A Friend Pops Up 24 Years Later

Have you received an email, text message, Facebook request or card in the letterbox which made you wince? Me too. And it was today. I guess I should be grateful that the sender did not phone me. I would have spluttered my way through the conversation and tried to weasel out of giving this person any information about myself since I last saw them 24 years ago.

Do I feel annoyed, upset or beguiled by their surprise appearance on Facebook? I’m not sure. First, I wondered what prompted this bolt-from-the-blue contact. Second, I wrote down our backstory to get my head straight:

We worked together before our children were born, she was going into a new marriage and I was leaving an old one. This woman’s role was administration manager or something like that, she did a lot of accounts and moaned about the way forms were filled incorrectly. She had a corner office with a big desk and spent a lot of time talking to staff in an over-friendly, mocking way that unpopular people have when they are trying to be popular.

As a matter of fact, I’m ashamed to admit, I became part of her bridal party. I succumbed to pressure and involuntarily became a bridesmaid. Her friend or her sister was matron-of-honour and I think there may have been another bridesmaid but maybe I replaced someone who wasn’t up to task. Anyhow, I remember the gown fittings, the diamanté jewellery, the shoes, the bouquets, the whole rigmarole was exhausting. On the Big Day I had professional make-up applied (trowelled on) and I thought it looked hideous. My hair was whooshed back and I felt as stiff as a Barbie doll. A close-up photograph of me doesn’t look too bad – gosh, I was young.

Now, dear reader, I was in a relationship with an army sergeant at the time and the wedding photographer was an ex-boyfriend. I don’t remember feeling tense about them being in the same ballroom. Maybe I blotted out that part of the evening. I do remember my ex-boyfriend wilfully snapping a photo of me dancing with my new partner. I’m not a dancer. It was an okay wedding ceremony with theme colours of pink and maroon which were quite tastefully done. As befits the centre of attention, the bride played her part but the groom was a bit quiet, e.g. rather inanimate character. Predictably over the intervening years, the cake, food, groomsmen and speeches left no impression.

Not long after the Big Day, I resigned from the corporation where we both worked and I started another life. I briefly met the woman in question about two years later outside a local video store (remember videos, overnight rental, tape jams?) and she was with her husband and six months pregnant. From what Facebook will let me see, she has a couple of children now. With no family news or information, she perceptively called me ‘Stranger’, asked me if I was still living in the same place and did I want to meet up? Why, and why now? Truth must be told; I was uncomfortable around the woman. She had the knack of grating on me, especially when she initiated ‘jokes’ with co-workers.

A long-time friend, a dear person who lives in the countryside, says he has been contacted by various ‘friends’ he hasn’t seen in years and feels they are freeloading in their desire to drop in on his rural idyll, taking advantage of a convenient escape to the country. I, too, have had similar occurrences in suburbia but I tell people that I do not entertain at home and we don’t have a spare bed. And that is true enough, depending on the visitor. With this mystery reappearance of a workmate (as opposed to friend) who made no contact with me after the wedding, much to my relief, and now wants to buddy up as if 24 years is no time at all – I don’t get it.

Is she divorced? Is she retiring? Is she thinking kind thoughts about me? Or is she bored with her life and Facebooking randoms from her past? Another truthful moment; I don’t think we would have one single thing in common. Possibly she has changed, possibly I’m anti-social, possibly infinite variables.

Am I tempted? Sure, I’m tempted. I could click Accept or Decline on that Messenger button. Click Accept and, hey presto, all will be revealed. Also, it would expose a lot of stuff I don’t want to remember very closely. Then there’s the difficulty of worming my way out of it. I don’t want an added extra to my social life right now. As previously posted, I am cutting back on my social media. I want to move forward…write and relax…my way…I guess I could just say ‘hello’ and not get involved…I guess…

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

N.B. Apologies to friends and followers who would like a Comment box.

My First Car

One hot day in early 1970s, sitting in a crowded bus on my way to business college in Brisbane central, I vowed to myself like most young people at the time, that the first thing I was going to do when I found a job was to buy a car. And I wanted a new car.

Thanks to my parents’ foresight, I was already taking RACQ driving lessons around the torturous hills of Bardon and Paddington in Brisbane. I was issued with my driver’s license at Rosalie on the first attempt, secured a secretarial job and started to save for my first car.

Vehicle window-shopping became a regular pastime. By mid-1975, after reading volumes of the driver’s bible The Road Ahead, and comparing models with my father, I purchased a brand-new white Datsun 120Y four-door sedan from Ira Berk in Fortitude Valley.

My new Datsun sedan cost me $4,000 in cash. Although I could drive a manual, it was an automatic. It also sported a thin stripe along either side. It had a tight turning circle and was economy-plus when it came to petrol consumption, two of its bragging points. The interior and seats were brown vinyl and the dashboard was black; basic but functional. It contained a radio player, cigarette lighter and, surprise-surprise, an analogue clock which ticked away the hours for 18 glorious years.

Many happy memories are linked to my first-car ownership which include boyfriends, marriage, having my child’s first car seat fitted, then school runs. There was no downside to my Datsun. The only challenge I faced was to keep the metal hubcaps on because they would pop off driving over speed bumps.

It was serviced regularly and the service log book was an historical record in itself. When my Datsun was sold in 1993, it was in such good condition, amazingly, I was given $2,000 trade-in. The only reason I sold it was to enjoy the cooling breeze of air-conditioning in my second brand new car. Another white four-door sedan.

AUTHOR NOTE: This excerpt was written in 2004 and I would like to add the postscript that I am now a big advocate of public transport and catch a bus regularly, particularly into the city centre.

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward

‘My Name is Lucy Barton’ by Elizabeth Strout

Hmm . . . a puzzling book. Good, then it dissolves into vignettes.

It is a book which sometimes comes back to me in flashes. I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it.

Lucy has an extended stay in hospital. I found the mother-daughter part of the story made me think. We all relate to our own personal experiences and I definitely got twinges when I related my mother’s attitude to Lucy’s mother – although my relationship was different. I didn’t like her father, troubled but not nice.

Much of Lucy’s early family life came out in tiny bits here and there. The trickle affect showed the reader the cruel hardship of her earlier life. Is that why Lucy was estranged? Why was she locked in the old car?

It was interesting how Lucy loved her kind doctor, she got no real love or compassion from her father or her husband. The author Sarah Payne was a great character, I wish she had been fleshed out a bit more. I liked her comment after that cutting PTSD remark “…And anyone who uses their training to put someone down that way – well, that person is just a big old piece of crap.”

After Lucy came out of hospital, the story took on the quality of snapshots as though author Elizabeth Strout saw or heard something and jotted it down then couldn’t quite flesh it out but wanted to use it anyway. There are very human insights but we don’t even know what Lucy wrote in her books.

Lucy’s relationship with her grown-up daughters was rather superficial but I liked the unnerving chapter about her brother, and also when she is bothered by the fact that friend Jeremy may have been the dying AIDS patient she saw in hospital.

The marble statue of Ugolino and His Sons by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux in the Metropolitan Museum of Art fascinated Lucy but I couldn’t understand why. It’s graphic but to me just shows the agony of imprisonment.

Overall, I guess I’d give this book three out of five stars because I’m not poetic enough to read between the lines!

♥ Gretchen Bernet-Ward