Counting it all joy

In that fabulous novel, The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway begins by revealing the advice his father gave him as a teenager: "Whenever you feel like criticising anyone," he told me, "Just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
 
That has in a way become my philosophy on life. I was looking at the resolutions I made at the beginning of this year and was shocked that the most important didn't work out. I didn't get to complete my Masters degree, didn't buy my first car and didn't even slide an engagement ring down the finger of the gorgeous woman God has preserved for me.

But I'm not going to gripe and blame myself and smash things because of the plans that worked out not. As Bebe and Cece Winans sing, I'm rather going to count it all joy because the trials that confronted me left me with a maturity of character that can only be learned in the school of hard knocks.

Besides, when I look back at where I've come from, and the advantages I've had such as having a father that so believes in education that he did everything to see me through school, and when I peer at the golden promises hidden in futurity, I lift my hands to the Almighty God with a grateful heart.

That's why December is my favourite month because in it the sun sets on the year and rises on another in January with fresh expectations. It's almost synonymous with finishing a great book and picking another with hopes of it being a greater read. Better still, it's like making love to your wife for the first time on the nuptial night and knowing the second will be about more discovery toward perfect consummation!

That's why you won't catch me brooding on the melancholy that defined this year; the sickness that almost shoved me into the jaws of death, the choking teargas following the (in)famous walk-to-work protests, the economic crisis and the unpleasant brokenness it birthed, and Umeme's capricious power that ruined my electronic gadgets.

Keep walking no matter what

The optimist is approaching next year with the fervour of a meteor man! Like Nick Carraway at the end of the novel musing on the "green light" that his departed friend Jay Gatsby very much believed in, we must "run faster, stretch out our arms further" till all our dreams come true.

Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Mary

I remember being arrayed in new "Kaunda" suits, and flowery ready-made cotton dresses for my sisters. From a distance, the instrumental versions of popular Christmas carols oozed nostalgically from the church organ.

Posing with Dad on Christmas in the good 'ol days

But sweeter was the night arrangement when natives grouped on Christmas Eve and moved house to house singing their hearts out. It would start in my sleep, the mellow notes reaching my ears with angelic faintness. And then the music would rise with such grudging beauty as would rouse me, lighting my face up with a smile on realising they were the night choristers singing outside our veranda.

My father would give them money, and they would ask us our favourite carols, and would sing, longingly, particularly Silent Night, from the core of their hearts, before moving on to the next house.

I would linger out in the moonlight, watching the stars twinkling aesthetically in the sky. We were living in Kigezi back then, and I've never seen anything like the beauty of the stars in the Kigezi heavens!

After church, we would sit round the dining table garnished with all sorts of delicacies, devouring and washing them down with sodas (soda was a big deal back then) while between swallows, father entertained us with memorable anecdotes.

Later, he would teach us rare poses while the village photographer snapped away. Christmas was the only time father was not tough, the only time we were completely free with him. And how we relished the good merry cheer together!

At night, he would insert new batteries in his Phillips radio-cassette, and with a single glide across the floor, bow before my mother, his hand extended. She would pick it with an obliging smile, and soon they would be gliding and flying and whirling together in a dance of waltz to the effervescent sounds of Dolly Parton. We would watch, hypnotised, till father said it was our turn. And the best dancer would earn some money for sweets.

That way, my father gave Christmas a special definition that always makes me look forward to every December 25.

Even though times have changed, it still moves me that some people have lost faith in Christmas. That's why I'm dedicating this piece to my colleague, Mary Atuheire. Ditch your office plans, and come spend it with me. It'll be a Christmas to remember, I promise. December will never be your worst month of the year again.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, Mary!

Running for Love

In a race with an elephant, so goes the saying, even the chameleon reached the finishing mark! That much was true in last Sunday’s MTN Kampala marathon.   

Anyway, as the throng set off in their yellow jerseys for the grueling race, memories of my inaugural participation in 2009 gushed back. That year I got involved, not for charity but for love! I was secretly in love with a woman but had failed to muster the guts to tell her. So I figured that if I can endure the rigors of completing the marathon, it meant I had the stamina I very much needed to look the beauty in the eyes and profess my love. 

Before set off in 2009 on a run for love!

But just 2km into the marathon, my lungs filled with burning pressure, my heart was almost exploding, and my muscles were throbbing excruciatingly. I was on the verge of quitting but the optimist in me taunted, “You quit now and you'll never see that girl again!”

In my preparation for the race, I had read the spectacular story of Pheidippides running from the village of Marathon to Athens to deliver the good news of a military triumph. Now his story came back to me, as if to spur me further on. I mean this Greek patriot had moreover done 40km and here I was already fretting over a mere 12km! I gritted my teeth in shame, swearing to complete the race even if it meant dropping dead afterward. 

