Morning run

I like to run by the rugby. It took me by surprise, my first jog back in Cape Town, the way the Saturday morning whistles, muddy shorts and parents with thermoses reminded me of crisp Octobers, my R.O.Y.S.A. jersey over a black turtleneck, eyes on the ball, that tightening in the chest of physical exertion mixed with cold.

I could feel the depth of tradition and culture: fathers yelling sharply in Afrikaans, young men raised in an old British boarding school culture of prefects and head boys. I was witnessing, I knew, something old and sacred I could never be a part of. Something that has belonged to many, but never to me. In a moment, South Africa grew even deeper, richer, more textured. It so often does.

Yet in a strange way - It was an otherness that somehow belonged to me, too. I looked upon the scene not as a vignette of another culture but as a memory of my own - as the soccer player that was me, the onlooker at so many high school football games. I could imagine a childhood and adolescence spent amid shouts and whistles and sweat while the mountains kept watch in the sunshine. In the end, the rhythm and the meaning are the same.

As I jogged back up the road, returning in the direction from which I had come, I approached and passed a tall, handsome boy striding down the road, with a slight limp born of physical exertion and pride. He's in his prime, I thought - senior year, grade 12, that moment when you are on top of the world. Life is steeped in meaning, significance, tradition, culmination, and the future is opening up ahead.

It felt good to be back in Cape Town. Home.