Today was my mother’s birthday. I had a bit of time before the party started, so I decided to drive around Pinelands, where she lives and where I grew up, and see how things have changed in the years since I lived there.<\/p>\n
The suburb of Pinelands is somewhat of a joke in some circles in Cape Town – the kind of place that along with Fish Hoek people pass snotty remarks about, say they’d never consider living there, and look at you with sympathy when you confess you grew up there. I can understand why. It’s an insular suburb, with little entertainment to speak of, may still be dry<\/em> (no bottle store, although these days some restaurants may even have liquor licenses), and has more than its fair share of old age homes. I am probably soon going to moving back to the city side, and definitely won’t consider living there. But it was a good place to grow up in. Lots of trees and open green space, parks, a canal running through it, UCT sports fields nearby (now housing), tennis courts, and quite safe.<\/p>\n Driving around it was a nostalgic experience. There are some changes – the walls are higher, less of those old houses with small or no walls, and more large fences, although thankfully not so many of those Jhb-style huge, electrified walls that really put an end to any semblance of community. New developments – Cannon Creek, a private school that I remember as open space, and a large ugly church that I remember as a private house that served as a meeting place for one of the many Christian sects that Pinelands seems to attract. Pinelands was one of the few places boasting what I think was a community of Plymouth Brethren<\/a> (I knew them just as the Brethren, my knowledge of their believes going as deep as the fact that they could only marry other brethren, and that they all looked funny).<\/p>\n Passing old haunts gave me flashes of memories, people I hadn’t thought of for years. I remembered M, whose parents had fled Zimbabwe in 1980, had to get special permission not to study Afrikaans, and who came across as crassly racist, even in 1980’s South Africa. Or P, whose parents were divorced, but continued to live together, and who had very little charisma. Almost no-one else at school liked him, not even the teachers, but even then I was a bit contrary, and befriended him. After leaving school he became scarily Christian for about a month, real hellfire and damnation stuff, followed by a period of exploring the other side<\/em> (don’t they just always go together). I remember him excitedly telling me the day he’d lost his virginity, using a whole 3-pack of condoms<\/em>, and feeling upset that he’d beaten me to it.<\/p>\n I passed Clyde-Pinelands, the soccer club where I used to play, and remembered the day Pele<\/em>, the first black player, arrived shortly after multiracial sport became legal, and a rant by B claiming that Clyde was a white club<\/em> and that Pele should go back to where he came from. I also remember bumping someones car door when I got out, and having them shout at me for scratching the car. I couldn’t understand why they were making a big deal about a silly car door, but then my father drove an old wreck, and they had a new car. From then on they were the snooty rich family<\/em> to me.<\/p>\n I remembered smoking marijuana for the first time under the bridge by the canal, and the terror when the police, obviously tipped off, arrived to search under the bridge. We’d moved by that stage to the car, and I remember a tussle as to whether to open the window, and let the fumes out, or to close the window, and not risk them smelling the fumes as they drove past. In the end we just sat put, with the windows closed, and they drove on past.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today was my mother’s birthday. I had a bit of time before the party started, so I decided to drive around Pinelands, where she lives and where I grew up, and see how things have changed in the years since I lived there. The suburb of Pinelands is somewhat of a joke in some circles… Continue reading Nostalgia I: Pinelands<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-water-personal","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.greenman.co.za\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}