fountainhead

1 b. ruby

it is reassuring to know the person i share my life with, knows what to do, no matter how tough the going gets and will have the necessary commonsense to make an educated decision about matters. the responsibility of that is not mine alone now. how liberating and what a relief! i rely on him so much, i cannot burden him with more problems, especially since he is so far away. just trying to stay alive for me is such a huge task already, besides all the other things he has to see to. i cannot burden him. i do not want to burden him, he needs to focus to come home to me.

when i saw him the first time with that guy i thought was his friend, i did not pay him any more attention. i did not particularly like tommy, he was hot air. how could someone who seemed to want to be good friends with a windbag be someone worth knowing? and then he hardly looked at me! i must have seemed terribly boring to him. but his eyes were so beautiful even then. hazel. so serious. like they had their own hazel brown thoughts. i love them most in the picture of him when he was still in the navy, just before he transferred to the military. as if he is looking very far into the future. maybe he saw me there? maybe he saw us, tied together by fate and twisted intricately in love, like filigree, interlaced and netted. gossamer mesh. forever intimate and loving details of each other.

he told me a family secret once. he told me the story of how his grandfather moved to south africa from ireland and settled in cape town. his name was charles. after a while he married a local girl. her name was alice. they had eight children, three boys and five girls. the secret comes with the fact that in those days babies were registered at birth with an identification number that indicated their race. each race had their own identification number together with their date of birth that made up their identification document numbers. 01 meant that you were classified as white. 02 meant you were classified as coloured, (meaning a mixture of white and another 'colour' - one usually turned out some shade of brown.) 03 was allocated to those with black skin. indians were some other number. (somehow japanese were considered white, but chinese, not.) what happened was that when the children had to go to school, some of them were not allowed entrance because apparently a few of the girls had been registered as 'non-white'. in those days people did not take much notice of their identification numbers and documents, there was no need to, really, except when it came to where one was allowed to enter and where not. first stop, school! (from there it was downhill all the way.) except now some of buck's aunts specifically, could not attend school. this happened because alice was a very dark skinned lady. the children that she had registered after they were born, were automatically considered non-white because she herself was so dark skinned. she never realised this, somehow (or did she, and what did that mean?)

it was compulsory for whites only, to attend school. other races were not encouraged at all. the children registered by charles were all considered to be 'white', he being extremely fair himself. when buck's mother met his father and got to know his family, she helped teach the sisters to read and write. and their faulty registrations were never changed. apparently that took some doing! the point is that for years this has been a secret of sorts. i can only guess at the implications it must have had in the family. also on the children who were considered legally 'white' and who attended school. there has been an invisible rift in that family, none of them more affected by it than buck's father. but that is another story for another time.

if buck was green and purple, i would still love him.