Stretch and change

“Change? I guess change is good for any of us … I ain’t mad at you, got nothing but love for you. Do ya thang boy!” The late, great Tupac Shakur.

People sometimes feel the need for change; well they don’t feel it so much as it makes itself necessary for the individual’s happiness and progress in life. Unfortunately these moments of reflection, which result in an individual’s need to change whatever in their lives they feel is not ideal, is usually brought about by an event which stirs the soul. The event itself may be rather tragic or maybe lend itself to be terribly fortunate.

I have one such friend who went through major change. I’ll call him “Stretch” for the purposes of this piece, and I do not call him Stretch because he has been in a perpetual state of inflating for the past five years. No, that would be mean of me and lead me to being a bad friend, which I certainly am not. I call him Stretch because he has those unsightly stretch marks, and unlike me, he hasn’t had them all his life. So at the realisation that he had developed such markings it was paramount for me to acknowledge this new development by making another entry to his growing list of AKAs.

Stretch-Easy and I are close these days in the sense that we call each other regularly to catch up and maybe hang out and have a cold beer about four times a year, which is sad, because in our history, Stretch and I were inseparable. We used to spend most of our social thirst-quenching and waking hours together in youthful abandon at the tertiary institution we attended in Durban.

Even after we became positively contributing members of society by finding employment in the food industry, naturally as this was our chosen area of science, we still spent a fair amount of time together continuing in our path of liver destruction with increasing callousness.

A year after Stretch and I started working, we found ourselves again at the same place; Stretch had managed to get himself employed at the same establishment I worked for. This rekindled our friendship and led to even more debaucherous behaviour, which now included the ladies ever more this time around.

But as my mother always told me (I actually don’t remember if it was my mother who told me this, but what the heck, let me take this opportunity and make her sound wise) — nothing lasts forever and change would surely find us as it found all of those before us. And so it would unfold that we would be involved in a destructive activity called growing up, which scared me, and we would naturally change as a consequence of this mysterious and fateful undertaking.

I’m still waiting for my change, at 28, I still find the very same things funny, fun, saddening and satisfying as I did when I was 21. The only difference now is that I run slower, which is probably because I weigh about 40kg more than I did back at tertiary. I’ve got stuff now that I didn’t have then, but fundamentally, I’m still the same tub of lard.

Stretch wasn’t so lucky. He was careless with his youth and paid the ultimate price, he had to grow up! You see, the loveLife adverts must have meant nothing to him, or maybe he never saw one (which he claims) or maybe there was a fundamental tragedy in safety-gear failure (which he also claims after forgetting that he had already made the first claim, this is usually after the 13th beer), but the end result is that my buddy is now a proud father of a gorgeous little girl.

Personally, I wouldn’t trust him to rear a patch of grass, but apparently there is no screening test for being a parent so he got through on that technicality.

As you can imagine, becoming a parent was a huge new challenge for Stretchy-Bear, the biggest achievement he’ll probably ever make, forget that it was by default, he was excited nonetheless. I could see that this whole “I’m a dad now” issue would be to the detriment of the lives of the collective, which regularly came together to partake of the amber nectar of the gods, but I was powerless to reverse the inevitable fatherhood responsibilities.

I could see the trouble still in its infancy, but chose not to intervene. How could I? It was not my place. I mean this wasn’t like the time we went to a party, drank ourselves to near 85IQ, and then fought over who would drive. On that day, in his state of inebriation, Stretch couldn’t be trusted to even manoeuvre little Stretch out his pants (caused much embarrassment because of this, may I add). Therefore I offered him a safe option: I would drive, and if he refused to let me drive, I would beat him up (body shots only, so there would be no questions about blue eyes at work) and relieve him of his keys and drive us safely to our respective homes.

Stretch being the unreasonable inflatable that he is, chose the latter, after about five minutes of a heavily one-sided bout, he conceded defeat, but slyly ran to his car. You wouldn’t say it now, but he used to be able to run for a full five paces at speed — three more than I can manage with my girth causing a major drag effect. He got into his car, huffing and puffing no doubt, and locked the doors then drove off into the night leaving the Sumo panting and cursing on a foreign street in Westville.

