Couple of weeks ago someone from the past made contact with me … No… not THE past… just my past … and a dormant forty year plus memory came back to life . It kind of caught me off guard as it’s a rare occasion that I ever reach back and communicate with people from back in the days gone by like this guy did. I make no effort to communicate with old school chums nor past shipmates from time in the Navy and I’ll often shun attempts of people’s efforts at contacting me . I suppose I should be embarrassed by this but someone had made a hard effort to locate my email address and so I did respond .
We’d first met in a small town in rural Australia and once again by coincidence months later in another rural area of Australia as our wanderings crossed paths . A couple of years after that we were again to meet as we both awaited the same flight from Perth Australia to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia . We were both adventuresome and travelers at that time and did in fact share an adventure or two over a period of some six years . The last time I saw Bruce was on an Adelaide dock where he boarded a yacht as a crew member heading back to his native New Zealand . I remember what he said before he left …
” Ya know Mate …. we can’t do this forever …. future is just round the corner and if we don’t change our ways we’ll wind up cleaning toilets ” .
I didn’t feel the same way as he at the time , no statement could have been further from the truth , or so I thought . Two weeks ago he wanted to know If I regretted any of what he surprisingly termed as the “time we wasted” roaming around the globe and I explained my only regret is I’m too old now to do it all again . I think Bruce got a kick out of the answer to his next question of how I ended up .
” Owned a small cleaning service ….. spent the last few years of my working life cleaning toilets just as you predicted ” I told him
Bruce is now enjoying his retirement from being a school janitor . Guess we were never meant to change the world …
