I have a weird sleep pattern. I am an extreme night owl. I am awake until 2:30 or 3:30 then I sleep until 11 on most days. My sisters make jokes when they call, always after 11. “Did I wake you up?”

This morning, around 2, I couldn’t find anything I wanted to watch. Disaster movies seemed too real, the same with zombie movies. I ended up watching a World War II movie for about 20 minutes until I got bored. I think I had seen that movie, but even if I hadn’t, I knew the ending. I looked through my photos next and that got me thinking about Ghana. I wrote this around 3 AM. I called it Memories:

When I was twenty-one, I was brave. 

In Ghana I had a motorcycle. It was only a Honda C50, a series I don’t see any more though I expect there are probably many on the roads in Ghana. I loved my motorcycle. It was the freedom to go where I wanted. My first trip was when I bought it. I had to ride it from Tamale to Bolga, a trip a bit over 100 miles. Before I left the Honda dealer, I had to learn how to ride, use the brake and shift gears. That first ride was amazing. 

Every morning, in Ghana, as I was waking up, I could smell wood fires. I could hear the poundings of mortars and pestles as breakfast was being prepared. I could feel the heat. All my senses were alive to the mornings in Ghana. 

I played a game in Ghana. I know it has a few different names. You’ve probably seen the board which has two sides, with holes on each side and beans or small stones in the holes. In Ghana it is called an Oware game. It was usually played with the beans. I have an Oware board, a very old one, but it never helped me. I seldom won. I couldn’t see all those counts in front of me. The game in Ghana was usually played at tables and chairs outside a local bar, not like our bars, different somehow. I’d sit down and watch. They’d have me play a few times. I always lost. They were kind.

I changed the background on my computer. It is now the same photo I posted today of the inside of the bus we rode from downtown Philadelphia to the airport to get our flight to Ghana in June 1969. I can see myself, and I can see people I’d soon meet: Emma, with whom I’d be stationed for only a year, and Roger and Dale who would be posted together near me in Navrongo. Kalman, standing in the back, would not make it home. Every guy wore a shirt with a collar and many wore ties and a few wore jackets. We wore dresses or skirts and blouses as the information sheets had directed.

At the hotel, I had brought my luggage downstairs. From then on the guys took care of it. There were a lot of guys. They piled the luggage on the sidewalk then passed it along from one to another to load the luggage in the back of the buses. They unloaded at the airport the same way and left the luggage on the sidewalk. We’d next see the piles of luggage at Kotoka Airport in Accra. Nobody lost luggage. It was a charter flight on an airline with just us.

It is the longest flight in time I have ever taken. That seems right somehow.

This entry was posted on June 1, 2020 at 1:18 pm and is filed under Musings. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.