The Grandfather Who Was Sure the Bush Was Not For Him

My very good excuse

I had a very good excuse for never going to the bush, and I had used it for forty years. I keep kosher. Properly, carefully, the way my mother kept it and her mother before her. In the city this is simply my life, unremarkable, woven into every ordinary day. But the bush, the lodges, the game reserves that everyone around me seemed to adore, those I had quietly filed under things that are not for me. How could they be? A camp in the middle of nowhere, a communal kitchen, meat of who knows what and prepared who knows how. It was easier, and I told myself more honest, to simply stay home.

So while my friends came back glowing from the Kruger and from Botswana with their photographs of lions and their stories of sundowners, I nodded and smiled and privately felt the small, familiar ache of being on the outside of something. I told myself I did not mind. I minded. A man can lie to everyone including himself for a very long time, but the ache does not go away, it just gets quieter and more practised.

The grandchildren who would not let it lie

It was my grandchildren who refused to accept the excuse, and they refused with the particular stubbornness of the young who love you and cannot understand why you will deny yourself a good thing. My eldest granddaughter, Talia, who was about nineteen and fearless, sat me down one Friday night after the meal and asked me straight out why I had never once in my life seen an elephant in the wild. I gave her my very good excuse. She listened, and then she said, gently but without any give in it, "Zaida, have you actually looked, or have you just decided?"

I had not actually looked. That was the truth of it. I had decided, decades ago, and I had never once tested the decision against the world as it actually was. I had built a wall and then admired how solid the wall was without ever checking whether there was a gate in it.

Talia, being of her generation, did the looking for me. She sat next to me on the couch with her phone and she started showing me things, and I started, to my own surprise, to lean in.

Discovering the gate in the wall

What she found undid my excuse entirely, and I felt the ground shift as it did. It turned out there were people who ran a proper Kosher Safari, that this was not some awkward compromise cobbled together but an actual, thought through thing, with the kashrut taken as seriously as I take it in my own home. I did not believe it at first. I asked Talia to read it to me twice. A camp in the bush where the kitchen was kosher, where a man like me could eat every meal without that low anxiety I did not even realise I carried at other people's tables.

I began to ask the sort of detailed questions that I ask about anything to do with kashrut, the questions that usually make people impatient, and I was braced to be brushed off. I was not brushed off. The more I understood about how a serious Kosher Tour is actually run, the supervision, the separate preparation, the care taken with every part of it, the more the wall in my mind came down, brick by brick. These were people who understood that for someone like me, the food is not a preference or a fussiness. It is the whole basis on which I can be present and at ease anywhere.

Saying yes, and being frightened of it

I said yes, and then I was quietly terrified, which nobody warns you about at sixty six. I was frightened of the smallness of the planes, of the heat, of being far from everything familiar, of being the old man who could not manage. My wife, may I say, was delighted and unsurprised, having predicted for years that I would crack eventually. The whole family came. Children, grandchildren, the works. Talia made sure of that. She was not going to let me have the experience without witnesses.

The morning we left I stood in my own kitchen, my kosher kitchen, my safe place, and I felt the pull to invent a new excuse, a bad back, a forgotten appointment. I did not. I picked up my bag and I got in the car, and I have rarely been more proud of an old man for a small act of courage.

The morning I forgot to be anxious

I will not try to describe the animals. Better writers than me have failed at it and I am not going to embarrass myself. What I can describe is the thing I did not expect, which happened at breakfast on the second morning. We had come back from a drive at first light, we had seen a herd of elephant moving through the trees in that impossible silence they have, and I sat down to eat, and I ate, and I was halfway through the meal before I realised that I had not once thought about whether I could. It was simply food, kosher food, put in front of me with care, and I was free to be exactly where I was, with my family, watching the light come up over a place I had denied myself for forty years.

That freedom, that was the gift. Not the lions, wonderful as they were. The freedom to be fully present, to not be half occupied with the quiet management that observance in the wrong setting requires. People who run proper Kosher Safaris understand, I think, that what they are really giving is not a menu. It is the ability to disappear entirely into a sunrise without a single part of you standing guard.

What I carried home

My grandchildren have their photographs of me, and I will admit some of them are of an old man weeping quietly in a game vehicle, which I would prefer they did not circulate, though I know they will. Talia has one of the two of us at a sundowner, her arm around me, both of us grinning, that she has printed and framed and given me, and it sits where I see it every day.

What I carried home was bigger than the trip. It was the understanding, arriving late but arriving, that I had spent decades mistaking my own untested assumptions for the shape of the world. I had assumed the bush was not for me, and I had never checked, and a nineteen year old had to ask me whether I had looked or just decided. I have started asking myself that question about other walls I have built. There are more of them than I would like to admit.

I am going back next year. I booked it myself this time, which felt like a small revolution. And when a friend gives me the old nod, the one I used to give, the one that means the bush is surely not for someone like us, I take out Talia's photograph and I say, gently but without any give in it, have you actually looked, or have you just decided.