Premature thoughts

Might it be permissible, after less than a week in Cape Town, to offer a few thoughts on our new home away from home? Well, hell - given that I began writing about fatherhood before I became a father, it ain't like I'd be ignoring some enshrined precedent. And, anyway, isn't blogging - and its hyperactive younger brother, tweeting - all about instantaneity, gut reactions, and reason be damned? So, friends, here you go: Cape Town is a beautiful woman whom you love even though (or perhaps partly because?) she has been repeatedly unfaithful, and will be unfaithful again. It's a husband who rarely comes home when he promised, and may arrive in a storm of violence, or with the sweetest bouquet of flowers and a lilting love song rendered in a pure tenor. For every sublime view of the mountain above, there is a fresh puddle of shattered car window glass to your side as you walk on a gentle Wednesday morning. The beauty of the developed piers on the waterfront beckons, only to fall to pieces as police roughly escort a handcuffed and scarred man past you and your toddler. The lush parks and innumerable emerald sports grounds are crisply counterbalanced by the bracing poverty of row after row after row of shacks in the township to the north of the superhighway.

And what does this have to do with fatherhood, you ask? Nothing, and everything. As we walked a playground that occupies a meadow beneath a coffee shop, a dignified black man peered at us through the grates of the fence - everything, everything fenced - and handed me a xeroxed and typewritten note describing a plight: want taxi; no money. Had he really waited so long for a ride that he'd had time to type up his predicament, and make copies for distribution? Of course not. But did that matter? Of course, again, not. And so the small joy of a wooden bridge successfully traversed evaporates, its shallow degree of relief nearly invisible against the brasher, harsher chiaroscuro of the city.

Can one be said to be betrayed if the traitor is merely being herself?