Memories shouldn’t be buried

How life flies, I realised when my old school lets me know it is planning a 50-year reunion.

Really? A full 50 years since I last donned that navy blue pinafore and thick black stockings, pedalling the 5km school run through rain, sun and even snow on my thickwheeled bicycle that my enormous feet had to brake for?

And before you think I am at death’s door, let me just remind you I grew up in the days when we could go to school “early” – and I was one of “those”; just like I was a child bride my dad had to sign away.

Story of my life: always too young to be in the same Sunday school class as my mates; always too young for the fine butterfly nylon pantihose and mascara and minis my girlfriends’ moms gave them; always too young to go partying at the K9 club where the cool Milner High boys hanged out on a Saturday night.

And then, just like that, I went from always too young to … just old.

The reunion, admittedly only in three years’ time, flooded me with memories of my four kids’ decades and a bit at school. I quietly worked out I spent a good quarter of a century handling from first-day tears to harrowing matric exams – theirs, but I lived it.

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But at least I have memories, unlike today’s young ones whose lives are cold-bloodedly snuffed out by random bullets and poisoned drinks when they go jolling.

They’ll never know life’s blessings: walking shaking down the aisle wondering if you’re doing the right thing, hearing that first cry of your baby and realising: this is it, I’m now an adult with an enormous responsibility for this tiny thing – but loving it.

Those are the big blessings. But the small ones are what makes the life they have no more worth living: my mom and I nearly wetting ourselves over a stupid joke we heard on the airwaves; my kids’ tears of laughter over my Grade 2 pic with my crow’s nest and badly cut fringe, missing tooth and all; hearing an old friend’s voice again and raising a glass to life in the glorious sun.

They say only the good die young.

I say we have lost our innocence. We killed it. And the innocents deserved so much more. They deserved memories. Life.