It was an invigorating revolve that saw me overtake a buxom girl whose breasts were jouncing inside her vest in rhythm with her pace, and a man who was slogging it with frightening weariness etched on his face, his tongue sticking out like a dog’s. He looked about to drop dead but was a better athlete than the muscled guy that shamelessly jumped on a boda-boda when the going got tough, making me realise I wasn’t doing badly after all. 

As we approached the finishing mark, I barrelled past others like a bullet. I had found my groove and there was no stopping me now! What a great feeling as I crossed the finish line. I tell you it was more elating that what barefooted Abebe Bikila must have felt when he aced the 1960 Olympic Games marathon in Rome. 

And that evening, with the new found confidence, I dialed that number and won that long overdue date with the apple of my eye!

The Difference Between a Hero and a Coward

I’m no movie buff, but once in a while I go on a scouring mission to video libraries in my neighbourhood for something unique. And last weekend I returned home with Tyson, the 1995 movie about the highs and lows of the former heavyweight boxing champion. I was so earnest to see if this movie would validate my offering in this column last Sunday that we ought to approach life like boxing pros approach a bout. 

“I was just a kid when I first got to see Muhammad Ali,” the movie opens with Mike Tyson (Michael Jai White) saying. “I saw the way people looked up to him, I saw their smiling faces, and I said to myself, ‘that’s what I wanna be –I wanna be the champion of the world!”

I had to hit the pause button and savour these words! One has to have something to stir him, for which he has to begin striving for early in life to get to the top. For Mike, it was watching Ali doing his thing, though it really was Constantine “Cus” D’Amato (George C. Scott) that completed Mike’s metamorphosis from the notorious street purse-snatcher to the heavyweight boxing champion of the world.  D’Amato is the man who discovered Mike, adopted and mentored him.

My most memorable lines in the movie is when he tells his protégé about heroes and cowards: “What’s the difference between a hero and a coward?” he asks one morning, and provides the answer before Mike could speak. “There ain’t a difference. Inside they are both exactly alike. Both scared of dying or getting hurt. But it’s what the hero does that makes him a hero. What the other guy doesn’t do that makes him a coward.”

As Franklin D. Roosevelt once famously said, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. D’Amato agrees, telling Mike never to worry about getting scared going into a fight because “fear is a friend of every good and reasonable athlete” but that he has to turn that fear into fire, into a gun! Mike relied largely on that to knock out most of his opponents.

American boxer Rocky Marciano retired in 1956 with a record 49 wins and no losses, becoming the first heavyweight champion in history to retire undefeated. Here Marciano takes Roland LaStarza to the ropes in 1953

And like Rocky Marciano, one has to be tenacious and refuse to accept the prospect of losing, or the concept of defeat to enter your mind. This is as real in boxing as in life for one to win, no doubt!

The Joy of Achievement

“Who am I,” Phionah asked rhetorically, doing her best to control the avalanche of emotions vibrating through her. She was wearing an academic gown, complete with a hood on which dangled the characteristic green laces.

Last Friday that was, and Phionah had just graduated from Kampala International University with a degree in Business Administration. An achievement the only daughter of a poor mother in a place as remote as Bitereko, somewhere in Mitooma district, knew not would be hers, had her Uncle, Daudi, not sponsored her campus education.

And now Phionah vowed to go on and probably become the first woman PhD holder in Bitereko! With that glint of ambition in her eyes, I can see abundant vicissitudes of good fortune stalking her everywhere.

Phionah was sharing a class with her cousin, Sixtus - Daudi’s son, so it was understandable they got one graduation party.

Phionah and Sixtus were overjoyed for the road that has been!

Sixtus’s speech mirrored the joy of achievement too, but differently. His was animated, and sprinkled with humour and witticisms that were quite a delightful surprise to some of us who know him as a quiet, shy guy. When father looked son in the eye and asked to be paid back soon in form of a wife who would give him clever grandchildren, Sixtus thanked him heartily but asked, “for only 10 years” to make his father’s wish come true! Of course everyone burst out laughing, including his father.

He also talked about how life at school had sometimes “boxed” him, but how in spite of the “punches” he had gone on to triumph. Sixtus’s juxtaposition of life with boxing reminded me of heavyweight pugilist Joe “Smokin” Frazier who died recently, the man who brought new delights to my favourite sport with what experts dubbed the “leapin’ left hook” that famously earned Muhammad Ali his first loss.

Take a pause and think then what Joe’s joy of achievement was on that memorable day –Match 8, 1971? Maybe it’s high time we started looking at life as our boxing opponent. That way, you rise early every day, train more, work harder, and when it tries to throw jabs at you, it’ll find you ready –ready to duck and throw harder punches back. Nothing will scare you.

And you know what you’ll become? A champion! And you know what that brings? The deserved exultant joy of achievement!