My Father's Prophesy

Getting up in the morning was my favorite activity of the day. The white cushion and cozy blankets couldn’t hold me back from rushing to meet the new day. I had spent enough time lying there after waking, gazing through my bedroom window at my beloved plum tree in our garden and listening, through the partly drawn, curtains to the rustling leaves of the giant eucalyptus trees in the park across the road, thinking how pleasantly I could spend my day.

Society had other plans; it was time to get up and get ready for school. Without further reverie I jumped out of bed, ran to the bathroom to get ready for the great occasion that started my school day, the morning assembly, my socks pulled up, tie straight and hair combed.

I was nearly at the door when my mother called me back:

 “Leon!!!! Where do you think you’re off to? sit right down there at that kitchen table and finish your breakfast. Do you hear me? Leon. You don’t go anywhere without finishing your breakfast. It’s on the table in the kitchen and I’m not going to throw it down the drain.”

Sometimes I still had undone homework and my dog was going to try and follow me to school and I’d have to coax him back home. These were time consuming events that I hadn’t taken into account when I started thinking about the pleasant day ahead. I walked, on the pavement, my ma called it “dawdling”, along the fence that enclosed the school soccer field, a little too high with sharp spikes for me to risk climbing it to get to a short cut through the soccer field.

I had a fetish of running my fingers over each and every corrugation of the spiked staves of the fence until I reached the school entrance. Then I had to put my school bag in my class and only then enter the assembly. So I was late quite often.

Of all the terrible crimes a pupil could perpetrate, at Krugersdorp Town School this was the most serious. Punishment involved a whack or two on the tail by Mr. Kirschmann (Kirschie), the principal.

One could say that my life was lived in a feeling of constant anxiety of being late.

To my great annoyance, to this day I am thought of as a person who comes late. Personally I believe that this is a libel. I’m not that kind of person, neither am I any of the other things people accuse me of being: a dreamer, a dawdler, a time waster or a spendthrift.

Someone, very close to me, I can’t remember who it was, it could have been my mother but she would never use such bad language, but it was someone very close to me, said: “Leon, when you get some money you just piss it against the wall.”

Somehow people, today, who I meet for the first time, who never knew me as a kid, adopt these opinions of me as if they were personally in my mother’s kitchen, where ma used to attach these appellations to me. They just stuck to me as if she had put a sign around my neck, impossible to remove for the rest of my life.

I am still puzzling over the question of how these false opinions of me get transferred from one generation to the next, even from one country to another. The obvious conclusion should be that I really am possessed of all those negative characteristics. I must, however reject that idea if I am to have a positive image of myself, which I have and so live a happy, well adjusted life, in spite of all the negativism which surrounded me in childhood.

One warning that my late father dished out to every pretty girl who fell in love with me and it seemed likely that they would agree to marry me, stemmed from this negative image which was attached to me. This warning was that they should know that they are marrying a man who will always be poor.

Well he was prophetic in a certain measure but I don’t see being poor as a negative characteristic. Looking at the experiences of my life I can say that a poor man can be wealthy just as suddenly as a rich man can be poor.

I have always endeavored to love people without looking at how rich or poor they were.

However I do want to treat poor people kindly because I feel that they have a much more difficult struggle to change a negative self-image into a positive self-image.

I think that many people who struggle to become rich are unsuccessful because they’re seeking riches for the wrong reason, namely to hide a negative self-image. Hence having a negative self-image traps a person in a vicious circle which keeps them poor. On the other hand having a positive self-image is not a guarantee that a person won’t be poor, but it goes a long way in overcoming dissatisfaction and unhappiness at being poor.

A poor man with a positive self-image doesn’t worry so much about being poor.