All of my zeal, for my religion and the church, flew out of the window when i saw the abundance of wall to wall women on that first day of university.
Maybe it was helped by the "make love not war" music hanging in the incense filled air. I had come to study the noble profession of Architecture, arriving in Durban with an A2 sized drawing board, a defretted semi acoustic bass and a jumbo sized folk guitar. It was a good time to be at university.
I soon had shoulder length hair, the obligatory hippie beard, but, not wanting to lose control, refrained from my friends pursuit of recreational pharmaceuticals. My herdingkatz mindset, however, ensured my place in the gang, as i would always come up with the idea that met with their approval.
Then in true hippie tradition i dropped out of 'varsity life at the end of my third year.
I eventually found "accommodation" in a squalid single room, in the backyard of a rundown Umbilo tenement. It was on one of my lonely friday night walks that i landed up, quite by chance, outside the Central Methodist Church. To scared to go in, i watched the young music group rehearse. I must have vocalised that strange yearning deep inside of me when i "suggested" to God that if He got me a good bass i would play for Him. I left dejected before the young group had finished, as i didn't want to have to explain my presence there.
Forty years later, i did acquire that bass ( God's sense of time is rather flexible, but He always delivers). It was a vintage, genuine American Fender fretless jazz bass. By this time i had married and had two sons, of whom i am extremely proud. I had told Michele, rather excitedly, that i was in love. "You can't have it"was her reply, knowing that it would never have been another woman. Such is love.
The morning i went to collect her, she was carried straight to her first gig, playing a collection of church and sixties styled songs.
Years later my collection of basses having grown and now playing in a Gospel band called "b'ra Khah", having completed a spell in "Malachi" and a further stint in "Live the Life". A duo that i had formed playing the afrikaans christian churches i was diagnosed with prostate cancer. It was decided that i adopt radiation treatment, and eventually received forty sessions of radiation. Half way through my radiation treatment i was rushed to Addington Hospital with a ruptured appendix, this having(with hindsight) happened on the tuesday night. It was now thursday, and if it were not for that delicious concoction called morphine, i would have felt just a little worse for wear.
I was gutted, quite literally, with a scar commencing about 100mm above my navel and descending southwards stopping just short of the soft dangly bits. The delay in having received any treatment, coupled with the fact that i was a cancer patient, meant that it was now a serious major extravaganza. It was "touch and go", but i like to think that God, in His Wisdom, had some unfinished busy with me.
On the day that my doctors proclaimed that the radiation had preformed it's task successfully, i met Daan, the multi instrumentalist and songwriter from b'ra Khah, having coffee in the hospital restuarant/coffee bar and told him that i was looking for a church to play in thanks for all that had happened to me. He suggested st. Elizabeth's Anglican Church Westville, where three years later i still perform bass duties with the new love of my life,"Pearl"(having had to sell all of my other basses to acquire her). The Prodigal Son has returned, i am back home, with a new spiritual family.
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