In highschool, I won the poetry competition. I recited a poem called “To an old lady asleep at a poetry reading”, by James Kirkup. I remember that I said the whole poem to an increasingly embarassed woman in the front row.

Snore on in your front row seat
Let not my voice disturb the wordless heaven your eyes have found
Here in the hard hall,
With its naked lights,
The nightmare setting of all sleepless nights
In which my words and spirit are bound.

When I was speaking with one of the judges after the competition, he discovered that I was an American, and was, I believe, quite horrified. I had laid on the British accent thick, and he didn’t realize that it wasn’t genuine. And it used to come very naturally to me.

Well, at my Christmas Carol reading on Saturday, I had to work really hard at it, and, even then, there were several times when I realized that I had almost entirely let it slip. And while I expect that most of my audience didn’t notice any but the most eggregious times, I guess it just shows that when you don’t speak a language for a while, you lose it.

Let not that tiresome vulture – your wakeful neighbour
Disturb you with her nudging gloom
She is one of those restless seekers-after-culture
Who, at question time, will shout for it
While I desire only the chilly sanctuary of the Chairman’s guest room

Ah, poor dear, she’s wakened you
You stare, perplexed a moment,
From under your hat’s provincial flowers

You must not mind, dear
As shame comes hunting your
Yes, dear, this is Hell, and this is me confronting you.

I should probably get a copy of Patrick Stewart’s reading of A Christmas Carol before the next time I attempt to do this. I watched his movie rendition on Sunday. I probably should have watched that before, too. His interpretation of things seems to be very true to the spirit of the book.

Apologies to Mr Kirkup. I’m probably remembering wrong, but I can’t find a copy of the poem anywhere. Anyone who knows what volume I can find the poem in, I’d be much obliged if you could provide that information.

A comment made on my posting about Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight got me thinking about smells. The commenter notes that Fuller always talks about the smells of a place. This didn’t really strike me, but the comment reminded me of the smells of Africa. The smell of the Nairobi City Market: the fish mongers, the wonderful dust/sweat/wood smell of the wooden carvings, the smell of the flower vendors and the fruit vendors. The smell of Biashara street, with the spice stores.

And the smell of Dagoretti.

Dagoretti is a little town that you go through if you catch the bus going the wrong direction at the Rhino Park Road bus stop. The bus still gets you to the same place, but instead of going through Karen, it goes through Dagoretti.

Dagoretti is the place where the herders bring their cattle to be butchered. You can smell it a couple miles away – the thick stench of rotting carcasses that almost gets stuck in your throat. As you drive into Dagoretti and past the abattoirs, you see skulls and vultures. Wooden pens, perhaps 2 or 3 meters on each side, and stretching up about the same height, stand in front of and beside each abattoir, all along the side of the road. Each one is filled with skulls, in various stages of decomposition. Vultures cluster thickly around each, picking at those skulls that still have enough on them to be worth it.

As the bus toils through Dagoretti, you struggle to hold your breath for the 6 or 7 minutes when the stench is the strongest, and, when that fails, you try desperately to think of something else so that you don’t start gagging.

As the bus finally pulls out of Dagoretti, you deeply inhale the dust and diesel coming up from the road, in an effort to purge your nose and lungs, but the smell will linger in your clothes all day.

Of course, if you happen to get there on slaughter day, the smell is entirely different, and the trip much slower. The streets are clogged with thousands of dusty, skinny, bawling brahmans. (Although I assure you they don’t look anywhere near as good as the ones at that link!) Usually young boys will be driving them, smacking them with little sticks and yelling at them to move along. Then the smell is one of dust and manure and excitement. The cows stumble along unprotestingly, and you can almost imagine that, in their emaciated state, the slaughterhouse is looking like a pretty good thing for them.

My brother and his wife are in Kenya this week, and I’m *ssooooooo* jealous.

In college I was an RA (Resident Assistant). That means, roughly, that I was supposed to keep the children … um … men from destroying the dorm, killing one another, or operating illegal businesses out of their rooms. At least, that’s how I understood my tasks.

(Typical conversation: “Room check! Ok, you still have a room.”)

One of the rooms on my hall contained two freshmen who were intent on annoying everyone else to the point of distraction, keeping the noise level at or above the pain threshhold anytime that someone might possibly want to sleep, give the hall the aromatic features of a petting zoo, and carpet their room entirely in banana stickers. Names are withheld to protect the guilty.

So, fast-forward 14 years.

Last night, one of these fine gentlemen called me and invited me to attend a reading group, which will be reading books on the topic of social justice, featuring the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others. I was honored that he would think of inviting me to the gathering of upstanding young men who will be attending. And although I like telling college stories about this guy, he’s a great young man, and, as long as I’m complementing him, he’s got a beautiful wife and daughter, too.

Oh, and, for the record, the other guy is operating a mission organization that works with street kids in Kathmandu and Calcutta, among other places. So he turned out ok too. Although he’s still a little weird. 😉