Celebrating Passion Gaps
Perhaps this is universal, but if you'd have asked me, aged four, what I wanted to be as an adult, you'd have got no hesitation. "A dirtman!" Again - I"m not sure the term is universal, so I'll translate - A garbage collector. They were so happy and cheerful.... somehow, they still are. Back in those days, my family lived up 120 stairs cut into the sheer cliffside of a quaint little seaside suburb, 'Clifton,' in Cape Town. My life was idyllic. Now it is a mansion-strewn playground for the rich; but back then, it's where ordinary folk lived spectacular lives, well out of the way of the city so close by. The dirtmen in those days used to bound up our stairs on elastic legs to retrieve our bags of trash. Back then, nobody'd even thought to invent disposable bin bags. Our trash went loose from the indoor bin into a little steel barrel with a lid. The happy fellows who collected it climbed our stairs with a cheerful disposition, grinning with their signature 'passion gap' and always enthusiastically greeting me. "Klein baasie," I think they called me... "Little Boss."
A passion-gap may not be universal either, but for some social quirk I don't understand, the population from which the dirtmen of the era were drawn, always seemed to have their 4 upper front-most teeth removed. It appears to be still a fashion. It made for a face as endearing as Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Neuman.
They were my mates, these adult garbage collectors. And my parents and every one of the era, as I remember it, appreciated them enormously. They'd hang from the back open trucks, shouting and gesturing noisily to everyone they knew - which, in those days of real community, was absolutely everyone. They'd appear at our door with a heavy-duty blue canvass bags, turf our garbage into it, swallow a glass of milk or orange juice for their effort, and then tip their hat as they'd hurtle down the stairs again; presumably only to climb the next flight to our neighbours, and the stairs up to their neighbours. I can't recall if the milkman who trudged up with his load also sported a passion gap, but he never seemed as enthusiastic as his younger counterparts. Perhaps it was because he carried the load up the stairs, while the garbage men went down with it; an easier task. Perhaps it was because he worked alone. He seemed more doer but would smile if you smiled at him first. Nevertheless, every day, he made the arduous sortie with a load of white clinking bottles topped by silver caps and exchanged them at our door for empties with little green and orange plastic coupon currency.
Fortunately, in those more gentile days, he could leave the bulk of his load down on the sidewalk, and nobody would dream of messing with it.The butcher delivery man used to cycle a standard no-frills black bike. It would not be out of place on any Chinese street of the era. I think it was sponsored by a concrete company with solid steel articulated brakes and silver mudguards.
Actually, that was my first bicycle too. Gears were a distant aspiration. Then, one happy Christmas morning, my back wheel was replaced with a wonder of the rocket-age - a new hub that could be peddled backward to select one of 3 "speeds."
Learning to ride the thing on the parking-roof of an 8-storey apartment building (that offered nothing but 3 struts of hip-high steel poles between me and a new career in wingless gliding to the beach below) was sure a motivation to get things right the first time around.
But, I digress... The only service provider to avoid tramping up our stairs was the man carrying the lightest load of all... the postman. Maybe there was more than one postman who did the rounds, I'm not sure. He always wore a safari-suit, knee-high socks, and sported a dandruff-dusted Brylcreem basted combover that tried to reach his lambchop sideburns on the other side. What he had to be grumpy about, though, I never could understand. Sure, he hefted a stiff leather bag stuffed with letters that looked weighty, but he stayed on the flat. These people were my reality. They were my job-options... and immediately I crossed being a postman off the list as I figured I wouldn't like the company. Then things began to change in the world of adults, these various services evaporated. My dirtmen mates only came every second day - and eventually only twice a week. And, when they did collect, they no longer climbed our stairs anymore; we bagged our trash took it to the bottom of the stairs. Now, of course, I appreciate that it's how it should have always been, but if it had been, I'd not have met my best mates in the world. And then a few short years later, when my older brother started taking me out fishing, I was plunged into a career dilemma. Though I quickly discovered my unfondness for seasickness, I'd also found that my toothless and vociferous mates from the dirt trucks were out at sea. hand-lining hottentot fish - a type of bream - over the blood-n-scale stained gunwales of hideously rolling wood-plank built 'tollie' boats. Occasionally a run of shoaling snoek - a family of barracuda - would make its way steadily down the coast. The tollie boats would arrive beyond the waves belching small puffs of diesel smoke.
I'd sit and watch out our front windows as one metre of flashing silver after another came over the side at the end of course hand-line, cat-like teeth furiously snapping to repay its captor with a nasty bite. My chirpy mates would yell 'VAS!!' ('HOOKED') as the shoal arrived; calling others of the fleet to crowd around and bring the shoal to a feeding frenzy.
My fishing career never really took off as nobody wants crew with a weak stomach. But my enthusiasm endured... somehow, I never grew smart enough to avoid trying to be a fisherman, even though it always wound up with the same result - me chumming the bay. So, these were the people I loved as I grew up; my quietly intensive, noisily relaxed, neighbours... When I moved abroad for a decade, I never forgot their endless laughter in the face of hardships I could barely comprehend. There is no question that it was these deep memories that played their part, dring me back to my homeland. California was wonderful, but it isn't Africa, and I am African.
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