No bobba, the other boat! lamentings by Paul Rubin
I’ve just returned home from one of those typical uninspiring jo’burg
nights-out where the best part of the evening had to have been the spaghetti
meatball main in a restaurant setting which could only be described as a
dead sea of closed minded Morningside Jews.You know the ones who can’t see
past their perfect little sterile formulaic worlds, yes those ones.
Middle-aged women dressed completely inappropriatly, mimicking their
fashion-sense deprived off spring, trying to fit in to a status quo that
left them behind a generation ago. Faces heavily painted like something out
of a Steven King novel. Husbands grimacing at the sight of their wives, a
sight they’ve endured for just far too long, as they strain their necks
trying to catch a glimpse of the solitary gentile waitress’s arse, who’s
doing her very best to take food orders from people who plain refuse to
select off the menu, but instead insist on customising every dish,
butchering the chefs attempts at culinary genius. It’s on nights such as these that I imagine myself being just a bundle of
unborn energy, floating around the cosmos glaring down on my respective
grandparents fleeing nazi ocupied eastern Europe. And as I watch the
commotion from above, I ‘m overcome with an insatiable desperation to scream
out loudly “no bobba, the other boat!” as I see my granny Bertha inoccently
boarding the passenger ship marked South Africa. So as I eat my meatballs, focused on the uneveness of my dates manicured
eyebrows, her words “wonk wonk wonk,” like Charlie Brown’s teacher as they
fade into the surrounding din, going completely unnoticed by me, I find
myself thinking – I wonder what my sisters are doing? Px
