Post by Pip Wilson on Jul 20, 2003 9:48:18 GMT -5
Years ago I was in Perth, Western Australia, about 4,000 kilometres from Sydney where I had always lived before. I was not long out of high school. In Perth, I developed a circle of friends, among which was another guy about my age. We didn't recognise each other at all, but it turned out that we should have.
We had both been in the same grade at the same high school for six years. For more than 5 years we had lived a few blocks from each other and caught precisely the same train to and from high school each day.
The remarkable thing about that was that we had both lived out of the school area, so we were not travelling with hundreds of other boys from that school. No way we could have been lost in the sea of boys on the station. We were both unusual in our suburb because everyone in that suburb went to another school, and we were like aliens. We were the only two boys wearing the same distinctive black and red school uniform, travelling from our railway station to our school some 8 miles away. How could we have never seen each other? The only other kids on that train were from the girls' high school -- there were no other boys. Just a trainload of girls in maroon, and this bloke, and me. (Maybe that explains our blindness
)
To top it off, he used to walk past my house to the station at the same time each morning as I walked to the train, and back again of an afternoon. We can't not have seen each other -- not possible. Yet we didn't even know the other existed until two years after graduating and meeting on the other side of the continent. We had never even heard of each other's names, in six years in the same grade, yet we naturally had many friends in common. We looked at each other and had absolutely no recognition of each other's faces. He was as dumbfounded as I.
We had both been in the same grade at the same high school for six years. For more than 5 years we had lived a few blocks from each other and caught precisely the same train to and from high school each day.
The remarkable thing about that was that we had both lived out of the school area, so we were not travelling with hundreds of other boys from that school. No way we could have been lost in the sea of boys on the station. We were both unusual in our suburb because everyone in that suburb went to another school, and we were like aliens. We were the only two boys wearing the same distinctive black and red school uniform, travelling from our railway station to our school some 8 miles away. How could we have never seen each other? The only other kids on that train were from the girls' high school -- there were no other boys. Just a trainload of girls in maroon, and this bloke, and me. (Maybe that explains our blindness
)To top it off, he used to walk past my house to the station at the same time each morning as I walked to the train, and back again of an afternoon. We can't not have seen each other -- not possible. Yet we didn't even know the other existed until two years after graduating and meeting on the other side of the continent. We had never even heard of each other's names, in six years in the same grade, yet we naturally had many friends in common. We looked at each other and had absolutely no recognition of each other's faces. He was as dumbfounded as I.