You Can Remember Yesterday: True Action and Humour in My Life. as Able-Bodied and Paraplegic

By Jakes Erasmus

This is my memoirs. Memories from my days as able-bodied, until now as paraplegic.
The days in school, me and the horses, combat with terrorists. Do you enjoy your laugh and action from bygone days? I hope you enjoy the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Aug 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499088618

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Not many people can be satisfied and be proud of a successful life history. Normally something went wrong along the way.

I do not think much of Biographies. They are always about someone’s own life successes.

My story is not about achievements, but about humour and tragedy, the things I can remember.

All fast adrenalin driven people do not end up on wheelchairs, but I did. Although I carry on living and laughing for life, I still hate it to be in a wheelchair. Pity, but what happened, did happen.

My journey is one of laughter and of sorrow. Things I remembered when writing this story. Not in a sequential manner, but they all happened.

This book of memories are dedicated to my father and mother, Chris and Driekie Erasmus

CHAPTER ONE

The year was 1982, and it was September. I was on a porch, or was it an open corridor? Yes, I was lying in a bed being pushed somewhere. There were rails around the bed, and my wrists were tied to the rails. Bottles, thin pipes connected to needles, stuck in my arms. Two nurses were doing the pushing and dashing with me along the corridor.

What is going on? When I asked the ladies both of them almost fainted.

I was in the H.F. Verwoerd Hospital, speaking for the first time in two months. It then dawned on me that I was unconscious since my accident, and on my way to the operation theatre. The surgeon, they said, was on his way to fit a plate on my left leg’s tibia.

When it got shattered in the accident, the two pieces of bone did not want to attach to the other. They told me the accident happened two months earlier, and I resided in the intensive care unit for two weeks.

Four dorsal vertebrae in total were broken. One vertebra shattered and it damaged my spinal chord. One rib entered one of my lungs, three pints of blood were drained, and I fractured my scull.

Coming to terms with the damage, I felt that my life meant nothing anymore. I am embittered, but that didn’t change anything. Life must go on, it has to. A man must do his best in life with what he have. Humour made it little better and there was and still is enough to be happy about.

This is so true:

Death is an end to torture, to struggle, to suffering, but it is also an end to warmth, light, the beauty of a running horse, the smell of damp leaves, of gunpowder, the walk of a woman when she knows someone watches.

From a book by - Louis L’Amour

CHAPTER TWO

As a young lad at the end of 1972, I moved from the city to live in the country on my father’s farm. I had a choice, but wanted to go to the school’s hostel. It sounded great. I’ve never lived in a hostel before, so it had to be fun.

The day before school started in January, I moved into my dorm room. It was a Tuesday afternoon. At about five a clock, while I was with new friends, the bell rang. The other guys did not move, so I asked why that bell did ring. They said it is the call for supper.

Don’t we go?

No, we are going to the movies, one lad said.

Oh, may we go? I asked.

No, we are going to sneak out.

Oh.

Well, that was that then. We are going to the movies.

Later on, we saw our chance and sneaked out, into the road, and started for the movie house. Yes, living in a hostel is fun, I thought.

When we came back late that night, the entire hostel was dark. In the darkness I found my way to my room, and believed that it was a pleasant evening.

The next morning, the guys that left the hostel without permission the Tuesday evening, were called, I was called too. The teacher on duty we called Oom Ben. He looked at me and smiled, allowing the new guy, being me, to feel at home. He even told me a joke. My new found dormitory friends received six lashes each, but the new guy, me, received only three.

Later during the day, I attended my Northern-Sotho classes for the first time. Guess who the teacher was… Oom Ben. He looked at me with a grin. We had met before.

On Thursday afternoon, I went to the serving hall for lunch. Everything was as normal as could be and I have new friends. After lunch and study time between seven and eight o clock, we sat outside of the hostel.

We were not supposed to. The rulebook didn’t reach my ears yet. Suddenly the guys started running. Left with no choice, I ran after them. A teacher was on his way and we were breaking one of the rules: no smoking. Running away was the right thing to do, since the teacher was also trailing behind us.

Around a corner, I saw a perfect tree, and quickly climbed it, hiding in the branches. When I was moving higher up, one of my friends followed me upwards. Somehow he didn’t see me. Looking down we saw the teacher running into the night trailing my friends. Luckily he didn’t see us. We did not move.

When everything went quiet, I then asked the guy under me who he was. The poor fellow received such a fright, almost falling out of the tree with shock. He looked up towards me.

My name’s Mike, who are you? The new guy, Jakes?

That was a way of my first meeting with my new friend Mike, under humorous circumstances. After that, we were friends for many years.