The Reader Travels

I’m letting the music guide me back to South Africa. The silly songs still ring in my head from the time I wake in the morning to the hour I lay my head back down to sleep. I’m sure they’re continuing on through my dreams, making the journey connected, cyclical.

A dear friend told me the other day, “You have a disease.” And I said, “Yes, I think you’re right.” Perhaps it’s a happy form of obsessive compulsive disorder. I can’t stop it, I just follow the threads of tinkling tunes from place to place and hour to hour.

She’ll be coming around the mountain when she… high hopes, he’s got high hopes, he’s got… Tarantara! tarantara! Tarantaraaaa!… I am the very model of a modern major general… Jimmy crack corn and I don’t… Ugh! Make it stop.

So, now you want to know what possible silly song road I could travel to get back to South Africa? So here it is. I had to stop listening to Tom Lehrer’s That Was the Year that Was to help me curb the plague of silly songs driving through my brain, but it doesn’t matter. The songs are still there.

Anyway, in one of the songs he sings about nuclear proliferation and how it seemed in the 60s that everyone was getting the bomb. France got it, but that’s OK because they’re our allies. The Soviets got it, but that’s OK because it helps balance the powers. The Chinese and Indonesians were working on getting one. Lehrer then sings about South Africa getting two bombs - one for the black and one for the white. It’s only right.

So there, now we’re back in South Africa.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 30th, 2007 at 10:06 am and is filed under Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.