Monday, December 16, 2013
Generations in Dark Continents
Momba
When the last child left for college, Miriam hastened
to divorce. He went back to Africa, and the new oil
boomlet.
Mr Carruthers, grayer, still fetched you a boy. Indeed,
the memory of Momba bringing his afternoon gin
and tonic sustained him even before the new adventure.
"Momba is a foreman on an oil rig now, but I can get you
a divinity student part-time. Everybody else is into
the oil."
It would be the middle of next week, but Carruthers could
find a cleaning girl sooner.
He went into the new Starbucks and ordered an ice coffee.
There two girls had trouble with the machine, and promised
to bring it to him.
He must tell them to ratchet down the air conditioning!
Shivering! He opened his laptop with difficulty, wondering if
they had wifi.
When one girl finally got the ice coffee there, he had
turned blue.
The girls called an ambulance, and persuaded a regular,
a retired British doctor, to look at him.
"You can get into a great deal of trouble declaring anyone
dead in another chap's country, but though the tech boys
can certainly try, odds are he's gone."
Momba heard the news with mixed feelings. Miriam, the same,
having just married a much younger man, a more scholarly one.
His dissertation: The Economics of Economics.
Labels: Africa, Colonial, divorce, oil, scholarship, Starbucks
