if i was immortal

no one ever attends the funerals of their kindergarten teachers, or even their weddings or birthdays...they are people we meet when our lives are small.....as we grow we aspire to greater potentialities that we believe those fat mamas cannot hold to...we start thinking of Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey....yes, our worlds become big and we forget the people who once overshadowed our lives with their bulk (they are usually stereotyped as being obese) and their might...

but i did attend my kindergarten teacher's funeral....but do not get me wrong...it is not like i so much liked her.....any sympathy i felt must have been a great consolation for most of the folks were just there to ensure she was buried before she could resurrect and interfere with all the niceties present....now you will wonder why people had cause to hate her like that...but fionina korus was no ordinary lady....first of all she was all modelly and long-leggedly.....come to think of it her legs must have been 12-feet long......

naturally a kindergarten proffession would hardly have suited her and being more than well awre of this she decided to engage herself in other trades......one of them being the world's oldest...and among her first clients....as rudely discovered by a classmate of mine when she opened her office door to show fionina her pencil drawing ....was none other than the local parish priest....two lessons to be learnt from this

1. never open doors without knocking, the results can be traumatizing
2. inasmuch as we confess our sins to parish priests they mostly more worse than us-offencewise

anyway, she must have plied on well with her trade because by the time she died she lived in an elegant mansion complete with an electric fence and an ice-cream-shaped swimming pool....

and that is how i ended up in kitale (her final resting place) after receiving a lacy card signed by none other than fionina (her death wish was that all her kindergarten kids attend her burial)......yep, she did it before she kicked the bucket....so as the priest (the same one caught en flagrante delicto) went on boola boola about her supposed virtues i decided to spend my time admiring her coffin.....it looked very palatable and choc lately-inspite of the decomposing corpse inside..yer, i know..what a nasty thought!

shaped like a boat so as to represent fionina's childhood wish of sailing around the seven seas like Vasco da Gama or Bonny Anne, that famous Carribean pirate woman, it reminded me of Pharaohs who preferred being buried in ornate coffins shaped like papyrus boats so that they could all go sailing down the river Nile to meet the sun-god...the vikings too thought it a noble idea to perish in the harsh Nordic seas....and apparently the neanderthals as well.....i don't know whether fionina achieved that dream...

guess what am trying to say is that death is a reality that we have to face one time or another...people eventually die.....friends, family, you and I.....it is a handicap we wish we could overcome....some philosophers argue that civilization is all a part of man's futile attempt to conquer death...Christians say that they do not die but are only promoted to a higher glory....i do not know but higher glory or not may death stay far from bay on our swell ride on planet earth

the devil that danced on the water

shoes tell a lot about someone's character, especially my character...here goes a wild tale.....i was walking down moi avenue today after a particularly nasty paper.....and suddenly my image flashed brightly and madly before me in one of those glass windows of a fancy, gisty shoe shop with a name that is difficult to remember...my eyes went all the way down to my sport shoes, they were torn around the edges as if a mouse nibbled them and the laces were too long that i could trip over them if i walked too fast....yet, when my sister gave them to me some time back they were so fresh and new and untortured, but after a time spent with dear old mr.writer they are telling a tale so different to the mind of the visualizer.....i felt this pang in my soul like i have been neglecting a part of my life, letting it waste away unnoticed....wish i knew which part that were.....for if anything else, crisp and new, is going the way of my shoe then boy do i need to see a psychiatrist...

speaking about shoes, my mum has this old time keepsake, brown sandals made out of a strange material ( it is hard to tell whether they were khaki or leather), she got them when she was about five years old and living in colonial kenya..... a state of emergency had been declared and no one was allowed to move about freely, but her elder sister, who worked in a pyrethrum board in eldoret, sneaked her out of the reserve one day on the back of a rattling truck that suffered from heavy bouts of whooping cough..... after many resuscitations along the way, the truck finally arrived in eldoret and my mother for the first time viewed this strange world of white people moving about with elegant hats and shoes, yes shoes, because my mother finally realized that what she was wearing could not be justifiably called shoes when placed next to what those white ladies were wearing.......

colonialism came and went, and those fine, dandy, high-nosed, aristocratic British ladies finally packed away from the sweet kenyan sunshine to wild destinations to the Isle of Mann or wherever colonialists go, but my mum still kept on to her old shoes, she never wore them again but time to time she glances at them, now especially that her sister died of ovarian cancer, perhaps she holds on to them because they remind her of dear sister's love.......

imelda marcos had 2000 pairs of shoes, 2000 pair....my foot, no wonder she looked so vain, i mean what do you need all those pairs for when you are only going to wear them once in 3 years....now this brings me to favourite topic-shoes.....no, don't get me wrong....am not a shoe freak and have little idea about the latest fashion in the same.....i only love shoes because they tell me something about the wearer......i assumed that the late queen mother was a strong determined spirit because she could wear high heels all the way upto her hundreds......i also wonder what kind of shoes Adolf Hitler wore when he committed suicide because that might save a lot of historians trouble when it comes to making up what was going up his mind...

