My mother. She’s as kooky as ever she could be. I sometimes just stand there, mouth agog at some of the hair brained schemes she comes up with – all with complete conviction. Every plan she hatches is to her a stroke of pure genius, such that would bring a tear to her eye should it ever make the shift from the conceptual to 3D reality.
Truth be told however, the vast majority of these schemes leave most people a little pale or at the least, feeling slightly uneasy. Stomach cramps and the like.
The latest plan she gleefully shared with us the other day was another sparkling gem of insanity. And it weighed about 82 carats.
“Lets make a huge aviary out of that great chasm !!!”
She points ecstatically over the lawn to a huge fissure on our farm carved out of the ground from millions of years of erosion.
An uneasy silence hangs in the room as we all look at each other nervously. Somewhere in the distance a dog barks. Time passes.
The site of this proposed aviary is probably big enough to engulf a whaling boat, a double decker school bus and the British Armed Forces with a few spaces to spare. Its bottom is filled with water, which in turn is inhabited by crawly things and legavaans [sic] (which are huge komodo type dragon reptiles with forked tongues and an appetite for little fluffy creatures. And birds. And bird eggs.)
The fact that you would need about 5 kilometers of netting, 300 tons of pre-stressed steel, 3000 pine trees in decking, a rifle (for the dragons) and a Masters degree in engineering to get the job done doesn’t seem to enter her mind at this point.
My father looks vaguely stressed. I would imagine he’s feeling pretty much the same as an Egyptian slave whose just been shown a copy of the blueprints for the pyramids of Giza.
At the end of the day however, these golden nuggets are what make her the person she is – they are her idiosyncratic fingerprints which no one else (God willing) could ever come close to replicating. To think of her as completely sane and practical would be stripping away the gloss from her personality. And trust me; we need glossy people in this world of ours.
If it weren’t for these people we would probably not have half the amazing inventions we take for granted today, that in the beginning were greeted with animosity and cries of “preposterous!”
Things like the telephone, flight, and wonderbras™
So to all you kooky people out there: I thank you.
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