'Times i sit back and reflect on tge many hurdles that i encountered to get here, and, gratefully i say a prayer of thanks. Of particular interest was a time when i lost my fortune and had to endure much before i regained my footing. See, i made money much earlier than most of my age. But like they say , easy come easy go. I made one too many left turns and i lost everything.
Most of what remained, i sold and or shylocked to try to maintain some semblance of my past life. When money went south, friends flew south. I was left so lonely i at times held conversations with myself just to while away the yawning gulfs of time that plagued my existence.
I had managed to salvage a few good suits from my past life good days. A shoe or two made it too. What didn’t make it were the boxers. Hehe. The boxers, four of them, barely made it. See, the good book says a man should have a maximum of four boxers. Any more and you are gay to the marrow. So the boxers were four in tandem with the Man creed.
But them boxers had just about reached the 'use by " date when the floor caved in. They also caved in. Literary. Not all. Just two. They had been washed too frequently ant in protest, had decied to tear apart in a very suspicious area. Right under the apple bag. But this didnt bother me much since only mama knew of the hole and whenever she questioned their replacement, i made funny references of the weight of the apples that she would laugh so much and forget our miserable state.
The hole had the uncanny habit of trapping one of the apples but i had a way of freeing it without much fuss. But one day, the hole went ballistic on me.
I was out in the field running some erands one sunny afternoon. And it can get pretty hot in Uthiru. When its that hot and you are walking long distances for luck of bus fare, the boxer tends to rise up the waist with every hot step. Many men will atest to this. Expectedly, the apples hung loose when its that hot. Two opposites. The boxer rises, the apples hung loose. Its inevitable. An apple permeates the boxer by the hole in search of cooler estate. But on this particular day, the tree, in a twist of rogue fate, used to holes, decided to join the trapped aplle in the hole. The boxer was just too high.
But this didnt deter me from my walk down the hill towards kawangware where i would board a matatu for ten bob to Dagoreti where i resided. I made it down the hill and up the slope to the Dagoreti juction with the full intent of freeing the vital organs from the snare as soon i got home . It was a short distance by matatu anyhow.
But, friends, there is a law that states, “what ever can go wrong will surely go wrong at Dagoreti junction” it did.
There was this gal, a neughbour, i had been flirting for a while. Njoki was her name. Found her right at that junction waiting for a mat home. She had previously been very unreceptive to my advances owing to the close proximity to mamaa. But here, on this junction, it was fair game. She relaxed faster than i could drop them lines. Now, friends, some organs in a man , though blind , can sense a cumming climb. The very same organs respond in readiness to the percieved climb. The aplle swells and the tree hards. Trapped, the two did their thing. Not the two, sorry, the three. The aplle above swelled, the one trapped swelled, and the tree harded by a factor of seven going eleven incher. At Dagoreti junction some minutes to seven. Still alot of light to expose my shame. The pain i did well to conceal but the cold sweat was a dead give away. I had those huge Diary that every hustler worth his salt carries around. I almost pinned it to my groin. Any attempts to free the trapped articles were suspended due to the obvious reasons. More over , her new found touchy touchy hobby wasnt helping my insistent barrade of commands to the tree to reconcile, sorry, to recoil.
I have never so much wished for darkness in my entire miserable life. The trapped articles remained so until we parted way s near home by what time i had lost enough water to last a camel a week .
I walked home. By the time i knocked on the door, things, though still trapped, had cooled down enough. Many moons later, njoki put it on head. And, i friends, avaged the vital organs. Sorry, the organs avaged for themselves.
The moral has something to do with the recent military hardware. But am too engrossed in the memory of njokis parted legs to scheme out the moral of hardware in military or something