Charms of the Season

The kid I used to call Boobee now goes by the name of Dani. Same kid, different name. Well, a much different kid now. A little while ago, I was taken by the manner in which carrying him around in my arms was a balm for my own soul. I remember that on more than one occasion I would almost ache from the fact that he wasn't pressed against my side anymore.

A few years down the road at 5 he is almost too big to carry. Comfortably, singing him a lullaby, watching him work through knowing and not knowing, wet and dry, hunger and satiation. Those days have been replaced. The tooth fairy came last week to replace a missing tooth with a coin.

Not knowing has been replaced by knowing almost too much. Wet and dry are largely conscious acts, much as we are still sometimes surprised by wet.

I spoke to him yesterday on a phone call to Chicago, where he's spending ten days visiting his mother Pamela's family. He told me that he had got a new pet monkey, and I played along with it, asking him how he intended to take care of this monkey, given that he had abandoned his pet rabbits to head to Chicago. He gave me his by now standard self-assured answer...he would be fine. And then he asked me whether I wanted to speak to the monkey. Of course, I said 'yes'. And for the next minute of our conversation, I got treated to a great George of the Jungle act.

So here we are, fatherhood and sonhood. All very nice.

Two Years Later

I haven't posted to this blog in two years. I must have gotten blog fatigue. Has anyone ever written anything about the exhausted feeling you get trying to walk the line between making a blog...especially one about your son...interesting, revealing and also respectful of him? Or any of the conflicts that bedevil us all?

I'll try to catch us up on the last two years of Boobee's life. First, I think we all call him Dani these days. He seems to have outgrown Boobee-ness, although I call him that from time to time.

It's mostly good news. He's grown tremendously. He's a very active kid, a livewire, maybe too much so, very quick mentally...is learning French already. Knows how to greet and inquire after one's health in French. Reasons beautifully. A little addicted to The Game, a store his mother frequents, where he gets toys.

He graduated from The Playroom to the Gingerbread School last week. He's all of three and five months.

Boobee and His Growth

The amazed first-time dad always finds marvels to proclaim to the world. Boobee laughing as our dog Sonny takes a pratfall while racing furiously down stairs ahead of us. Aaahhh, so he has a sense of humor, and why wouldn't he? He cries, doesn't he? Although crying is probably viewed as part of the survival kit for babies. Humor must come later, a sign of a growing intelligence. Of course, he's shown himself a master - for his age - of comprehension, the ability to pick out the moon in the sky, the sound a motorbike makes, and so on.

And the reverse of humor, if that's what his crying is about, has also deepened. After a week away in Kumasi, where he had, by all accounts, a fabulous time with all the kids and grown-ups in my aunt's beautiful house, he came back to Accra, and stopped in to see me on Thursday, on his way to his playroom. It turned out the cabdriver had his wife in the car, and that they were on their way to the hospital to check in on their premature baby, so I returned Boobee to his car seat quicker than he liked, to enable Ben and his wife to be on their way.

It was distressing to see his chin quiver, to struggle manfully (is that the right word for a seventeen month-old?) to hold back the tears, to see his face settle into an unquestioning, stoic, disappointed sadness, as though to say, "you're doing something to me I don't like, but I have no power to stop you, I leave it to your own sense of rightness!"

I don't know, I'm not strong enough to handle this...

But when he laughs, when he's clever, then it's alright, although at bottom I wonder whether he really is, that his physical well-being, his intelligence will continue, and not falter. I do hope so. I'll never stop loving him, I don't think. I think it's possible to, a man in the Ann Beattie story I just read did stop loving his wife and daughter, but I'll always love Boobee.

Sad News Again

It is sad news again: A- O- lost her valiant struggle against cancer last Tuesday night. She had been stricken in all the time that I'd actually known her; she'd been pretty well-known as a kid, we'd grown up together for a time in the same neighborhood, but I'd not really known her till I returned to Ghana in 2002. She was very open to some of us about her condition, although she never seemed to express an ounce of self-pity, at least not to me. An elegant, beautiful woman, she had always seemed to have a smile around her lips, playing around her eyes. It's fair to say that everyone - male and female - was in love with her.

Interestingly, she also intersects the Boobee story. I think that she was at the Salif Keita concert in Accra, two-odd years ago, and encountered P---, boobies mother in the ladies' room, along with, I'm inclined to believe, R- N-, with whom, it was rumored by some, she had a longstanding relationship. P--'s recounting of her exchange with "the two lesbians" was distasteful in its homophobia, and fueled and reinforced my determination to be rid of her.

