Southfield Stories

There’s stories here, in this wild and quietly woolly place called Southfield.

Its not as  dangerous as working in Hanover park or Lavender hill, or rarified as Rondebosch, or touristy as Camps Bay, but its quietly earnest and the people who live and work here feel the have made their stake here and no other place for reasons neither you or I could understand.

And the library, despite appearances, stands in the middle of these stories.

A silent witness, or Greek chorus, depending on the time of the year.

And the librarians inside, who are the gears, grease and fuel that makes the library 'move', we sometimes stand apart, letting the stories unfurl other times being in the thick of it. Nothing stops a good story. 

So here are some stories about Southfield and its people as they unspool in the library. Sometimes the memory is a bit foggy, and the deeds described are sometimes an interpretation or an inference of actual invents.
Truth they say is purely subjective, so please apply that standard here.

Surface
Its not often one gets groped in the library. It doesn't happen very often and when it does happen, its an event that gets remembered and retold. And in the retelling, someone adds a little bit of a tail.
This is how I remembered it after all the tails have been attached.

The Quiet Days

This is a story that plays out whenever I see a teenage girl with her two front teeth gone. Its a norm in the so-called coloured tradition to remove the two front teeth, as some sort of rite of passage, an acknowledgment of maturity. However, its impact on society at large is a negative one, as it is invariably associate with a ignorant, destitute class that would never amount to anything except flail around in meaningless subsistence jobs until succumbing to substance and alcohol abuse. 
This story is an idea. That what you see in front of you is not a true reflection of what is. And I am glad to say that my don't believe what see vision is attributable to working at my public library.