Wedding Bells, Vocab Vowels and Japanese babies all in a row

Aoi, Kyro’s bride to be, turned out to be the sweetest most delightful daughter in law we could have imagined.   

Love was in the air.  Kyro swooned.  Aoi fluttered her eyelashes innocently.  Did I mention love was in the air?  The charming couple wanted a fairytale forest wedding to capture their fairytale romance and Kyro planned each step of their wedding day with Aoi following via skype from Japan.  Aoi, having never been to South Africa, imagined we might live in a hut and feared for her safety.  The poor girl had no idea what to expect but bravely ordered her wedding dress and booked her plane ticket.  Kyro assured her we weren’t savages and that she wouldn’t get mugged on each street corner as she expected as per CNN.  I warned her that we were a meat eating nation and that some men event hunted for their meat.  I just omitted to say not in our back yard although memories of that pigs head in the fridge had my mother thinking otherwise.  We planned to kit Theo out in a loin cloth, unshaven, clutching a turkey leg to greet her at the front door but decided that would surely frighten the living daylights out of her.     

Aoi arrived, brave as can be, and a week later they were married.   My mothers house burst at the seams as Japanese gifts, flower arrangements, layers of wedding cake, various stages of plasic icing flowers and 60 meters of organza filled every corner of the house.  Aoi’s wedding dress and all the things necessary for a romantic honeymoon overflowed out of the bedroom door.  The bathroom was scattered with Japanese earbuds, false eyelashes, dental floss, creams and puffs and anything necessary for a bride who worried that there weren’t any shops within 400 km’s from our house.  The kitchen, well where to start. The kitchen bulged with everyday Japanese things like tofu, seaweed, mochie, noodles, cherry blossom and tuna flavoured crisps?!?,  soy sauce rice crackers, fish sauce, rubberlike ball thingies, funny green things, sticky sweet little pink things, long slimy white things and brown gooey things.  Poor Rosemary struggled to find the bread to make her daily rashion of a peanut butter sandwich and my unadventurous mother played it safe and went on a diet.  
The house was alive and vibrated with activity.

Theo was in his element because he could do the catering and moved the bamboo shoots aside in the fridge to make room for hunks of beef and pork fillet which he was curing for the 3 course banquet braai which was to take place under the trees at Paarl rock.

The big day finally arrived and everything went smoothly. The intimate group of guests celebrated the day with Kyro looking ever so dashing and Aoi as beautiful as a princess in her wedding gown.

After the honeymoon, life at my mothers house certainly did not return to normal.  Six weeks passed in a blur of Japanese and South African cuisine, the lovers whirled in and out the house, permenantly joined at the hip, doing as many site seeing trips and shopping trips as daylight hours would allow. Now the thing about falling in love with someone who you can see via skype but are not able to touch is that there’s a lot of catching up to do.  A lot of it.  And the result - Kyro slipped in significant little hints that they would one day like to have twins.  In fact, prior to her arriving, he had sent Aoi on a quest to find Yams in Japan.  This apparently would prepare her offspring producing hormones for twins but unfortunately the gene altering vegetable didn’t grow in her homeland.    

Then sadly the six weeks came to an end.  The joy they brought to our house and their infectous happiness was to end.   The tearful day arrived for Aoi to return to Japan, alone but Kyro would join her a few weeks later. She packed her bulging suitcase with koeksusters, Rooibos tea, Zambak, dozens of pairs of new shoes and memories of South African. With a lump in my throat I tried saying my goodbyes to my sweet, loving and delightful new daughter in law, her cute foreign English accent and even more foreign recipes.

Three days later, after a visit to her doctor in Japan, Kyro announced that we were to become grandparents.  TO TWINS!  No Yams or family gene involvement, just the power of positive thinking.  Well, that kind of news required another bottle of whiskey. 

