Common Sense

She appeared to be trying to rub molten knives from her knees. She sat in her old wheelchair with her legs sticking straight out in front of her. And as we sang & played, her legs writhed to their own painful inaudible rhythm. We led the tenants of the Cheshire Home in their annual Christmas Carol Evening. The folks that could leave their rooms, were wheeled out onto the lawn under a murky, but merciful sky. Each person, in their wheelchair, sat buckled and bent, as if they had somehow turned into human pins in some bizarre ten pin bowling game. At the end of the carol singing, an elderly lady strutted out to the front of the audience to do the thank you's. Apparantly, she was the oldest person in attendance; yet she stood erect with a gleam in her eye and distinct voice, that displayed an alertness far younger than her obvious years. And all about sat these souls with battered and broken bodies that life had tossed into the home. out of view. and out of mind.

The lady reminded me of Mrs Saunders, who was my first school principal. Marlbororough Park Junior Primary on the Bluff. The year was 1968. Mrs S was equal in stature and age, tho diminuitive in height and she was the Law. Her only school rule was: "Use your  common sense!" Which was great at the time, because any kid knows how to bend rules - but when you have to think first : you end up thinking twice before doing anything you shouldn't. anyway that's the way I looked at it. Just by-the-by, one strange memory from those days was the practice of and instruction of "volkspele." We had to all assemble on the quadrangle and do these orchestrated moves (you couldn't quite call it dancing), to Afrikaans folk tunes, like: "Ek soek na my Dina" (Dina is a girl's name), which I took to mean: "I'm searching for my dinner", which really added to the absurdity. but the phrase that jangled in my head and has remained with me till this day was the "common sense" thing.

and I may have mentioned it before, but as teens, a couple of my friends had cars, and coming home late at night from Youth meetings, the cars were always filled to capacity. One crazy stunt was to drive down a road and switch the headlights off before the intersection. The backroads on the Bluff were pretty dark at night and the deal was that you could see if anyone was coming toward the intersection because their lights would show. Then after we had whooped thru the intersection without slowing down or stopping - the headlights would be turned on again. Absolutely crazy and Zero common sense. but with maturity comes the realisation of the stupidity of some of the antics we pulled as youngsters. Back to the present and, well driving around my suburb of Ashley, morning, noon or night : you gotta really have your wits about you, as drivers totally disregard stop signs. Even the occasional wooden cross erected by some victim's family at the scene of a fatal accident is nary a deterrent at all. At moments like these, I wonder what Mrs S would say... oh! and maybe it bears little or no relevance, but the school motto embroidered on my blazer pocket back-in-the-day read: "Happy Landing".

the pic is of my brother Mallie from the same school - couldn't find a pic of myself. His shirt has the badge with the motto beneath it.