Jo’burg is a dump.  Big time!

For starters, in my ten year absence, someone rolled up the streets and rearranged them.  And gave them other names!

Driving on the highway has become an ordeal in which your memory and navigational skills are put to the test.

Imagine a long stretch of tar, you are on it, driving from south to north.  The hallowed off ramp goes by the name of Modderfontein and said off ramp is the Holy Grail of your journey.  You know it is there, it was there ten years ago and it’s a main arterial road.  Voila, it appears, like a beacon of hope (because your doddering mode of transport has decided to test your nerves and cut out while being pushed to 120km/h by a rather large truck).  The white letters describing a muddy spring smile out at you from its green background and you can almost feel it beckoning to you from its vantage point on the side of the bridge.  Relief seeps through the very marrow in your bones when you finally turn off the ignition at your destination.

Now, imagine the same journey but going from north to south (because you were forced to take the wrong off ramp because the one you were supposed to take has either mysteriously been relocated or now has an unrecognisable, unpronounceable name).  The Holy Grail of your journey is still the Modderfontein off ramp.  But alas, there is no longer a muddy spring off ramp, not from that direction anyway.  Your options are now Kempton Park and something somewhere else, somewhere else you really don’t want to be.

Throwing a tantrum in the middle of the highway in a car that is not entirely a viable option at that point but it would more than likely bring some welcome stress relief.  You clench your jaw harder and continue on your no longer merry way.

After coming to an off ramp you do recognise, only because it got left behind in the Let’s Rename Everything and Anything Flurry, you do the standard up the off ramp, across the highway, down the off ramp manoeuvre.  And find the off ramp you were looking for, only to realise it was the one you thought it was but it has a different name, depending on which direction you are coming from.

Fun, I tell you.  Did I forget to mention I drive like a farm girl?

If any of my old blog readers still visit here, you might remember how I used to whine about the shops in the Eastern Cape – the poorly stocked shelves?  And the shoddy supposed 3G internet connection?  And the terrible service in restaurants?  Well, I always thought that the Eastern Cape was sort of cut off from the rest of South Africa but, I was wrong.  I’ve now realised that the Eastern Cape has been infecting the rest of South Africa.  Apart from the weather, the fact that I have no idea where I am going and get lost a lot, the scenery, the smog, the….  Okay, it’s entirely different from the Eastern Cape but what I was going to say is that sometimes it feels like I never left.

Leaving the Eastern Cape of course meant I had to leave many precious creatures and things behind.  The things are not really that important but the precious creatures are.  I suppose a part of me was consoled by the fact that Houndus Maximus, Hades Cat and Ciller Cat were safe in the home and environment they all loved and were used to.  Deep down inside I knew I could always see them again when the opportunity presented itself.

That much is true when it comes to Houndus Maximus and Ciller Cat.  But sadly, not for Hades Cat.

You see, despite making her promise to me that she would one die day of old age, peacefully in her sleep, she couldn’t keep that promise and not because she didn’t want to.

A week and a bit after I arrived in Jo’burg, I got the news that my beloved feline companion had gone to the Kitty Palace in the Sky.  She was having a sand bath in the driveway.  And one of the local landed gentry was at the house, fiddling with the newly installed borehole pump.  As most awareness challenged people do, he got in his vehicle without looking around before he did so.  And promptly reversed over my feline soul mate.  She was a bit blind and a bit deaf from age and so didn’t get out of the way.

What breaks my heart and riddles me with guilt is that this wouldn’t have happened if I had been there.  Whenever there was a car in the driveway, I always checked to see where she was when the car started up.  She was getting on in years, she needed a bit of looking after, a bit of watching over.

Cally would have been 17 this month.  I still remember the day I got her.  The sign in the varsity cafeteria said “Free kittens.  Will go to the SPCA if homes aren’t found.”

The lounge in her parents’ home was a swarming mass of wild little balls of fur.  While the majority of these little balls slunk away when I entered the room, there was one tiny striped terror that sat upright on the back of the couch and eyed me with absolute hatred and arrogance.  She was the one I picked.

Her life with me got off to a bumpy start.  Cally was wild and vicious but that might have been because she was rather angry at me for assuming she was a he and naming her Calvin.  Her first run in with being ‘in season’ quickly saw her name being abbreviated and girly-fied.  The first time she was in season was also her last.

My baby girl was a bit of a feline ball of hell.  She terrorised the neighbourhood dogs, stole biltong from the neighbours (across the road) and chops off the unguarded Sunday braai grid (three houses away).

Since my student days, I have been a bit of a gypsy, a gypsy with a cat because she travelled with me from one side of the country to the other.  So much so that car travel became something she really enjoyed.  If a car’s door was opened, Cally was in it.

Cally also had a soft side, demanding attention and affection because it was her right and she knew I wanted to give it.  Biting my arm, hard, was her way of asking me to stop crying on the rare occasions when I did.  Morning routines usually involved her sitting on my chest, hooking one of my fingers with an extended claw, lifting the finger up and ducking her head under it for a head scratch.

Until the day she died, she still actively moused, ratted, shrewed and terrorised.  Although she would never have admitted it, she absolutely loved Houndus Maximus, when he lay still and let her lie on top of him in winter.

Some days I wonder if it has sunk in, the fact that the day I hastily said goodbye to my beloved companion, with the promise that I would come and get her as soon as I could, was the last day I would ever see her again.  I had just given her and Ciller Cat breakfast and, instead of eating, she stood on the top of the chest freezer and wanted loves.  Did she know something I didn’t I wonder?

Flyboy graciously offered to plant a tree in the garden where he buried her.  I think she would have liked that, especially since for the first year of her life she lived in a concrete jungle and didn’t know what a tree was the first time she encountered one.

Saying goodbye, whether it is to a friend, a family member, a place, even a life, is never without consequences.  Sometimes they are happy consequences, sometimes they are sad.  Mostly we learn to live with those consequences but the scars and smiles remain.

Cally

March 1992 – December 2008

Rest in peace, my beloved friend!