We spent every possible minute with Kyro over the next month, realising our time with him was soon to end, as our only son, was about to leave for Japan for good. We turned my mothers house upside down again, well actually it never returned to its old orderly fashion, what with Kyro packing and repacking his suitcase in the middle of the lounge every few days to squeeze in the family rocking horse and baby gifts which kept accumulating, not forgetting the twin stroller which eventually got bubble wrapped after we all took turns pushing it down the passage a few times.  We took over my mothers sewing room, dug out her stash of ribbon, fabric, elastic and lace and I whipped up some “granny” gifts for my grand children.  Delicate needlework is not my forte, being a more slap stick boer maak ‘n plan kinda person, so my rouch stitching didn’t quite match Aoi’s perfect one millimetre chain stiching on her delicate hand made coasters which she brought for us all as gifts.  I eventually sent 2 roughly blanket stitched felt fish, one lackings its dorsal fin, and two owls, one without wings.  In the end I’d given up trying to do the tiny stitches required, but hopefully the twins wouldn’t mind too much. The sewing machine worked overtime and I, with Kyro’s help, made a colourful bag, decorated with cute animal cut outs which I traced and glued on, and which I thought looked quite nice besides the fact that the whole bag was very lopsided.  Kyro whipped up four of the cutest little soft leather shoes, biaz trimming and all, two pouch slings to carry the infants in and a huge zip up carry bag, complete with elastic pockets to store bottles and other goddies and reinforced and lined with my mothers boob xrays which he discovered at the bottom of the cupboard. Since we were on a creative streak, I went into a fabric flower frenzy and made a bunch of flowers for my friends birthday. I spent hours researching other craft ideas which would keep me busy when we eventually hit the road again and which could come in handy in some rural village. Recycled craft ideas was what I was after.  Kyro showed me how to turn plastic packets into long strips then he plugged my mothers liquidizer into the passage plug, tied the end onto the spinning bottom bit and tada, we had 10 meters of twisted plastic wiggling through the house ready to be woven or plaited into things like bags or mats or anything else.  On days like these, my mother stayed in bed a little longer doing her dementure proof Soduko’s.  The baby shoes turned out so good that Kyro decided to make himself a pair of sandals, especially since he would struggle to find shoes in Japan to fit his boat sized feet.  He promptly cut soles out of my mothers garage rubber mat for his new project, leaving a gaping size 11 left and right shoeprint.  

Theo kept himself busy with his favourite pastime and cooked Souh African food to make sure Kyro didn’t forget his roots and things like pap and wors, rooster bread and braaivleis once he settled on Japanese soil.  He cooked food outside in a solar cooker which he made by placing a black potjie in a plastic cooking bag in the centre of a cars shiny silver sun shield which he first folded into a cone sort of shape.  Four hours later our free energy food was cooked.  He studied up about permaculture and did research about farming using natural resources.  We scanned the internet for charity organizations or NGO’s involved in upliftment programmes which we hoped to get support from once we left Cape Town.

Oh yes, inbetween everything we celebrated a big family Christmas, celebrated my mothers 69^th birthday and passed our TEFL exams.  Kyro with intentions to teach English in Japan and us to leave for what started out to be a journey to Zambia had now changed to the Eastern Cape, old Transkei, since it seemed easier to achieve.  Theo and I were hoping to find a rural village somewhere beautiful and unspoilt by western man and possibly teach English combined with teaching rural people how to plant a vegetable garden.

And then the day rolled around for Kyro to leave.  It had to eventually I suppose.  We were excited for him but damn I was going to miss him and his uncomplicated yet unconventional ideas about how the world could be.

We drove to the airport making jokes, pretending everything was all right.  He carried a lever arch file under one puffed up arm and a board game under the other bulging arm which struggled to bend since he was wearing most of the clothes he owned.     There wasn’t any space in his suitcase since it was filled with gifts, baby things which were identically matched for the identical twins and one blue antique rocking horse wedged from corner to corner.  The bubble wrapped twin pram would have to survive the cargo hold.  His pockets bulged with extra socks, 2 dozen semi precious stones and tomatoe seeds (he’s a very keen gardener) which if questioned about at customs, he planned to say he messed tomatoe from the salad he had at the airport and the serviette which he wiped it up with ended up in his pocket.    No-one stopped him since his excitement to see Aoi again had him grinning from ear to ear all the way through customs. 

We cried our goodbyes, promised to skype and waved good wishes to Kyro as he set off to start a new life far across the ocean in a place that had earthquakes and eggrolls and where no-one could say rrr.

