It's been a while since I've written. Informal literature, that is. I've been caught up with academic life, writing papers and doing tests, the things which are expected of an academic. I've also been reading a lot, not just academic literature, but I've started to re-read Charles Dickens novels and let him captivate me with his words, again. It's important to re-read books at different stages in your life, the stories don't change but your perspective does. The last time I read Dickens, I was a naive adolescent.
I've decided to write this blog post because I'm procrastinating and because it's a good story. The story that I'm about to tell happened a couple of months ago, on a cold and rainy day, when I had least expected it to. I didn't feel like getting sopping wet when my destination was not home, so I ducked into a cafe on the university campus just as a storm was brewing.
I sat down at one of the empty tables just outside the cafe, with my overpriced cappuccino and started to read. Alas, it was not Dickens, but rather a boring journal article which I was struggling to get through. Surprisingly, I concentrate rather well when I'm alone in a noisy, crowded environment. I then spotted a tall figure in the periphery of my vision but thought nothing of it, assuming that they were looking for a table to sit at. I was so engrossed in trying to make sense of all the long words and unnecessarily long sentences that I could not look up until he said, "Excuse me, may I sit down?". "May," I thought. Well mannered. Well spoken. Well dressed. Not a student.
I assumed that I had known enough about him by what I had seen and heard so I said, "Yeah, sure". He looked like he was in his mid-20s. I got back to reading my tedious journal article, not paying much attention to the person sitting across from me. He decided to disturb me, not that I was terribly annoyed. He asked what I was reading and I replied that it was nothing and that it wouldn't interest him (To be honest, I myself was not sure about what I was reading). I asked him if he was a student, even though I knew the answer. He said that he wasn't, and that he was waiting for his sister. I decided to pursue my line of inquiry and asked him what he did for a living. He said that he was in between jobs (he was unemployed at the time). I asked him if he had been a student at Wits (the university) and he said that he had never attended university, or bothered with any form of tertiary education. At this point, I was rather taken aback. "Rich boy," I thought.
He switched the conversation and asked me about what I was studying and asked what year I was in. We then got to talking about my honours project. After I had explained the foundational concepts to him, he made some really great suggestions which just added to my surprise. They were valid, completely sensical ideas. Here was a person who knew nothing about archaeology, nothing about the concepts which I had just explained to him, letting me see how his brain works. I think by then I was more suprised that he had paid attention to what I was saying more than anything else. Our conversation broke when I heard someone excitedly call my name. It was his sister.
She's a really good friend of mine, someone I've known since first year, but someone who I hadn't seen very often because she studies something that requires her to be on a different campus to the one where I've been based for the past 4 years. She left with her brother after our general catch up, and by this point I was confused. My friend was by no means rich. I then remembered her telling me about her brother who made a fortune for himself by thinking for big companies. I made the connection, and I could not believe it. I had just sat down with probably one of the smartest people in South Africa and discussed my little honours project with him.
I had been wrong. Rich boy. I now scoff at the thought. He might have been rich, but not in the pretentious way I was thinking of. I thought that he was unemployed because he had mommy's and daddy's money to keep him company. Observation is a tricky thing. Sometimes you get it right, sometimes you get it terribly wrong.
