Just another morning in Canberra. The heat of the past week or so has vanished and it was cold last night, dropping down to four degrees. My wife, making a quick visit home to retrieve a forgotten item, reported a light dusting of snow on the Brindabellas.
Snow in summer.
I worked my way through my emails. One from Schoolfriends Reunited caught my eye. My high school year was having a reunion. I didn’t think there’d been one before, but I’d moved away and fallen out of touch. Maybe they all got together each month, got maudlin drunk and swapped stories about what went on at the other end of the ovals when the teachers weren’t looking.
Apparently not. This was to be the first one in thirty-six years. 18 September 2010 in the bowls club beside the school. It’s a long hike from Canberra to Brisbane, but I’m not noted for my aversion to travel, so I marked it down as a possible, filled in a few details on the site, and shot off an email to the contact, Donna Dancer (Griffiths), noting my change of name and that my memories of those days were pretty hazy.
She responded:
Hello Peter
Can I tell you that you are not alone in the hazy memory department. I guess it is coming back to me as I access Graduation Lists and people are sending photos they have. It will be essential that we have our school photo on our name tags at the reunion.
I have attached correspondence that I have sent to everyone and a list of 1974 Graduates that may help that memory. If you have any contact with others on the list that I have not found please let me know
Donna
And it went from there. I looked through the spreadsheet, sent back a few details to fill in a hole here and there, and before I knew it, I was being drawn into it all.
I’m a packrat of the finest kind, and it seems to me that my house is crammed full of stuff that really should be thrown out. One day. I’m sure I’ve got some material of Sunnybank State High. Old photographs, timetables, assignments that I haven’t handed in yet. That sort of stuff. Boxes of it. Somewhere.
That evening Donna emailed me again, forwarding a note from Doug Wait.
Ask Peter McKey if he remembers writing a parody of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. :-)
(John Eggleton has a copy. It’s quite funny.)
Ask Adrian if he remembers who it was that Keith Price married. That’ll give you one more if you can find Keith. Maybe Peter & Sandy know of Keith.
I can’t say that I remember the parody, but I wrote parodies of everything in those days. Hamlet, Kublai Khan, the school newsletter… Laden down with awful puns and injokes, and possibly mildly amusing in a geeky sort of way. Horribly embarrassing, of course.
I won’t say it was all coming back to me, because although I remember Doug and John very well, Keith Price had slipt out entirely.
But someone knows. All these flecks of memory, painstakingly swept together and assembled by Donna and Doug to contact people out of sight for half a lifetime.
I thought I might like to help, and though I’m useless for anything much except driving a taxi and organising weekends in Kansas City, I still retain a few nerdish skills.
Hence this blog. Read the About page, think of ways to make it all happen, I’ll prod WordPress into action and I’ll see you in Sunnybank in Setember.
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