Back to the Mother Land

Hello again, cats and kittens, greetings from Cape Town! I have been here about a week, for a longer stint this time, 10 weeks interning at St. George’s Cathedral. Again, in the dead of winter. Oh, for a swimming pool and a chick-lit novel. (Do you hear that, Mom? It’s all I want when I get home.)

So I got in Saturday night, got settled at my hotel, and went out to the corner store for something to eat. I was kind of morose—28 hours of travel, jet lag, hadn’t showered; it was cold and kind of blah and I was missing home and all my peeples and Phen and thinking longingly of all the summers of the past that I spent playing in the swimming pool and at the beach with kids and taking them out for ice cream and having dance parties in the classroom. I’ve got a great picture from that era of a 6-year-old Michael Breaux (admit it, all of you who know him just went “Awwww” at the mention of his name), a slight sunburn across his tawny cheeks, who had spent the day building sandcastles and playing in the surf and flying kites at the beach and had fallen asleep at Sonic with his head on the table…in a pool of melted ice cream. That, my friends, is what contentment looks like.

Anyway, so I’m missing the old days and wondering if I shouldn’t have stayed home and worked at my own church this summer and rerooted myself in my community, and I am in the grocery store, which for me is one of the primary places one can feel isolated in another country, because *their* food is never *your* food. Even if it is in name, it is not in fact. The packaging and look is different, and you realize that you had not reckoned on how much of the predictability and security of life was bound up in the familiarity of the packaging of Dannon yogurt or Doritos. Oh, they have Doritos here. They have Sweet Chili Doritos. What in the name of all that is holy is sweet chili, you ask? I don’t know, and I will not be finding out. If it’s not my Nacho Cheese Doritos, or perhaps Cool Ranch Doritos, I have to leave it alone. (Doug, I am thinking here of the ketchup-flavored Pringles you encountered in Palestine.) And of course one’s culinary wanderings are exacerbated by people like Dan Walmer, who is supposedly a man of God, who likes to flaunt his regular trips to Sonic to get the Route 44 Watermelon Slush knowing there is not a Sonic on your whole damn continent. Dan, you owe me a Route-44 cherry limeade at the Sonic happy hour when I get back in August.

I’m wandering the aisles, forlorn and displaced, a stranger in a strange land, and then I see it. Shining in the refrigerated aisle like a beacon of sweet, sweet goodness. Friends, I see Dr. Pepper. Those of you who followed my adventures of yesteryear know that it could just as easily be called Quest for a Can of Dr. Pepper. And here it was, in all its glory, and it even had the right packaging. I mean beloveds, the CAN even looked the same. Do you see the hand of the Lord here? Do you see how He heard His child’s cry in Egypt (well, South Africa, but same continent) and came to deliver me, as the Israelites of yore? I mean the only thing that could have surprised me more is if there had been a Starbucks in the store. (By the way, the presence of Starbucks in stores like Target and Kroger? Is what makes us the greatest nation on earth.)

I snatched up that Dr. Pepper and willingly paid the 14 rand for it, even though that is almost $2, which would be usury for a 12-oz can were it anyplace but here. Here, it was a bargain, plain and simple. And I drank the Dr. Pepper. And it was good.