It was when COVID had sent us all into what was to be our first lockdown. About 3 weeks after our governments forced us into our homes I seriously started to contemplate my mortality. There were moment throughout each day, usually when I took my kids to a park for our allotted 60 minutes of exercise, where I would find myself watching my daughter and son, running, unfixed from almost everything even gravity, and contemplate this was indeed, it.
I think everyone did; asked themselves the question. Always silently, internally. Never tempting reality to find a foothold in a thought by saying it aloud, ‘Is this where I… we die?’ And in asking this question I would reflect, mostly in the depths of night, while my family slept, listening to music from my youth, because it’s the music that spoke to me most, about the people I’d loved and who had been nudged out of my life by time and distance and circumstance. And the time when my friends were more like family and less like friends
My friend Dale
During my first two years at university I lived in a student residence. In my first year I shared a room with two other guys. Two doors down from our room another first year student played ‘sitting on the dock of the bay’ by Otis Redding incessantly during for the first six weeks of the semester. Over and over again the song would end, and then start again. I must have heard that one piece of music a 239 times (according to my calculations) in my first week.
I came to know who occupied the room thanks to gossip and hearsay, but I didn’t meet the stubborn and predictable DJ until a few weeks later. My room mates and I were at a nightclub, they had met some people they knew and I was drifting around looking for someone to talk to, to get drunk with. I was hating being there. The music was loud and painfully shit – the way only bad 90’s music can be. The bar was four people deep and getting a drink was the equivalent of putting your name on the organ transplant waiting list for a liver to become available – agonising. Anyway, this guy walks up to me, I recognise him right away, it’s the Otis Redding fanatic. ‘I’m Dale,’ he shouts into my ear. ‘This place sucks, I know a good pub a few blocks from here where you can have a proper conversation, and where you can actually get a beer. You coming?’
I went. This pub wasn’t a few blocks away, it was on the other side of town. Neither of us had a car so we walked. It took us a least 45 minutes to reach the place. On the way Dale and I talked. We hit it off almost right away. He had older brothers who were still at the university, he went to an English school, but looked forward to making Afrikaans friends and he explained to me what he believed were the undeniable and insurmountable advantages of smoking Chesterfield cigarettes. That’s the one thing Dale and I never agreed on, I smoked Mills – short, stubby and cancer tauntingly strong.
Oh, and Celine Dion. We never saw eye-to-eye on Celine Dion.
The pub was everything Dale had promised. The place was straight out of the Hobbit, cosy, dark and full of good drink and interesting people. That night Dale and I proceeded to consecrate our friendship with beer, tequila and I think it was vodka.
My best friend
Had it not been for Dale I wouldn’t have met half the people I did at university. I joined the debating society because of Dale. It was thanks to him that I mustered the courage to tell the woman who ended up becoming my girlfriend how I felt about her. Dale introduced me to the wonders of casinos and the joy of saying ‘yes’ to things, even if you didn’t think you’d enjoy them. We became room mates in our second year, and in our third year we moved into a house with a group of friends. Worth mentioning that this was despite the fact that in our second year, while we shared a room, he played Celine Dion’s the French Album on repeat a-la Otis Redding. He listened to that album so many times he knew the words to all the songs, in French, without actually knowing how to speak French. His Canadian musical phase almost ended our friendship.
However, the thing about Dale, the reason I love him so much, has to do with what happened after I graduated. After receiving my degree I went to chef school while he continued with his studies. We lived in different towns, an hours drive apart. We lived different lives, but despite this Dale never gave up on our friendship. And later in the year, when my father died, my friend took a week out of his studies and his life to come and stay with me and my family. We smoked cigarettes, played endless games of Rummikub and he sat patiently and listened and was there for me as I processed and mourned my father’s death.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for him to be in that house with my mother, my sisters and me. But I will be eternally grateful that he was there.
He and a group of my friends came to my father’s memorial service. Most of them hadn’t met my old man. And that night, after the service, we took my sisters and we all went out and got horribly and properly drunk.
I miss Dale
Dale and I eventually grew apart. He moved back to Jo’burg and made a life for himself while I drifted around. Eventually we stopped talking to one another. And I’m sure it’s mostly my fault. Today we occasionally send one another a WhatsApp and sometimes Dale and a group of my university friends might get together and leave me a garbled and slurred voicemail in the middle of the night telling me they miss me, and asking when we’ll meet up again at that pub.
With the pandemic, I grew nostalgic and thought a lot about the time when my friends were more like family and less like friends. When one of them stopped his life to come and help me with mine. And I think how lucky I was, and how much I still love them and the memories they’ve left me with.
To Dave, Bones, Knife, Conrad, Furry, Jordan, Dingo and especially Dale – thank you. And I miss you.
And for anyone planning to visit Stellenbosch, the best (and oldest) pub in town is still De Akker.