Even though I quite like my life the way it is, I sometimes fantasise about my ‘parallel lives’. You know, the lives you’d be living if you’d changed just ONE little thing. Like a ‘choose your own adventure’ book. If you took one path instead of another, or been born sometime else, somewhere else, what would’ve happened? Like… if I’d been born into royalty last century, would today’s Queen wear leopard print?
What if you could just change something from high school?
Would I really have paid attention in Maths classes? Would a success maybe be something else besides bartering deals with Science nerds in exchange for help with Shakespeare? If I could turn back time I wouldn’t have wasted valuable playground flirting time with a certain young man who I now know is GAY. I certainly wouldn’t have bothered feeling bad about getting a C (I don’t get C’s…) in P.E. in Year 8 (Do I LOOK LIKE I’m good at hurdles? Long jump? Anything athletic except Javelin?) I wouldn’t have bothered working in a supermarket on Saturdays for $4.30 an hour when I could’ve been swimming in the river. I may not have even spent quite so much time keeping an accurate economics journal with weekly snippets from the Financial Review. (But quite frankly, in those if you weren’t having nooky on the riverbank or playing football there wasn’t much else to do except study and sunbake covered in vegetable shortening). And I definitely wouldn’t have spent years believing I had fat thighs, bad hair and unacceptable feet.
This past Saturday, as we drove to ‘the Hills’ to Brad the Tradie’s high school reunion, I asked him the question. What would he change if he could go back? Not much apparently. In fact, after hearing about his high school years, I kinda want to go back and be him as well. How can two people have such different versions of high school? BtT had… FUN. Loads of it. He didn’t study, didn’t care, was hugely popular, left school early and still turned out OK. WHAT??!!!
Suspicious, I asked BtT to recall some fond moments of high school. Apparently breaking someone’s nose was memorable along with wandering around sand dunes and getting a car to speed up the Lesmurdie Hill in. So, this is what I had to work with last Saturday night accompanying BtT to his school reunion as the ‘plus one’ partner. And desperately praying that the recipient of the broken nose wasn’t attending.
As a ‘plus one’ at a school reunion there’s really not much you can hope for.
Except finger food, chairs and… unlimited wine. Tick, tick and tick. Great organization, weedy ‘not very sexy’ barman excepted (seriously, doesn’t everyone ask for ice in their red wine?) A ‘plus one’ doesn’t have an identity. I gave up trying to tell people I was a neurosurgeon and was satisfied with being known as ‘Brad’s wife’. I entertained myself by playing with people’s heads when approached with “Hi! Did I go to school with you?” I morphed through different roles with strangers, from being a chick called Tania’s vegetarian lesbian lover (thanks for the lovely hand gestures across the room by the way darl!), to ‘that Danish exchange student’, to taking photos using other people’s posh cameras, to just being the hot Bogan chick at the bar (OK, so ‘hot’ might’ve been a temperature thing rather than an indication of my ability to ‘pull’). And I perfected the universal reunion greeting: “Ohhhh. My. GAWD! HIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Have you had a school reunion? I did.
The bogans of Bushbogan public high school were called together a few years ago (via a big bushpig whistle that carries in the wind…) to a gathering at the local basketball hall. We feasted on Bbq chooks and Woolies salads and compared stories. My school wasn’t nearly as classy as Brad the Tradie’s. We couldn’t rustle up newspaper success articles about SAS officers saving the children of Rwanda. But, damn, in our best stonewashed denim and stretch boobtubes, we rocked the makeshift dancefloor to Abba and Jimmy Barnes and ran out of Tooheys.
High school is only a short time in the scheme of things, yet shapes us in many ways.
And as such, we’re usually keen to go back and find out ‘what happened’ to our schoolmates. In the era of Facebook and email there’s not really many reunion surprises anymore. Fortunately, mine was held a while ago now, so there were still shocks to be had. Like the girl no one recognised who turned out to be the dumpy chick who’d lost 60kg and dyed her hair. Like the meathead footy captain getting a law degree. And a certain boy (not the gay one… a different one) marrying an Actuary called Saffron. And the depressing news that one of my Science nerds had committed suicide before he even made it to twenty.
You can’t see it coming. Life, that is.
Try as you might to sit with the Yearbook and predict the paths of your schoolmates, it just can’t be done. Some of it we make ourselves and some of it just… happens. It might be fun to pretend to go back and turn back time. But you can’t. And we shouldn't want to, because everything we experience makes us who we are, bogan warts and all.
I know this, because if I could, public high schools everywhere would let girls wear leopard print heels and serve wine at the canteen. Duh!
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If I Could Turn Back Time, Cher, 1989 (the year I finished high school)
Reunions are funny and sucky at the same time. Can't believe how much the Tradie and I have in common, Aside from the attributes mentioned, i.e. lack of study skills, popularity and apathy, I can only add, the ability of charming the opposite sex, igniting the room with drama or humor, and drinking everyone else under the table, while being the designated driver. Many stories, many adventures to share. Later, in May!
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