Alive with possibility?

Recently my cellphone rang. I couldn’t recognise the number. It was very long, but I answered apprehensively anyway.

“Hey, Dad!” a familiar voice boomed, “I am standing here in First Street, United States, with my arm around my gorgeous wife and looking down at Cinderella’s Castle. The memories, Dad, the memories of — what was it, 20 years ago? Awesome! Awesome! Awesome!”

It was my son, Justin, and daughter-in-law, Penny, calling from Disneyland, Orlando, Florida. The tears began streaming down my cheeks. For a few moments my 30-year-old multi-award-winning international photographer son and I just made silly unmanly squeaky sounds as we wept across a distance of some 7 000km.

I remembered clear as daylight the steamy August Florida sun beating down on us in 1988. It was so long ago. Justy was 11 and was wearing a Donald Duck cap complete with plastic beak-peak. I had a Goofy cap on with huge floppy ears. Debbie, my ex-wife, had a wide-brimmed sensible sunhat on. We’d bought them and packet loads of other memorabilia at a store in that fantastical realm. Each article had a manufacturer’s label inside that read: “Made in ROC”. Fantastic thing, globalisation. In my suitcase was the trophy for Winner — International Speech Competition — the first African to have won it.

I had dreamt of one day standing in that spot — Main Street, United States — with Cinderella’s Castle behind me since I saw a picture in a 3D “viewfinder” when I was seven years old. Now my son and his wife were standing in the exact same spot and had called to tell me about it.

The resounding irony of it all sprang to mind this morning as I contemplated what the next 364 days hold in store. So much can happen. Try as I might otherwise, I am profoundly pessimistic about 2008. It’s one of those déjà vu-type sensations deep inside me. I know it is just a feeling, but all the signs give credence to it and endow the abstract feeling with concrete logic.

It’s a bit like falling in love. Something happens deep down inside you; something you can’t explain, but you know it is there, powerful and “real”. And as time passes, we find more and more “evidence” to support that feeling.

We go from this vague, ethereal sensation, which grips us on a purely emotional plane, to finding all sorts of perfectly logical, rational and sensible justifications for it. We say things like: “She shares my taste in music,” or “We seem to be able to talk for hours” or “He completes me”. It’s how it goes with most profound things. First comes the irrational sensation to be substantiated later by the rational evidence.

For those around me, 2008 is gonna be great. Personal success, achievements, new directions, happy discoveries.

But for this country, I’m afraid the slightly offish smell we began to sense from about April and which had become quite poofy in the last two months, will worsen to distinctly rancid and seriously putrid by the end of the year.

It’ll be decomposed by all the usual suspects — fainéant and ideologically bankrupt government, unimaginative and craven leaders, wily organised crime lords, an inept and corrupt justice system that has squandered the vast reservoirs of goodwill that once existed, mounting poverty and joblessness, a refugee crisis that will become a national disaster and scared-shitless people (like me). Oh yes, and violence, violence, violence.

And it was in pondering the massing cumulonimbus (already flashing across today’s headlines) that sparked the memory of Justin’s call from a place whose motto is: “If you can dream it, you can do it.”

The two million or more expats living outside South Africa have long given up on the threadbare motto of “alive with possibility”.

“Possibility of what?” Noelene, who lives in Canada and had come to see her family for Christmas, asked me at the weekend. “Of being gunned down in a mall? Of seeing my kids struggle through this 19th-century schooling system that couldn’t equip an earthworm to dig? Of government-endorsed racism disguised as black economic empowerment? Of corruption and fear and lack of direction … Come on, uncle Llew!” she said with an exile’s passion.

“Who wants a place that is ‘alive with possibility’ when just about any South African can go overseas and find a place that pulsates with probability?”

I didn’t have an answer. Still don’t.

All I know is my son and daughter-in-law tried and failed and tried again before emigrating. They ache to return. But they won’t, not in my lifetime. My grandchildren will probably be born American. And that bites. Maybe they will eventually return when this land has grown up.

Justin and Penny will be visiting here in March before moving to San Francisco in October where a dream job awaits Penny. The prospect of having to start building his photography business anew doesn’t daunt my son. He knows he is in a place which pulsates with probability.

When he matriculates in December with several As, a radiant academic and arts track record, proven leadership as a prefect and sport colours from his school, Justin’s younger brother will probably follow his sibling to study in the United States. At least a future awaits him there.