Durban - Sunshine Sally. Now partly cloudy.
The sunny nickname was given to me by friend and colleague Frank Chemaly because very little gets to me for long.
If it’s out of my power to fix a problem or make it better, move on, shoulders square. How else does one keep one’s equilibrium?
That’s come under a bit of pressure over the past 40-very-odd days. Mostly sunny, but expect clouds and occasional thunderstorms.
There’s just so much to deal with.
One minute it feels like the whole world has gone into drama queen mode, oh-my-heavens-it’s-just-a-bloody-virus. Then reality kicks in and the sky has indeed fallen on
our heads.
It’s difficult to know when you’re having a surreal, neurotic angst attack, when you need to give yourself a catch-up klap.
That comes when you remember how life-threatening it is for so many of our fellow citizens, of South Africa and Earth.
So many people have lost their lives and livelihoods. So many report ongoing problems when they have overcome the disease. What we - with all the world’s brain power working on it - don’t know about it.
And sleep, what dreams
might come!
The 1am gotchas are fairly frequent. The head starts re-nodding about 40 minutes before the alarm
is due to go off, so days can be
pretty hairy.
But it’s the dreams that are remarkable, tumbled and jumbled and mixed with people and places I’ve never met or been to.
Versions of one particular dream are easy to explain.
New York State governor Andrew Cuomo is a frequent visitor. I never miss his daily TV briefings and, if I ever met him, he’d intimidate the heck out of me.
He manages (in real life) to be at once human and gubernatorial, leader and citizen, just-the-facts and opinionated (in a good way), politically and intellectually challenging, Big Boss Man and family man. His spaghetti and meatballs Sunday lunches
sound lively.
Which explains why I was terrified when I was cooking lunch for him. My friends know that despite my brilliance in other fields, I am appalling in the kitchen. Stuff out of packets and cans, and muesli for breakfast, lunch and dinner is cool for me. Or toast.
Dream analysts could equate the anxiety of never getting to the end of the meal, just cooking and cooking and nothing happening and trying to make an impression, with Covid-19. No end in sight.
But how come Boris doesn’t come for dinner? Or Angela? Or Emmanuel? Or Jacinda? Heck, what’s wrong with Justin Trudeau, as long as he shaves first? Must be a crush thing. Or the fact that someone, anywhere, admits how far we all have to go and how much work we must do to get there.
Also, he emphasises, daily, something tabled by our own president when he visited KwaZulu-Natal this week: the “never-normal-again” opportunity.
We should get past normal and be ambitious. As we struggle to understand what next, we have the best chance in generations to make bad old ways better.
With discombobulating change happening at such speed, good change would help soothe our wounds.
We can fix things.
Sunshine Sally just came back.
- Slogrove is the news editor