The world as playground

Sometimes you think you have a general sense of your surroundings - average city block, say, or beachside boardwalk - and then, in a moment, you find them momentarily transformed. Today, for instance, I was walking on Bloem Street, downtown, on my way to get a sandwich. I passed a curbside deli, a warehouse, a few taxis, and then suddenly saw a small plaque that noted that I was standing in front of what used to be a recording studio. But not just any recording studio - rather, it was the studio in which Dollar Brand, the legendary Capetonian jazz artist who later changed his named to Abdullah Ibrahim, and whose early albums I've been trying to find - had recorded Mannenberg, a widely known 1974 work that became an anti-apartheid anthem. And then, underneath the plaque, I saw six hollow steel pipes, of slightly different lengths. Strike them with a stick, a small label read, and you'll hear the melody of Mannenberg. And suddenly, just like that, an ordinary city block was a playground, and I was using a coin to bang out a raw version of a locally famous jazz melody.

But of course transformations like that are somewhat common when you're in the presence of a child. On Sunday, as you can see in the picture above, a tiny patch of sand became a temporary sandbox, and then, as we built up two small walls of sand, a pretend crib. Or take the time, a few weeks ago, when I gave Cleo a small bucket and shovel, and we spent several happy minutes in a pebbled parking lot, which was suddenly an ample quarry. Similarly, a steel railing at Heathrow, on our way here, was magically transformed into a prop for a gymnastics routine, and a taut wire fence on the Cape Town harbor recently found itself converted into a pullup bar.

The world is the world. And then, too, it is overlaid with past worlds, and all that we can imagine.