Johannesburg Nights

There is something wholly blissful about cold light beers on a rooftop, watching the middle afternoon sunlight turn to the extravagant colors of Sunday dusk. People constantly alternate between sunglasses and no sunglasses, hiding behind occasional pillars or the shadow of the person on their right. People laughing, standing, sitting, moving, buzzing, interacting, living. You can order your brunch now, or later, or after this beer or that bloody mary. You can have a drink now, or later, and who really cares; just whenever you feel like it but you should certainly have another. The DJ plays a song you don't really hear as anything but background noise and a beat. This peace, this casual conversation without any rush, is intoxicating. It is what in my mind Sundays are made for. It is one last beautiful man-made pause, a footnote, a moment of fleeting contemplation, before the rush of the week begins.

And then the day turns to night, which in my case might be the last sunset I will ever see in South Africa. That makes it all the more urgent, this being present in the various tiny moments of splendor. What follows is a flurry of packing and repacking and sporadic lunches that come when you usher yourself along quickly from one intermediary place to another, and then the trains and the cars and the customs line and its passport check with an officer who for the first time in your life, actually cracks a joke, and then another, and then you fly and watch Invictus on the plane, Namibia and Angola floating by out your right side window, but fixated on Morgan Freeman's depiction of Nelson Mandela, all because it feels right, that one last dose of a country before it is gone again and completely out of reach, accentuated in that final moment when the South African Airways flight attendant on the television screen in front of you says, "we wish you a proudly South African goodbye" in a lovely accent with a smile, all before falling again back into the chaos and the unearthly smog and the Third Mainland Bridge that shoots you out forcefully into the tremendous city of Lagos. But for those last few moments with good people and a beer sweating in your hand, on some deck that you could never find again, you can enjoy.

These were the Johannesburg afternoons and nights: that humble dose of civilization, where things - the little details people only appreciate if they have spent time to the truly dysfunctional and compromised countries of the world - function naturally and as they should until the end, and your entire being, the parts of you always on guard because everything is something - a risk, a con, a challenge, an obstacle - finally sits back and takes a breath and that is all there is.