I saw A- again early in P---'s pregnancy, at a time when my belief in our incompatibility was causing me to urge her to have an abortion. We were at Max Mart, the supermarket that where you could generally see people you knew, when P--- walked by, in fact, I'd seen P--- in the store, and she'd given me some kind of a letter stating her determination to have the child. I was standing in the lobby of the building catching up with A- when P-- walked by; she exchanged a frosty greeting with me, and to my surprise, I guess, an altogether more cordial one with A---, and continued on her way.

As she walked past us, A- remarked on P--'s beauty, whereupon I told her about the sticky situation the two of us were embroiled in. It was probably the first time that I'd told someone outside my family and really close friends (among whom, sadly, she couldn't be counted, as we'd only had a handful of meetings, albeit thoroughly engaging and pleasurable ones together) about the impending arrival of Boobee.

She the news with her characteristic equanimity, probably urged more acceptance and tolerance on me. All of which I listened to bemusedly, not telling her about P---'s prior remarks about their encounter at the concert. I'm pretty sure that it wouldn't have made a difference to her, that she would still have found a gentle word to say about P---'s predicament, and might even have thought the worse of me for bringing up the topic at that time.

Anyhow, S-- A--, my ex-lover, who was one her closest friends, had told me a month ago that A- was going through a relapse. I'm sure that my unvoiced feeling was that it would be hard for her to pull out of this episode, not that I didn't wish her all strength, but because I'd seen how ravaged she'd been by the previous bout with the difficult treatments of her disease. In a sense, I wasn't too surprised when she sent me the message yesterday. I took a break from the task I had at hand, the writing of talking points for the senior government officials who'll meet the American investors next week, and thought how much I was going to miss her. I talked to S- A- again in the afternoon, she was crying softly (crying audibly wouldn't have been in character for my baby), I think, as she recounted the fact that A- was looking forward to going to Mexico to try an alternative treatment if the chemo she was going through failed. Sadly, it wasn't to be

Mr. Agoe Wo Odzoba (Mr Agoe R.I.P.)

August 19th, 2005

I'd been listening to my ghastly guilty pleasure, the BBC soap opera, which, this evening, dealt with Jamshed Dastoor hearing that he had only eight more weeks to live. Plenty of heavy emoting, his wife [I later found out that she wasn't his wife, more about that anon] Gabriella, still early in their accidental pregnancy, all the textbook questions asked: the meaning of life, would anything ever be the same again, should his co-workers be told. In the midst of their exchanges, a colleague he supervised called with some issue or the other. He handles the query with dispatch, aplomb, even. Some things change, some don't. Still, very plastic, a good actor giving a good reading.

I limbered myself out of bed, my head and gut all reacting to the beer I'd drunk by the bottleful, the fish and banku I'd with a spicy pepper, tomato and onion side sauce. Very good going down, a little rough to wake up to, too many real reminders of the passage of humors through the human corpus.

Still, out of bed, I draw the curtains close, debating whether to listen to Betty Carter, she'd sound great again on my repaired Naim CD player, parallel processing some thoughts brought on by the radio-play. What else? The roster of the dead of the recent past. Kojo Gyan, died young, of cancer, his beauty amberized in his casket, then, of course, Kojo Hayford's dad, a ripe old age, going in his own way, accepting the inevitable, directing the passage. Thinking also of the traditional glass of water I leave out each night so that the spirits might quench their thirsts in their passage through my house.

I hear the phone ringing downstairs, it's latish, the phone is ringing on the office line, but I can pick it up upstairs. I'm half-hoping that the comely young lady I'd bantered with all afternoon had made good on her threat to call me in the office. The first phone I pick up needs recharging, the second is unplugged, all isn't lost - the switchboard rolls the call over to an upstairs line.

I get to the phone and am brought up short by the voice on the line. It's both familiar and not, I know it and I don't. In the millisecond I have to answer the rather formal "hello, Kofi Blankson,?" it offers, I think it is one of the people who have called me anonymously to warn me of this or that. I haven't heard from the gentleman who never really gave me his name or any way to contact me in the calls he made.

"Robert A-," the present voice half-shouts, as I struggle to place him.

"What, do I know you?" "I'm sorry, do I know you?'

"It's Robert, Ataa Agoe's son...," he continues, rather more tremulously, certainly under strain. Robert has a drink problem, certain things suggest themselves to me, none of which I want to deal with.

