'You must be mad,' declared my brother when I announced my intention of attending a school reunion. I grinned and said maybe, while reflecting that this business was not even a case of Forty Years On, but more like 50.
Many people have dark thoughts about the wastefulness and futility of nostalgia, but I do not share them. Perhaps this is what happens when your life is sliced in two by migration, as mine was long ago. Today I live in Greece, but the reunion was to take place in the country of my youth, Australia.
We die many deaths in life; migration demands a death of at least one old self. The death paradoxically involves the process of living, because the migrant simply has to keep on functioning. The grief involved in migration is often intense and prolonged, but settles into a kind of remembering that never entirely loses an edge of pain.
I walked in the door of the reunion venue; immediately the organiser rushed over, wrapped me in enthusiastic embrace, and said, 'I know who you are; you haven't changed at all.' Her warmth was a tonic, but I wondered. Of course I've changed. I had to. We all have to, even if we cling to vestiges of our past selves and lives for comfort.
In a sense, perhaps, our old lives and selves do not quite die, but are like rose bushes that undergo regular shaping and trimming, and sometimes quite hard pruning.
My dad, now old and frail, had been a teacher at the school. He taught me, as well as many others who attended the reunion. They talked about him with fondness and admiration, for he had been a vibrant and entertaining presence, a sound and effective communicator, a person who connected with others. 'I don't remember all my teachers,' someone told me, 'but I remember him. He was one of the ones who made a difference.'
Some teachers make a difference. So do some people. And so it was that one old friend arranged to take me bush-walking.
Me and my landscapes. I am used to walking in the foothills of the Taygetus Mountains in the Peloponnese, where I have views of key-hole caves on the one hand and the silver-flash green of the olive groves on the other. But these things are the top-soil layers of memory; the Australian bush is the bed-rock. The spindly