My parents and, by default, I spent many years in exile, waiting for Zimbabwe to come into being. Of course, they spent more years in exile that I did and, being that I was seven when we went to Zimbabwe, I had no idea that I was a stateless person. Once we were living in Zimbabwe, the parents insisted on our travelling around the country, and making history lessons out of these trips. One of our early trips was a tour of the places in which my father had spent his childhood. He took us to his old primary school, where the school buildings were painted a vivid blue, like the colour of swimming pools in the movies.
As we were in the middle of the school holidays, we walked around the empty school buildings, peering into windows and listening to him reminisce about being a kid. We peered in, trying and failing to imagine our father as a kid. The history lesson over, my geologist father took us into the schoolyard for a lesson the the stones and rocks there. He walked us over to a large rock that was rising out of the grass and tried to get us to believe that this grey rock, that he referred to as talc, was what was used to make baby powder.
"If you take a stone, you can write your name in the rock because the rock is that soft."
We were skeptical. Now, our father, as he reminded us often, was the smartest person around but write in rock? He handed my sister, brother and me each a stone and said, "Try it."
He directed us to the rock and we each took a spot. I reached out and gasped in amazement as the stone sank into the rock and the beginnings of my name were scratched in. The rock looked solid and yet I was pretty easily writing my name in it. We were all so absorbed by this that we forgot that, as siblings, we were obliged to be constantly squabbling.
"Step back, quietly." My father's voice cut through the peace. When he used that tone of voice, we knew to put our millions of questions on hold and simply act. We stepped back as he stepped forward brandishing a massive stick that had somehow found its way into his hand. He brought the stick to the ground and hit the grass over and over again. The, he moved the stick in the grass and, when he raised the stick again, a snake was wrapped around it and the snake was quite dead. I am not sure how big the snake was in real life but, to my eight year-old self it was ginormous! And, as my father declared, it was a cobra. Since he was correct about the rock, we took his word on the snake.
So there was my father, discoverer of writing rocks (I wonder if our names are still in the rock), killer of giant cobras (that had not attacked because for once in our lives we were actually quiet) and general maker of exciting days. And we had not even had lunch yet! And, as though the day was not cool enough, it turned out that he had spotted smaller talc rocks that we got to take home. There is another tale of how my brother ended up with an allergic rash from homemade talc powder but that is for another day...
