Changes

Right off the bat, does anyone ever watch/listen to/respond to blogs that have your current track?
Hrmm Personally I don't see it. But if you feel it might provide some kind of explanation.
Heartbeats - Jose Gonzalez
Which you can hear in the Bravia "Bouncing Balls" ad.
Or this little piece on LED Throwies.

Now, back to the main event.

School carried on in the same vein. Hot lunches a few times a week, more exciting games. (is catch and kiss still played in the modern playground?) And a delightful english girl who had my attention solely because she sounded different. I can still hear her voice as one afternoon she grabbed my arm after being asked to leave some game and said "We dont even want to play, we want to go over there, Dont we?" and I was escorted from the game.

We also spent a lot of time with my cousin. He was wild. I'm still not sure to this day if he was just a lot of fun or if he had ADHD, or maybe they just gave him a lot of sugar. But we were mischief with a Capital M.
Should I mention at this point in time in my life, I'd been to hospital several times. Adenoids, Grommets, Stitches in my head (twice) and to this day my mother thinks I was trying to fly. Well sorry folks, as much as I like Supes today, back then I was already smart enough to know I couldn't fly. I slipped. I climbed out my window and chased a bird across the "awning" that covered the garden downstairs. A wrong foot placed and SWISH, Little Kal sailing through the air and hitting the ground. Horrible day.

So changes.
We moved. Packed up the house and left. Moved interstate, all the way to Camira. Suddenly things were different. I wasn't known as being smart. I'd learnt different things at school. And there were bigger kids at school.
I wasn't enjoying things at all. Until I aced a spelling test for the week, suddenly I was seen differently. I got to help paint the planets when we studied the solar system.

Our neighbours here were the first I can remember meeting. A single mother and her 2 boys. All german.
They taught me so many things, but strangely no german.
We ate toast with Salt on it. Nothing but salt. To this day, it's an occasional snack, occasionally meaning once in the last 5 years. It's not good for you * DONT TRY THIS AT HOME* But it's something that just tastes like the past. They also taught me to eat porridge dry. In a glass with sugar. This I did not enjoy, but Kal is not the one to rock the boat, so dry porridge it was.
Years later, I'm not sure if Yurg and Kai were abstract, strange foreigners or just really poor...
But I can assure you wholeheartedly, that as my life moved on over the next few years, I would be poor. Poorer than I think any of you readers have been.

The three biggest changes in Camira in Year 3 were fairly profound for my developing life.

• My family found out I liked a girl
• I made a real best friend
• I lost my father

The girl was nothing substantial, I was 7. But she had shining blonde hair and she smiled all the time. I forget her name, it was unusual, and I waved at her from the backseat as we sat at the local shopping centre. She looked, I called her name and I never heard the end of it.

My real best friend was Matthew. We were inseperable, liked the same things, but always had opposites. Ie we would watch Transformers together, but both wanted to be a different Transformer. Months later when we moved, Matthew wrote to me. I wrote back a couple of times, but as most people do, the letters got further apart and eventually stopped. A habit with penpals I would continue for close to another 20 years....

And my father. Well, he wasn't my father. Have we covered that yet? Well readers you've missed out.
We'll need to step back briefly, this is back in Murwillumbah that I found out I was lied to. We were looking through photo albums for a photo of a specific event or memory at the time, and I saw a photo of my Mum with a redheaded man. "Who's that?" I asked, waiting for tales of an Adventuring Uncle who I immediately presumed was an inventor.
It was my father I was advised. And I innocently turned to my father and told him he looked different. And recall my heart hitting the floor and me sitting down as I was told it wasn't David. It was my father. My brain took seconds to piece together the obvious but unspoken truth.
My father wasn't my father. Which was incredibly complicated to face. I wouldn't be quite as shocked by anything for another 10 years, when at 16 years of age I met my father.

So I come home one day and well I've pushed it out of my mind. We all sat down and talked, David was moving out. An unheard of concept for a smalltown family, I didn't even realise people's fathers could just leave. ( I refused at this stage to think about where mine was). What was going on? Would we move to?
No, we wouldnt. We would stay here with the neighbours nearby, the rusty trampoline, aluminimum walled pool and rusty swingset.
And we did.
Until Months later..............Mum came home and took us to our Aunties house. We were introduced to Paul. Tattoos, swearing, smoking, a beer in one hand and a station wagon we could climb all over. We liked him immediately. And not long after this, we left again. With Paul. Left our lives, our friends, our family and my mother started running away from life. The first of a trail of mistakes. But it was the start of a series of adventures I have not forgotten and that guide my life today.

Even then, I didn't stay long. From this point in my life, I would be only a guest.