"Robert," I exclaim. "How's your father?" The words have their own way of foreshadowing, I know before I knew, having failed to follow up on my note to myself to call to find out how he was.

"He died!"

"Oh, Robert, I'm really sorry to hear that." My way of dealing with this kind of news I learnt from my dad. Immediate acceptance, acceptance of the rolling of the wheel of life.

In a sense the news dislodges the block my failure to call had put on me. In'67, in August, yet again, a similar failure to go to read to my grandfather when he was terminally ill convinced me that I hadn't done all I could have to postpone his death.

Death, I trade you I Sam. Ch. -, V -, for a year's deferral of your appointment with Samuel Bus-Kwofie. This time, not a child, the limits of my power laid bare by the world's failure to listen to me, I hold no such illusion. The last time Ataa Agoe came here, really, that was goodbye, no second thoughts no regrets.

That visit was pure Mr. Agoe. If I may be fanciful, his fleshless body, wasted in the last days that his thighs - he showed them to me, I seem to remember - may have seemed no bigger than my arms, foretokened death. Yet his performance was scrappy, he drove himself here, accompanied by the aunt of his last child, a woman who worked in the teaching hospital in Kumasi, and whom he credited with having saved his life.

I was elated to see him, he seemed to have beaten death at its game, yet, yet,! Could such a traumatized body catch up to the willing of its spirit? He had been ravaged by the course of his illness. His weight loss, he said, had made people wonder whether he had AIDS, a thought that had suggested itself to me. In a sense it was worse than that - the same dispiriting stew of misdiagnosis, scarcity, the inefficiencies that plague our lives here at every turn. Of course, there was too much of a story to capture here: cauterizations to stop bleeding in the anal tract, unavailable files leading to interminable delays for treatment, hard to obtain medications, a better new doctor who said that his colleague had done such a bad job that he was disinclined to even try lest he die on his watch. He gave him a month or two more, we thank him.

Being Mr. Agoe, I was spared no detail: shit by the bucketful, pain enough to swamp the consciousness, the existential terror of being alone as the illness took hold, a combativeness held in check by a bewildering loss of the strength to do more, Samson with his locks sheared.

Bravo, I said, when he was at the end, the scaly thin limbs, certainly, they could be fattened again. The support of his beau-laide friend absolved me from my guilt at not being there. My last call to him had been about getting him to do me another of the many favors he had done previously. He couldn't, he told me, he'd been sick, on his way to the hospital.

I'll never forget him, impossible to, he'd wired this house, installed practically every fixture - not a soulful reason on its face, but zen-like if you knew his devotion to doing things right. His counsel was priceless, he'd fought an estate battle similar to the one I'm defending; after a decade or so he'd prevailed, bloodied but victorious. His delight in Pam's pregnancy, his reassurance when I couldn't bring myself to feel much joy in the circumstances, his foretelling of the pleasure I'd feel in having a child, the fact that I'd come home, pick up a kid who'd dirty my pristine white shirt, and how I'd feel pleasure in that, the fact that he believed in me, that the difference in age between us meant nothing at all to him, he absolutely was right. At the end, a real person, intelligent, his battles - ex-wife, with Robert, business partners, the trade - all of these I think he approached as a person, unpredictable, so not boring, but always, it seemed to me, the decent thing was done.

I didn't listen to Betty Carter, her artistry would have ennobled the evening, again the BBC guided my hand: a program on papal travels had a Leonard Cohen song - Susanne (?) - as a soundtrack. I couldn't think of a more worldly-wise, more accepting poet of our life here on this earth.

As usual things change, and they stay the same. As I started to place my recollections on paper before they were dulled by tomorrow's own full plate, my phone rang (I'd just sent a text message to Abeiku Smith and my brother Paa Kow to tell them about Mr. Agoe, and thought it was one of them calling back), it was Arie, he wanted to park his overheating car here, he was on his way to see his girlfriend.

I feel oddly at peace, my mood lightened from the preceding days' allotments, when I could feel despair closing in. The fact that a dear friend feels no more pain, that I can remember enough to write about him, and still not exhaust my memories of him. I thank my lucky stars for these opportunities.

Ataa Agoe, thanks! Boobee is a great kid, glorying in both of his parent, oblivious, at least I hope so, to both our quirks, although he now pats me on the back when I pick him up, as though he senses my need for reassurance these days. My guess is that you weren't right just about this, that there were many other people who felt the way I do about your talent for friendship and plain speech.

