ktravula – a travelogue!

An Affirmation of Life

A kiss here, a gentle touch there. An evening spent at the mall giggling at random quirks, or watching a funny or romantic comedy. A hand to adjust a wrongly fitted tie, a hug to welcome a tired worker back into the home, or the misty-eyed departures and reunions across a number of times, spaces, and circumstances. Life is full of them; mine is. Great food from a number of continental recipes, the variability of palatal expectations; the joy of moments spent laughing about the day, and the rush or arguing about hot topics that pitch us apart into different but sometimes complementing positions.

IMG_0321There are more: family from around the globe – Ibadan, Ife, Lagos, Ijebu, Ilesha, Southern Illinois, Kansas, Fargo, Minneapolis… Canada, London, Warwick. The wingspan of life has stretched into an interminable and happy length. Friends in the irascible Jos, distant acquaintances up north in Kaduna where the bombs lay waiting to explode. A college roommate in Lafia, another in Benin, or Abuja. The pulse of living binds us in a web of memories and thoughts, even beyond the reach of sights and sound.

Nephews and nieces, increasing day after day. Ageing parents, bound by now complicated cords of life and its filial conflicts and complexities. Chords too, in a certain harmony (or discord) across the times, or just the mere knowledge of the barest dignified standard of existence. We live across the times, in hopes and dreams. The present lives in the past, and the future thrives in the throes of the present. Mother’s dreams float in the morning steps into daylight, along with memorized admonitions and caprices. Father’s hopes and pride go in their own direction, and their greyness follows, with stakes, and the rewards. Come home to the present, life continues: a circle of familiar adventures.

Yesterday, I looked out of the glass frames in my office into the dusty streets of the city, my nose sniffing the acerbic bite of the new harmattan season. Memory, like the smell of dry leaves wafting in the December air, floats on in an endless loop. We live, and we are here, and that is all that matters.

An Affirmation of Life was published on December 13th, 2012, with the tags , , , , under the Observations category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Fading Landscapes

Spoke to mother hours ago. Two men from the landscape of my childhood just passed away. One was Pastor, the leader of one of the first churches that shaped my most vulnerable childhood times. He is around sixty years old. The other was Bro Kenny, younger, the director of the youth arm of the other church I belonged to as a teenager. Together with a select group of agile young people who all lived around that area of our youth, Bro Kenny as we called him then, led us through that period of our young restlessness.

Childhood and youth seems to fade away fast enough, and suddenly becomes a lifetime away. Faces from times past come flashing back, with strong energy currents of a familiar place… worshipers in church about three evenings a week, loving life with purest of enthusiasm, young innocent teenagers developing a crush for the very first time for fellow members of the youth group, trial music composers, dancers, proselytizers, picnickers, thespians, and general happy-go-lucky innocent boys and girls growing up within a bible-based yet liberal upbringing. Childhood was a little stricter, with religious instructions that extended beyond the church walls looming around as a constant threat and bulwark against our otherwise footloose rascally tendencies.

Where did all that go, dusty feet all around Akobo where all of this began? The naivete of youth, and the delightful profundity of biblical directions that sought to explain everything away? The simplicity of the day, the sweetness of the rain, the long pleasant smell of the harmattan at Christmas, the noise of little children during church services, the laughter of grown women and the intensity of their prayers up to heaven, the offering baskets and the coins we put in them, the general fervent intensity of youthfulness and mischief – all just floats around the plate of memory. Maybe this is what one death – or two – does: remind of how much was lost. And more importantly, how much more once was.

Fading Landscapes was published on October 23rd, 2011, with the tags , , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Watercolor Memories

The most pleasurable pleasures of my childhood were those I had moving around with father who was a broadcaster, record producer, culture researcher, and writer. There were many more which included haunts of the neighbourhood in Akobo where we lived in Ibadan (at one time West Africa’s largest city). There was a railway line that ran through the area about two miles from where our house was located. The blare of its horns was always piercing through the morning air. I remember the sense of awe and delight the first time I walked onto the tracks for the first time. We had just got back from school, and we walked, and ran, aimlessly around the area through bushes, paths, houses and dusty roads until the rail tracks showed up, then stretched in two directions away from view. I have encountered a few other moments in life where the simple pleasures of new discoveries made everything else seem insignificant, and with memory being the only consolation for their brief, fleeting existence.

I was eight, and father was driving to Akure in an old Isuzu. Hands on the wheel, and hungry, he asked me the excited son to feed him bread from the passenger’s seat since I had two hands free. There was another one with mother at the wheel driving somewhere, and insisting that drivers should never turn their heads back from the road. It was my duty to look out to find the right water bottle we had wanted to buy from many of those hanging out of the many shops we were driving around. Where are those days? Faces come in and out of that seemingly crowded childhood: Seye, the distant cousin who rode a bicycle, and later joined the military; Baba M who drove the brown Toyota van; Lanko Lanko who made bread a few houses away and who – from now distant memory – looked like the biggest woman I had ever seen. Iya Tobi was the one who pilfered grandmother’s kola nuts. Grandfather liked ludo. Grandmother liked singing, and storytelling, and gardening.

The best rationale I can muster for keeping a public journal of thoughts is so as to re-live the delights of a charming childhood and now an equally stimulating adult experience. It is not remarkable that I’m writing this now from a cozy comfort of a Chicago hotel, but there is also something pleasing in the deja vu smell of a new experience reminding of a forgotten past. One of the first water colour drawings I ever made were lost in a hotel drawer.

Watercolor Memories was published on July 30th, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Soliloquy, Travelling category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.