Grannies, Gastronomy and Grammar

Those three words sum up my last year in Cape Town.  Squatting at my mother’s house and getting to know the old ducks who regularly pop in for tea and cake or line dance classes, summed up my whole social life.  Well, other than befriending a retired gay drama queen and an Arab at the market.  The innocent pill popping grannies are ever so sweet but I think Theo’s endurance for endearment was sometimes pushed to the limit since he was the only male in the never ending stream of senior citizens doing the forward rock side step line dance movement through the house.  Anyway, you don’t put your balls on the line when residing with 2 geriatrics, being my perfect mother & her perfect sister, and little ol’ me, not quite perfect but close enough to perfection without being called conceited.

The “hyena club” as we referred to the screeching grannies, watched in fascination as Theo banged pots and pans around the kitchen, wielding his metre long butcher knife through the air, trying hard to miss (or not) a purple shrouded head inquisitively leering over his shoulder.  Other days the liquidizer worked overtime in his attempt to drown out their shrill cackles as they planned my mothers next aptly named chatterbox meeting. 

Mornings, my mother and aunt, clad in fluffy nightdresses, clutching their crossword puzzles and Sudoku, which they adamantly slogged over for 2 hours every morning in bed in their attempt to keep their brains alert for the day, would have to sample Theo’s kitchen concoctions.  My mother, I suspect, hid hers in her collection of chocolate papers when Theo wasn’t looking since she assumed that everything he cooked contained either innards or curry and there was no way she was going to eat anything which she didn’t recognise.  Rosemary on the other hand, who didn’t recognise anything other than a peanut butter sandwich, would swallow the foreign morsels, pinky in the air, and in her ever so frightfully English accent would murmur “Well Theo, I don’t quite know what that was but it was terribly tasty”.

Occasionally Theo would surprise my mother by leaving a pigs head in the fridge in the hopes that she would have a heart attack and move on to better pastures but over time she became immune to finding chilli splashed up her once immaculate tiled walls, seaweed in the bottom of her toaster, jars of sprouts growing in the cupboards between her colour coded coffee cups and mouldy cheese maturing to a nice blue klunky aroma in her dresser.  Theo on the other hand was bewildered by her shiny doll size pots to heat her little portions of frozen peas (kept on the bottom left hand front corner in the freezer) to have with her little packet of plastic sauce (kept in the tupperware box, bottom shelf, middle kitchen cupboard, 4 inches from the left) and her little portion of frozen chicken schnitzel from a little box kept on the top freezer shelf, front right parallel to the frozen bread 3 inches from the frozen chocolate mouse.

During the year, Theo and I traded at markets to fulfil his obsession with food.  We entered the slow food market, Theo moving a bit slower than me, once he discovered the organic brewed beer.  We sold seaweed products which I proudly put together in my mothers kitchen of course, while Theo whipped up a few divine potjies, originating in said kitchen of course.  Our weekly sales at the Saturday market didn’t quite bring home the bacon so we switched to fast food, hit the road to a few festivals where Theo fried corn dogs to feed the other 99% of the nation; the ones who weren’t bothered with things like gluten free or organic but who clutched each other closely as they whirled their way across hay strewn dance floors to De La Rey and Rooi Rokkie.

Along the way, we collected a shitload more utensils and dishes, pots and pans and things which we squeezed into every spare orifice in my mothers neatly organised kitchen cupboards.   

Inbetween chopping pigs tails and forcing wads of dry seaweed into my mothers liquidizer, we decided to study English.  We ploughed through a TEFL course (teaching Englsh as a foreign language) in the hopes that we could do a spot of humanitarian work in rural villages in our travels to wherever and do something uselful with our time other than cooking. 

Then Kyro moved in, also to save money, and our calm household of 2 perfect, 1 graciously close to perfect women, and one frustrated husband turned into chaos.  Our procrastinated plans to save up to drive our camper truck to Zambia became easier to procrastinate about as we had other things to keep ourselves occupied.  A wedding needed to be planned.  Not just your everyday wedding either.  Kyro, our adventurous son, announced that he was getting married to a Japanese girl who he had fallen madly in love with after skyping her via the internet for the last year.  After sitting down with a bottle of whiskey, we realised that he was serious and we were about to gain a foreign dauguter in law who lived across the ocean in a place where tofu, earthquakes and Tsunamis were everyday things. 

But that’s another whole saga on its own.