Love Your Exuberance Poem by Louise Tredoux

I love your exuberance this morning,
the way you walk with a swagger in
your step, the way you waltz on your
way to the garage to get the Landrover
fixed, the way you enjoy sticking your
head under the hood to fiddle with
everything, the love you lavish on that
old jalopy, the way you confer with
your confederates in a plot to get it back
on the road again, I can mentally hear
the Landy protesting while you force
a new life into her tired old body

I love the enthusiasm of mechanics
working with gear-boxes and engines,
appreciating life as an exciting gift every
day – a feeling I missed in my professors
at university, their step was rather heavy,
life was a drag – well, reading Shakespeare,
Sartre and Heidegger has that effect on me
too, suffering with Thomas Mann in Der
Tunnel, reading Der Steppenwolf by Hermann
Hesse - I prefer conversing with mechanics
and hairdressers to listening to sad expositions
on the end of the world as predicated by Hal
Lindsay, Oswald Spengler and Alvin Toffler…