My friend Jared and I sat on a wall at Muizenberg beach on Sunday night drinking quarts. We had a heart to heart, or more of a post heart to heart. This guy arrives with what must have been a three week old pitbull puppy. We just remarked that there's something special about that relationship between man and dog, thousands of years old, that will always prevail. The little puppy was caught by surprise as the tide caught up to them, and we chuckled as it struggle to climb up a small step and just sought of hung there, suspended in it's effort. It reminded me of when swimming as a child something that should be so effortless, climbing out, suddenly requires gargantuan effort.
We found ourselves talking to this guy and he said that the puppy was the runt of what was already a weak litter, but still he would give it a chance to fight for it's life. He had a kind of brutal understanding of nature, in the way that it refines itself by weeding out the weak and rewarding the strong. He wouldn't help the dog out of the water, but instead guided her up the rocks. He decided on a name for her that very night. "SKIM". In afrikaans it translates to 'foam', but also to 'spirit'. Skim was always fluctuating between life and death.
We discovered he's name, the man, to be Arthur. A noble name for the someone I would totally follow into battle. We talked for hours and were humbled and touched. I won't even attempt to do it justice by blogging it. All I can do is give credit to the profoundness of our experience, and hopefully show some of the wisdom we acquired in future posts.
Sholom
