I was ambivalent about writing this post. The last time I wrote about Brixton – a cat named after a suburb – was in December 2022, a few weeks after she walked into our lives. Now I’m writing to memorialize her, just a year later, and a part of me feels like it’s a weird thing to do. But even though Brixton, a.k.a. Brixie, wasn’t with us for long, she was special. She had a big impact on our lives. She deserves a proper remembrance.
Rugby in South Africa Is Not Only a Game
I know nothing about rugby. In 13 years of living in South Africa I’ve attended only one live rugby match. But I know a lot about sports and I know a lot about people. And I know that Saturday’s Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand was something I’ve never seen before: An entire nation of 62 million people coming together – forgetting their gaping divides, forgetting their country’s problems and all the world’s problems – experiencing unadulterated joy while watching a sports team that belongs to all of them.
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Grieving for Jon, Ten Years Later
For the past couple of months, I’ve been thinking about what to write in my blog for the ten-year anniversary of Jon’s death. Jon died a decade ago tomorrow.
I don’t think about Jon’s death anywhere near as often as I used to. For the first couple of years I obsessed about it constantly and December 19th loomed in my mind for weeks in advance. I wrote an intense post about Jon on the one-year anniversary of his death, and I’m sure I referenced it in subsequent years, too. But the pain faded with time. There were years when I only thought briefly of Jon on December 19th, and more with a feeling of wistful nostalgia than grief.
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2Summers Moves to Brixton
Last week I moved from Melville, the central Joburg suburb where I’ve lived for the past 11 years, to Brixton, another central Joburg suburb about five minutes away.
Moving five minutes up the road should be no big deal, theoretically. People move all the time. But this move is, in fact, a big deal for me. It’s a huge fucking deal, so much so that I haven’t been able to figure out how to blog about it.