Not All Peaks and Valleys

Wish I could remember the exact quote and who said it, but in some ways it's clear that war and fatherhood have a couple of things in common. At least around 15 months, I think the notion of long periods of normalcy, doing drills, watching him, trying to think ahead to when he can play tennis, or talk about a book, and the punctuation of these periods of the terror of watching him teeter as he climbs up a staircase, or the beauty of actually watching a connection form between a word and an object...this must be what the person must had in mind when he talked about tedium punctuated by a few minutes of terror.

Questions I'd Ask

Imagine that we could go back in time, some time back, not a hundred years, not fifty, but a mere four years and seven months ago, which was a time of immense hope for me. I'd never made so much money, never felt as top of my game as I did then, my father was alive, I lived between New York and Accra. It's cliched to think this but I felt then that the world lay at my feet.

Of course, life doesn't always move along this trajectory. I made a decision to move back to Ghana a year later to start a business here, hoping to parlay my contacts and the slick NY business skills into a life that unified more of the various aspects of my life. I felt unrooted in NY, my existence was pleasant, even anodyne, my problems were those of the overfed. Moving to Ghana seemed to be a place in which I could contribute.

In addition to all of this, I was anxious to be around my parents as they grew older - my dad was just into his ninth decade, my mother in her seventh.

So it was not an unhappy time, not a lot different from my consistent approach of self-belief and a pretty long-term view.

I went to Swedru, a relatively big Ghanaian town, to visit my Dad, who was then staying with a friend, and was there with his companion Auntie G. M. Dad had been traveling around the country, unable for some reasons to stay in his houses in Accra and Anomabo. It felt as though he was in pretty decent shape. I really didn't understand why he didn't stay in any of these well-appointed places, perhaps they were too big, perhaps he moved around because he liked being away from home - I often felt the same way living in a hotel room, for a while I could sustain the illusion that I had everything I needed, that I'd outran the mail, if you like.

I'd spent the previous week celebrating the New Year in New York. I threw a party that had the most interesting collection of people floating in and out. We even had a couple of people who had flown in from Denmark to spend the night at a party in New York. Fun, wasn't it.

And, buoyed by that entry into this seemingly unlimited future, and the euphoria of the Ghanaian election in which a hated government had been voted out, I flew into Accra in early July. It'd be naive to pretend that I didn't know that coming to Ghana would be a challenge, after all, if I didn't know that, I should have had an inkling of what might have lain ahead when our Ghana Airways direct flight was 15 hours late leaving New York. Unlike the other unfortunates who were on the flight with me, and who would spend almost a whole day and night at JFK, some sleeping on bare floors in the corridors, or slumped like disembodied sacks of charcoal against the walls of the terminal, I was insulated by the fact that I could take a cab back to the apartment and get a good night's sleep. Actually, I ended up going to a birthday party. I think my friend J. A-M might have been visiting and might have been conducting a tryst in my apartment. Anyhow, I wasn't too badly put out by this foray into Africa - the idea of not being able to travel, change plans on the fly, the confrontation with scarcity - all of this was cause for chuckling and bemusement, not enough of a reason not to move back here a year later.

I'd been to see my Dad at least once before I went back with my video camera to interview him, to record some impressions of their lives, especially since I was childless at that time and thought that this would be a way of bequeathing a family, I hesitate to call it a history, story to the eventual children I would have. And, funnily enough, I've had to view the tape again to remember the questions I asked in the hour of taping that followed, I didn't have a game plan beyond letting Dad himself run with the interview. He was such a gifted raconteur that he would fasten on your question and give you ten minutes of detailed reminiscence.

Still, if I'd been a professional rather than a doting son, I would have asked: why weren't you able to marry and settle down with a woman, despite your obvious desire and love for women? Why were you so hard for us to approach when we were kids, when you seemed to not even love your own children? How did you conceive of building these big villas and mansions, you, a poor kid from Anomabo? Why did your desire of acceptance lead you to accepting - perhaps even campaigning for - the Nkosohene title in Anomabo?

Boobee, I think you'll have the opportunity to ask me these questions, or at least your version of them, but I can only say, "don't be a doting son," when you do.

Be well, my lovely son.

By the way, this is the 28th anniversary of your great-grandfather Samuel Bus Kwofie's death. He was my mother's father, a person of some renown in the Gold Coast and, later, Ghana as a school headmaster (no small office in those days) and a journalist.