Subsequently, Stretch was involved in an altercation with a street pole that night, but that’s a story for another day.

In any case, Stretch-Daddy was going to be a father and this meant that he had chosen to make fundamental changes in the way that he lived in order to be fully involved in the whole birth thing and take in all the experiences that come with it. Yawn. Change was necessary for him, even though I begged him not to change and told him that it would be bad for the baby if he changed because the baby can tell that its father is unhappy and becomes unhappy by extension (unless it’s a girl, which means that it wants you to be unhappy), he refused to see reason and wrote me a letter to convey his feelings across on the matter.

Okay, it was an e-mail letter, but you get the significance. In that tearful e-mail, Stretch told me how he felt it paramount to live a positive life so that he may set a good example for his laaitjie one day. He said that he had been advised to get out of “poisonous relationships” which were “bad for the baby” by his girlfriend. He also said that she had maintained “poison” could also be spelled T.H.E.S.U.M.O. in some African languages.

I was hurt, but powerless, obviously much more fearsome evils were at work here determined to end the reign of the championship tag-team of The Sumo and Stretch. With many beer-drinking championships behind us, and a truck-load of memories to boot, it was time to throw in the towel and concede defeat, for the while, but I knew that he would return again some day so I wrote him the letter below:

Dear Stretch,

It was nice knowing you.

We had some good times with cold beers and all that went with that. You have chosen your path — I wish you well. I hope that soberness treats you well, I will miss you my “ex-friend”. If you see me on the streets, no need to greet me, just walk on by as if you’d just seen a stranger — better yet pretend you didn’t see me at all (I know that might be hard with my girth, but try), just walk on by.

Many have embarked on the same journey that you have chosen to undertake. Many have returned to the fold, beaten by their new path, tired and disorientated. To those we have not spoken badly, or shown malice, we have simply reached for a cold beer and handed it to them with a smile on our faces saying: “Here, have a cold one, you must be thirsty, Bro. Welcome back to the brotherhood”.

So when the time comes, and the time will come — oh yes it will, when you have seen the folly of your ways. When the path less travelled has rejected you, when your “new” life seems too hard to live and your new ways to heavy to keep. Do not be afraid, and also do not be ashamed, simply reach for the phone and call … and I’ll be there, with a cold beer of welcome and a warm smile of friendship, I will laugh at you but the beer will comfort you, have no fear.

When that time comes we will carry on, as if you had never left, drinking and rejoicing as if there were no tomorrow, no work tomorrow, no liver damage, no hangover and no nausea — as we always did. We will live again.

For now, you are dead to me, your e-mail address, cell phone number, home number and memory shall be stricken from my inbox, phonebook, memory-card and mind … until the day of your return, the eternal summer of beer … whenst we will drinketh again.

I rest
The Sumo

As you can see, this was a very emotional time for me but I endured and eventually he would return to the fold. The return was to his detriment of course, but is a story for another day. Since his return to the mix, the young man has grown, proportionately and consistently and one would argue that he would one day soon dwarf the Sumo. Hard to imagine, I know, but he is determined, or his fat is anyway.

My point here is that my dear friend changed when the time came for him to change, he relooked his life and found the best in his new role and made it work for him, for how ever short the time span was. But most importantly, when the time came for him to make another change and to somewhat return to the care-free life he used to live, he made that call again and followed through. Not many people can resolve and follow through, making the resolution is easy, and it is when it comes to the time for you to act on that resolution that we fall flat.

Of course not all resolutions are followed through, and not all of them are successful, like the one time Stretch decided that he would take up long-distance running and complete the Comrades in a year’s time. For my own amusement, I encouraged him to reach for his dream and work hard to attain it. I think he ran up half the hill that leads to his house once, then gave up, something about running being, hard, that led to this early demise of what would have been a disastrous athletics career.

Change is necessary, we all need to grow up and grow into ourselves, but it is important for us to do it in little, easy to swallow sips.

I Rest,
The Sumo