i read an interesting article recently..... about a 3000-year old corpse that was found on the Alpine ridge between Austria and Italy and aptly named Otzi the Ice man.....i hear that his shoes were made with such remarkable industry that all this major shoe companies are trying to learn on his style.....there must be a long tale behind those shoes....were they made by his mother knowing that his son would be away for so long..or was his secret lover who fashioned it, a young lady's sweet present for the passion and intimacy they shared....who killed the bear from which those fine shoes were made....did they set out to hunt it or did it invade their village one moonlit night.....was otzi a scientist who wished to invent shoes that could keep the human feet free from frost-bite in the harsh Alpine coldness....may be one day someone will answer these questions for me, or may be they should not, for they may tamper with its magic, by explaining it away in dry, didacting tones....

anyway, the world's most expensive shoes, the cinderella slippers cost a whooping 2 million bucks and is made out of 565 platinum-set kwiat diamonds ( don't ask me what kwiat is), and were worn by an obscure star, Alicia Krauss to the oscar awards.....i hope that at the end of the day she still felt that her life was still a bazillion more diamonds as compared to that inanimate, soulless slipper, i hope she did not feel small, doing her best to protect that shiny, shodding material that she forgot to shine herself out to others, and make them not look down at the glitter of her feet but on the dazzle of her smile.....

but at the end of the day, shoes are there to stay, and they are much part and parcel of humanity, and if in doubt ask Otzi or the herdsmen of the dusty plains of 3000 BC mesopotamia who designed sandals.....and for a last opinion i believe that my mother's first shoes hold much more treasure than those cinderella slippers......

the devil that danced on the water

shoes tell a lot about someone's character, especially my character...here goes a wild tale.....i was walking down moi avenue today after a particularly nasty paper.....and suddenly my image flashed brightly and madly before me in one of those glass windows of a fancy, gisty shoe shop with a name that is difficult to remember...my eyes went all the way down to my sport shoes, they were torn around the edges as if a mouse nibbled them and the laces were too long that i could trip over them if i walked too fast....yet, when my sister gave them to me some time back they were so fresh and new and untortured, but after a time spent with dear old mr.writer they are telling a tale so different to the mind of the visualizer.....i felt this pang in my soul like i have been neglecting a part of my life, letting it waste away unnoticed....wish i knew which part that were.....for if anything else, crisp and new, is going the way of my shoe then boy do i need to see a psychiatrist...

speaking about shoes, my mum has this old time keepsake, brown sandals made out of a strange material ( it is hard to tell whether they were khaki or leather), she got them when she was about five years old and living in colonial kenya..... a state of emergency had been declared and no one was allowed to move about freely, but her elder sister, who worked in a pyrethrum board in eldoret, sneaked her out of the reserve one day on the back of a rattling truck that suffered from heavy bouts of whooping cough..... after many resuscitations along the way, the truck finally arrived in eldoret and my mother for the first time viewed this strange world of white people moving about with elegant hats and shoes, yes shoes, because my mother finally realized that what she was wearing could not be justifiably called shoes when placed next to what those white ladies were wearing.......

colonialism came and went, and those fine, dandy, high-nosed, aristocratic British ladies finally packed away from the sweet kenyan sunshine to wild destinations to the Isle of Mann or wherever colonialists go, but my mum still kept on to her old shoes, she never wore them again but time to time she glances at them, now especially that her sister died of ovarian cancer, perhaps she holds on to them because they remind her of dear sister's love.......

imelda marcos had 2000 pairs of shoes, 2000 pair....my foot, no wonder she looked so vain, i mean what do you need all those pairs for when you are only going to wear them once in 3 years....now this brings me to favourite topic-shoes.....no, don't get me wrong....am not a shoe freak and have little idea about the latest fashion in the same.....i only love shoes because they tell me something about the wearer......i assumed that the late queen mother was a strong determined spirit because she could wear high heels all the way upto her hundreds......i also wonder what kind of shoes Adolf Hitler wore when he committed suicide because that might save a lot of historians trouble when it comes to making up what was going up his mind...

i read an interesting article recently..... about a 3000-year old corpse that was found on the Alpine ridge between Austria and Italy and aptly named Otzi the Ice man.....i hear that his shoes were made with such remarkable industry that all this major shoe companies are trying to learn on his style.....there must be a long tale behind those shoes....were they made by his mother knowing that his son would be away for so long..or was his secret lover who fashioned it, a young lady's sweet present for the passion and intimacy they shared....who killed the bear from which those fine shoes were made....did they set out to hunt it or did it invade their village one moonlit night.....was otzi a scientist who wished to invent shoes that could keep the human feet free from frost-bite in the harsh Alpine coldness....may be one day someone will answer these questions for me, or may be they should not, for they may tamper with its magic, by explaining it away in dry, didacting tones....

anyway, the world's most expensive shoes, the cinderella slippers cost a whooping 2 million bucks and is made out of 565 platinum-set kwiat diamonds ( don't ask me what kwiat is), and were worn by an obscure star, Alicia Krauss to the oscar awards.....i hope that at the end of the day she still felt that her life was still a bazillion more diamonds as compared to that inanimate, soulless slipper, i hope she did not feel small, doing her best to protect that shiny, shodding material that she forgot to shine herself out to others, and make them not look down at the glitter of her feet but on the dazzle of her smile.....

but at the end of the day, shoes are there to stay, and they are much part and parcel of humanity, and if in doubt ask Otzi or the herdsmen of the dusty plains of 3000 BC mesopotamia who designed sandals.....and for a last opinion i believe that my mother's first shoes hold much more treasure than those cinderella slippers......