When a lovely flame dies, gnats get in your eyes
In retrospect, it really wasn’t all that funny. Picture it: four fellows in a VW Polo, driving from Johannesburg to Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal to attend a function. One of them, Gopolang, randomly refers to Tsepe, the driver, as “the bear”. This is followed by a few seconds of silence. The silence is broken by Zamani, the third guy, laughing softly. After a few seconds the soft laughter degenerates into a hysterical giggling fit.
The fourth guy, yours truly, also starts laughing, even though he’s not too certain what’s so funny. But it’s damn near impossible to not join in the laughter when everyone around you is losing it. The shoulders of the “bear” are also shaking with laughter. Finally, feeling a bit silly about laughing for no reason, I ask what’s so funny. Zamani points at the driver, “Look; he’s really a bear!” I peep at Tsepe’s reflection in the rear-view mirror and — slap me down on a frying pan and sear me until I’m medium rare — with his salt-and-pepper stubble, the bugger really does resemble a grizzly!
My laughter accelerates from a stifled snigger to an uncontrollable laughing fit. And then Gopolang, the instigator of the cackle-a-thon, yells out in contrived Ebonics, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! The burr!” We all lose it at this point.
Afterwards, we are hit by the fact that we are a quartet of grownup family men, with 10 children between us, chortling like a bunch of convent school teenagers after discovering the word “fellatio”.
Why did we laugh so hard? Finally, we decide that it’s because laughter is more contagious than malaria. It’s nearly impossible to keep a straight face while someone is slapping their thigh, tears and snot running down their face and gasping for air. Most of the time, by the time they finally tell you what they’re laughing at, you don’t find it even mildly amusing. Yet, a few seconds earlier you were out of breath with laughter.
Laugher is not the only transmittable human physiological process. Stifling a yawn after someone yawns in your presence is a Herculean feat for most of us. The human yawn is so infectious that it’s apparently even transmittable to dogs. And I’ll wager that after I mentioned that tidbit, at least 63.7% of readers tried unsuccessfully to fight off a yawn festival. Followed by yawning in the general direction of Rasputin the family Labrador to test my theory.
Do you know what else is transmittable? Speech patterns. My septuagenarian parents have morphed into slow and loud talkers who take wide detours when they tell a story. It is a phenomenon called ukuthemeleza in my mother tongue. As a result, I have found that when I’m in conversation with them, a story that starts in Johannesburg en route to Pretoria tends to take a detour via Polokwane.
This is how my mother tells a story; “I attended a funeral in Empangeni last weekend. Cousin Ntombi from the Zululand part of the family passed away. Her father was one of the first deacons in the Catholic Church when the Trappist
‘My eyes were soon burning and swimming in saltwater as well’
Order first came to Natal. They were great believers in the vow of silence. You know, I wish people would keep silent from time to time.”
The only response I can think of is, “You know, the Japanese are very good at maintaining absolute silence. Do you remember when Buster Douglas knocked Mike Tyson out in Tokyo in 1990? It was the same day in South African time that Nelson Mandela was released from prison.”
By this point, the story about the funeral in Empangeni has long been forgotten.
Until about a year ago, I didn’t realise that crying was another human disease that is as communicable as cholera and Ebola. That was when I found myself in the company of two friends, Nomo and Zamani (of bear incident) at the Parkmore Tops in Sandton. Our collective ability to turn tap water into gin had failed us, you see. Zamani was, at the time, busy sharing with us a personal crisis he was going through.
Being an intelligent, sensitive and appropriately evolved man of the 21st century without Neanderthal ancestors, he started leaking salt water through his eyes.
Slightly embarrassed, he berated himself with the refrain, “Keep it together, Zamani!” Feeling the onset of a lump in my gullet, I averted my eyes from him towards Nomo to gather the strength to offer our friend some soothing words. Through some bizarre coincidence something seemed to have, at that very moment, lodged in both of Nomo’s eyes because they had simultaneously gone moist and red. Amazed by the incredible happenstance, I must have stopped blinking, leaving both my eyes open to an invasion by a crowd of gnats because they were soon burning and swimming in saltwater as well.
The sight of three black men with saltwater in their eyes walking towards the parking lot would have freaked out the car guard. Fortunately I started yawning. I’m convinced that the ensuing yawnfest is what distracted him from our eyes and fortuitously saved our collective street cred.