Dear Bazzers

Image courtesy of Chapinga Mutakasha

Bazzers,

If I don't exclaim 'Finally!', I tend to begin these missives by apologizing for how long they've taken me — in the spirit of unpredictability I would like to buck the trend somehow. Uniquely, oddly, I feel like I've been holding onto the words for weeks, months now, and changing them around constantly; if I behaved this way with a work of fiction, I would run myself raven. With you, fortunately, the consequences appear to be less severe :).

I know in some sense that I would like to talk about glass, about my increasing (and no doubt dangerous) dependence on terrible sports organizations for personal identity, and I suppose about the year ahead.

I was at the airport last week, for maybe only the second time since the pandemic began. My nephew finally packed his bags for college, and the complexity of my emotional response produces a new surprise everyday. I am for the most part numb to his absence, in a state of gentle shell-shock, if there's such a thing. Over the course of I want to say 15 of his 20 years the lad has been my kid brother, my best friend, my protege. I only saw him a couple times a week once he became a man — secured a driver's license, a posse, and the admiration of a lady or two.

So that is the numbness. Because I only ever saw him a handful of times a week, the vastness of the gap between this moment and his next visit does not properly occur to me yet. I keep expecting him to burst through my door any minute, destroy me on the Xbox, and argue spiritedly about the shape of the National Basketball Association.

At the airport, I watched him check-in through a turquoise window, the lad unfazed by the journey ahead. Whenever I order stuff online, I like to imagine the journey of my package as it leaves a warehouse, progresses through several heartland States or puritan counties, and then traverses an ocean or a sea. With tracking apps, I can go so far as to imagine what sorts of people handle it every step of the way, how they like their coffee, who they go home to. With my nephew, the stakes were suddenly similar but considerably higher: I hoped he would interact with persons, even in transit, who were at least performatively delighted to have him pass through their countries. I hoped he wouldn't sense the gap behind him, for all the smiles beckoning him forwards.

After 48 hours of this, I was at his house, delivering groceries. I was asked to pop the kettle on before I left. A kitten that has advanced in years since my nephew left high school, no longer a stray, leaped onto the window sill. We were separated by glass but I stood there for what felt like hours — touching a finger to the glass, letting this kindly feline rub against it. It was so damned quiet, man; there was no loss, no time, no capitalism, no pandemic. Just me and this cat, exchanging obscured vibes.

I say too much, anyways, on this website about my sports addictions. I have entered the New Year single-minded, Bazzers: win. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs.

CC.

***

Chola,

Every ‘Finally!’ you send out, whether in a missive or at the box when your beloved, if tragic, football team scores a goal, is the beginning of something new. There is an irony in that I find quaint, and at times useful. So, it is in that spirit that I accept your words, even if they are the words of a man run raven. 

It’s strange, when I left Zambia in December for one of those long sojourns to the Other Place I thought about the new airport. Previously I remarked on how the old airport with its honeycomb façade reminds me of home. The new airport checks such nostalgia, and confirms that memory is always held hostage to the levelling of the world around us. Then, as now, I wonder what imagination appends these obnoxious structures of new glass and steel. What will your nephew, who starts his journey abroad and thus his life proper, remember when he lands and leaves there? Or will he unthinkingly accept it, unaffected by the changing language of buildings around him; after all, only the old remark about how things have changed.  

I am intrigued by the gap that now separates you and the young man. It reminds me of the ‘lacuna’ between languages in translation, where all those complicated things — the untranslatable, the grammatically heretical or hedonist — are left unresolved. This gap, I believe, is especially productive in a world constantly in translation, leaving us with works of culture and art that are absurd, frustrating, and ultimately beautiful. But after that mess — the initial confusion where we are confronted with a new object of praise or scorn — there is silence, where we have to take stock of what we have lost and gained during that time.

I often get lost in that silence when I think of my brother, eleven years my junior, who grows up quicker than the physics of the world should allow. It is thus apt that touching glass, whether at the new airport or at home in front of the adopted cat, should produce such quiet: sometimes it shows us our reflection, at other times it allows us to look right through. 

Yours,

Bazzi. 

Bazzers is hereabouts.