Several years ago, the bridge linking our dorpie to the rest of the world cracked temporarily and then collapsed.
We now have a permanent, smooth-as-shaved-cheeks new one, but the figurative benefit of that broken bridge story stays with me.
Broken things bring out the good and the bad in people who are neither entirely good, nor entirely bad.
Bridges, for example, build either enmity or empathy between the people using them, and the companies constructing them.
One week, for example, long before the new bridge was up, a posse of municipal chaps had been working in very sorry conditions to make the temporary one a little safer to use.
These guys were standing in gushing rain, dodging dare-devil taxis and out-of-towners hell-bent on hot-footing it across and generally being terribly heroic for, probably, meagre wages.
I sat cushily behind my wheel, rather than out there, watching these men trying to stick 10-foot poles into muddy, moody ground while side-stepping cars every six seconds.
And do you know what someone said after I swept into town, hardly drenched and full of good cheer and coffee?
“Ja. Well, it’s about time they did something, HEY?”
Honest as butter, that’s the response I’m starting to hear day in, day out, from just about everyone – and not just in sunny SA, so do sit down.
Whether you’re a have or have-not, I’ll be damned if we don’t find at least one piddly thing to complain about – especially after a full belly or round of golf. That’s not to say that life is a rosy shade of perfect.
Anybody who believes that wears flowers in their hair and doesn’t answer their phone but still whacks you for a loan every week, claiming creative incompetence or spiritual paralysis for not being able to get a job.
I’m not in denial and I don’t live under a rock. The state of my local roads has listed from uncomfortable to appalling. I also suspect that any government unable to deliver textbooks is in hot water – and the price of food is an international disgrace.
But I haven’t stood for election, filled potholes in my street or grown my own carrots.
I’ve spent a long time whinging and whining about this and that with others because, well, frankly, it’s fun.
Humans have a penchant for blame – there’s nothing more satisfying than finding a scapegoat.
My friend Esti is one of those Pollyanna positive people who gets that life isn’t a bowl of cherries but that there’s zero point in sitting staring at the rotten pips.
Her attitude is simple: if it doesn’t work, fix it. And if you can’t, find someone who can.
You can always bring sandwiches while they do it – nobody’s asking you to be the expert all the time.
After all, who do you remember best from the Titanic? Not the faceless, understandably glum people who were jumping ship or mouthing prayers in their final minutes.
No – you remember the musicians: the ones who kept playing, regardless.