Are you home before you realise it's home?

Home. I hadn't thought about it in years. Well that's wrong (new record for contradicting myself in a blog, 8 words)
I hadn't thought of anywhere as home in years. Every place, every shack, every town was simply further from home. We passed Murwilliumbah sometimes in our journeys and I saw it on maps. It was always home. Life with mum and David was home.

And now life had begun to settle down. Moves from here on would be relatively small. Redcliffe to Caboolture might be a fair hike, but it's a daytrip there and back for a kid on transport. I could still see friends. (Maybe worth noting that I still live within moving distance of these people and run into someone now and then)

So we're at the start of high school. The big move was to Deception Bay, I'm not sure why, I think an uncle was given a job out there. Odds are it was at some kind of RSl or Football club, it often was. He was that kind of cook. (not a chef I'm sure. Paul was a chef). So in some surreal and strange move we up and moved again.

Mum thought this would be good for us, the new high school was opening up next year. So we would be amongst the first students to attend. A permanent place in history... Or something to this effect. In actuality it meant we spent the first few months of the year getting organised, waiting for the gym to be built, breaking in all sorts of things. Including the illicit locker black market.

You see (and I hope this is no longer true) The school purchased lockers that were never intended for a broad community. You know the kind with the small silver keys that seem to be in every office. Well you see, these keys for simplicity reasons come in only a few varieties. This is so companies can easily replace them. Unfortunately...... if you are buying lockers for a school of 300 odd students. This means every person with a locker (all of us) has the same key as 15 other people. And they are numbered. So you do a painstaking, but simple visual check of every locker....... and find the ones that match your key number. As you could guess, we abandoned the lockers quickly.

Year 8 was the first time I ever saw explosives in use. We had a police officer come out to the school and demonstrate some things for safety reasons, including why even a detonator was dangerous to play with. We had all seen movies, bombs were big. That little pencil shaped thing in his hand was of no consequence.

He placed it in a coke can, and then into a cardboard box and walked off into the oval. It was led back to us by a cable and we waited. CLICK and we hear a muffled *BOOM* and dust flies everywhere. We were then advised to go and follow the cable and retrieve it.

No box, no can........ So no explosives for us.

What are other stand out moments...... During this year i had a crush on Amanda. She was beautiful and sweet and I gave her a rose and a poem on Valentine's day. She loved it, and tucked the rose into her skirt. I was ecstatic, my day couldn't have gotten better.

Until I overheard she had told her friend I was sweet and a good friend to have. (later to be a recurrung theme) And I asked her for the rose back. It was not meant to suggest friendship. So I shot it all down in flames. There's early teen logic for you. Can't have it all, so nothing.

This year was also my first major creative outlet. I broke free of the shell I had been in for years and lived it up. My best friend was Gavin and we were dorks. There was no question about it, and we did everything together.

Including our english assignment. It could be an oral presented in any format you liked. And had to be about quitting smoking. Ours involved the use of two Agro puppets. Ironically named Cig and Arette.

It landed us an A and had a classroom full of kids in stitches for over 10 minutes. This single entity taught me how much people value feeling good. It can disarm a situation and put people at rest. My love of comedy and providing entertainment would continue to grow...

This was also the first time I met someone from where I used to be. Not literally, just the same place on the economic ladder. His name was Ben. Ben was tall, gangly, and incredibly rich. Ben was also incredibly well looked after. Father missing from I don't know what. (Divorce? War?) And a mother who doted on him. Ben used to write more than the rest of us in his homework Diary. And we didn't know why. So one day, to end all speculation, we asked him. His mum packed his bags. So anything he needed done, he wrote in the book.

The rest of us would know if we needed a specific text book or not for the day, and would organise it as such when packing. Ben just wrote it down. He even wrote what he wanted for lunch, which strangely he never got. He always had roast lamb sandwiches on Mondays and Tuesdays (his mum was a tradituionalist and always cooked a roast on Sundays) and he gave the sandwiches to me. I have always been a big fan of roast sandwiches. So this worked well for me, Mum wasn't big into packing lunches at this time.

Two major higlights remain in my head. We made a video for a Sony film competition. Unfortunately Gavin never submitted our entry in time, so our million dollar prize never came. It was fun though and we got to take a few afternoons off class

The second........ And this is another big life moment. The trip to Canberra.

Lets deviate to my cousin. We're about the same age, we looked alike (skinny blonde kids) and we grew up fairly close together. So as young kids, we were the same kid. In fact I had two cousins like this.

But as we grew older we grew apart. We were just different people now. And it showed. So there was a girl, Rhiannon who lived in our street> We all hung out together and I called her chicken legs. Obviously we were very close. but secretly I liked her. As much as a young boy could.

My cousin was more direct, more up front, so she spent time with him... until one day, my uncle. The erroneous, show up every few years and bring gifts uncle announces he is taking her home. I'm asking why, she lives two doors down remember.
Seems not. She actually lives with her father in Canberra and has just been on holiday for 6 months with her Mum here. Or she was moving to live with her dad. It's a friday afternoon and he says it's almost a day to get there. He will drive down, drop her off and drive back.
I got asked if i wanted to go for company on the way back so my Uncle didn't get bored and lonely.
Mum was fine with it, so I jumped at the chance. I grabbed a quick bag of clothes, and jumped in the car with Rhiannon and my uncle.

The trip down was incredible. It had been over a year since I'd been on a LONG road trip and I was excited to pass towns and sights I knew. Additionaly, both kids sat in the back and we kept talking. By the time we were 4 hours away from Brisbane, we were holding hands across the car and as we fell asleep that night we were leaning on each other.
I remember being woken up at "Driver Reviver" stops along the highway and getting out for a stretch. Kids were always popular outside these small towns with Volunteers, so more than once we were given a bag of Kit Kats instead of just one. So a hot chocolate and bag of chocolate to keep us going on the road.

Our uneventful trip (except for young romance) continued on until the outskirts of Canberra. We knew it was close and had been counting down signs and kilometres for the last few hours. And then the car started to flash lights. Things did not look good. My uncle said we would need to push on (what logic drove this I don't know).

More lights came on... and the car stopped with a godawful screeching noise. We had run out of oil. Somehow it had leaked and parts of the car had simply refused to move without it. The engine was destroyed. There was no way to recover it.

Rhiannon's father came with a tow truck 3 hours later and we headed into Canberra itself.

We stayed here for a week, I'll write this up in the next post.
Sleeping on a floor, a desperate hand touch whenever we had the chance.... At this moment, I had returned to being only a guest.