Glory Days

The Boss and I had quite different 'glory days', but I surely understand the nostalgic glory of a free and easy time in life (when I, too, felt like a boss).  My two truest periods of glory were in Wellington, New Zealand and Cape Town, South Africa -- the first and final destinations of the Greatest Hits Tour, as divine intervention would have it.

I like to think of my connection to Cape Town as something special, but the truth is that it is almost impossible for anyone not to love this city.  I mean, look at the place.  Table Mountain's commanding presence.  Beautiful beaches.  Colonial buildings.  New Orleans-style balconies.  Hipsters mixed with the spirit of Africa.  It's a cosmopolitan paradise.

One thing, though, that may give my love of the city more depth is being acquainted with one of its most wonderful residents, Khumo Ntoane.  Khumo was the first friend I made in Cape Town seven years ago.  We worked together at a restaurant in the middle of the city's party district on Long Street.  It might be more accurate, though, to say that we 'worked the party district' in a more general sense.  This woman of strength, intelligence, and liveliness has a similar love of the random to my own.  She indulges all of my nonsense.  She gets me.  We have one of those friendships that defies space and time.  In the blink of an eye, I was spilling red wine on her new duvet as we spoke in an animated manner about life and love and joy and pain as if we had just been making Long Street the Wrong Street the night before, as if the six and a half years since our last session of wine and girl talk did not exist.

The other factor that might set my love apart from most outsiders is that I attract/seek out the beautiful madness that lingers just under the city's surface.  I want to get amongst all of it -- the wild and the gritty and the questionable and the slightly uncomfortable.  For me, Cape Town is about random conversations on the mini-bus taxis.  It's about bumping into those taxi acquaintances on Long Street and mistakenly accusing them of acting like 'hungry lions.'  It's about engaging in a playful physical battle over a bottle of water with the attendant of the mini-bus.  It is about stomping and clapping and singing on the train from Fish Hoek.  It's about joining a story-telling circle on the beach.  It's about shaking my ass like I own the dance floor with an assortment of other unknown women who also believe that they own the dance floor.

The only difficult part of being in a place that hums the melodies of your glory days is leaving that place. When my adult-life timeline comes up with strangers, I sometimes feel a slight sense of agitation when someone responds by saying, "wow, you have really been traveling!"  Yes, I have been traveling.  I have climbed to the tops of volcanoes and hiked to the bottom of canyons.  I have slept on long distance buses and trains and entertained silly conversations with folks who have been kind enough to pick me up as a hitch-hiker.  I have wandered and shopped and explored and laid on beaches with a cocktail in my hand.  All of that has been awesome, but much more significant than those moments of adventure and exchange in foreign territories have been the different relationships and communities I have fostered in my longer (if still relatively short) stays.  That has not been a vacation; it's been my life (unless, one were to argue that the life of Anna Skinner is a vacation...).  So, when I leave a place like Cape Town, a place that is so charged with nostalgia and meaning for me, it's not just like departing a spring break destination (even if there was a lot of binge drinking involved).  It's like leaving my natural habitat, leaving a bit of my heart, leaving one of my homes...and feeling the pain of not knowing when I will return.    

But, as they say, "tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." As I embarrassingly cried on the plane, looking down at the beauty and confusion and vitality that is Southern Africa, I did so not just in a state of self-indulgent loss but also in deep gratitude for the way the region has deeply changed my life, for the knowledge that it will always be a bit like home, for the joyous memories, and for the important life lessons.  A few tears may, too, have been dedicated to the deep hope that I will get to relive those glory days again soon.  

Seven

I did not realize that seven was a special number until my official dread release ceremony in April.  As I debriefed the timing of the farewell to my beloved hairstyle seven years after its creation, my wise girlfriends shed light on the significance of this number in science, spirituality, and other symbolism.

Since the de-dreading, the number seven has continued to show its importance on the Greatest Hit Tour.  In Rishikesh, I studied the seven chakras.  I spent seven months outside of the Western world.  I had seven brushes with romance (if you count me grabbing a beer with my ex-boyfriend and his current love).  I even met a nice man named Seven who gave me a ride to Katatura.  

Probably the most significant seven of all has been returning to Namibia almost precisely seven years after I packed up and moved out of my flat on Theo Ben Guirab Street in Walvis Bay.  I found this seven year timeframe to be magical -- the perfect window of time to allow me to see and feel some real, significant changes while maintaining a feeling of familiarity and connection.  For my three weeks in Namibia, I constantly felt like everything was simultaneously completely different and exactly the same.  

In seven years, my former workplace, the Walvis Bay Multi-Purpose Centre, had pretty much disintegrated into a skeleton of what it once was.  The offices were populated mostly by new faces and new organizations, with barely a trace of the vibrant HIV-related programs I knew so well.  Even though there was a new cast of characters involved in different plot lines, the general vibe remained -- dudes sitting in the reception area, reading The Namibian, humorously chewing the fat (literally and figuratively). Adelheid -- the former receptionist now giving directorship a go -- was still holding it down, using the same euphemism for sex ('has it been raining for you, my dear?').  Loving children ran around outside, waiting for the soup kitchen to serve lunch as the woman with Walvis Bay's brightest smile, Meme Teresia, quietly watched their game playing and prepared to clean up after their mess.

Seven years later in Owamboland, my mind was blown by the number of malls and blinging cars.  Oshakati had a number of fancy new buildings, and Ongwediva had an entire UNAM engineering campus that had not existed 'back in my day'.  The taxis, however, were still jamming too many hot bodies into a small space, and they still played the same song on loop (though they use MP3 players these days).  It probably goes without saying that the village is still the village is still the (beautifully awkward for an oshilumbu) village.

And, nearly seven years since I last saw The Tall One -- with seven years worth of wisdom about life and love behind me, with the deep understanding that nothing could ever make less sense than me and this guy -- when my ex-boyfriend stepped out of the taxi to meet me for dinner, I frighteningly felt something similar to the first time we met.

Namibia.  Same same, but different.

It's no surprise, then, that I felt so comfortable back in Namibia.  It sometimes felt like I was fluidly picking up where my 24-year-old self had left off.  I was refreshingly connected to the version of me who was regularly drinking beers at Fagan's and making daily stops at the Shop 4 Value.  But, there have been many metaphorical building developments and organizational overhauls in my life, just as I saw in Namibia.  After days of marveling over the personal life developments of my friends and former colleagues, I realized that a lot has happened in my own seven year window:  I have lived and worked in five different countries, I have fallen in and out of love twice, I have had 10 different jobs, I have made friends of such significance that it is hard to believe that I haven't known them my entire life, I sat next to my grandmother and my father as they passed on, I found yoga, and I developed a taste for olives.  

Anna Skinner.  Same same, but different.  

It is difficult to imagine what the next seven years holds for Namibia and for me.   I have a sense, though, that the we will both always more or less be 'same same but different'. I just hope that we meet again before the next cycle of seven begins.