Post 179: A wander down memory lane.
My Big Sis comes in every week
on Fridays as a rule
Today’s long chat was full of fun
except the bits about school
———
I feel happy and lucky and grateful that, day by day, I’m further away from the dreaded chemo and its clutches. I’m starting to believe that I ought to count my blessings — due to there being no contact from my oncology department — and so enjoy this period of time with no treatment.
Looking back at this year since I started my Carboplatin in mid-April, my Darling’s and my life has been thrown under the bus, and my family and friends have suffered too as they’ve watched on. The process should be simple and the effects easy to manage — but my body said no!
It remains to be seen, after the next round of tests, how much help the chemo really was to me. But until then, if I want to, I can forget it for a while and get on with my life.
This plan is all in my head — and mine to put into action every day.
Big Sis is visiting. Her regular one-o’clock start takes her from being the cleaner at the big house she’s worked at for thirty years straight, to our kitchen table and the warmth of the best smile and hug I can muster.
Today I feel like I want to make sure she knows how well I am now. I want to see her smile and give a more firm and confident welcome hug. It’s been too long that I’ve been fragile. Mr U is returning fast.
Our first hug was a big one, and it telegraphed my strength — just like I wanted. I’m sure she felt it.
The Friday goodie bag was full again, and as she placed it on the table beside my soup, sandwich, mini-roll and cuppa-tea, I looked in and saw the treasures: biscuits covered in chocolate, a luxury bag of nuts and fruit glazed in honey, scary Halloween whirls, and a jar of marmalade all in the hope that my taste buds keep improving. I was touched by the spread of tasty treats and always so grateful — but every week Big Sis says she loves looking around the shops and picking things I might like, to cheer me up. She always asks me before hand if there’s any particular item or taste I would like, and I do steer the conversation sometimes, but the generic advice from me turns into a goodwill hunt for her.
It’s become a regular thing now — but honestly it’s a luxury kiss and wish, showing her love and spirit to help me be well.
I’m always touched.
We sit opposite each other and natter the whole time, sometimes drifting away into our shared history of childhood life at home on the edge of town with parents who were never there.
I remembered the time we walked over to Nan’s to be looked after that afternoon. I say walked, but the walk was more a trek, easiest done on the old railway track bed from our edge of town to the next village down the way where Nan lived. But we were always walking about, accompanied or not, down the “Beeching” short cut — so it was just another walk to Nan’s. Except when we got there, Nan had buggered off to Bingo on the bus, and we were left to our own devices in the village. Stupidly, locked out of her home.
It sounds horrendous and worrying that things like that were so common for us back then, but we didn’t have the fear everyone has now about unsupervised minors. We were too young to worry and our parents too busy to notice, and as everything ended up okay, so it was sure to continue in that vein. We loved the freedom of it all, I guess — and it’s easy to imagine that many other kids’ lives were just like ours.
Occasionally Big Sis remembers someone or something shocking, and today was no exception.
When we were at primary school there were two types of education: one that covered the most normal path (for students) through the process (which I was on), and another — this new-fangled “process” — for a group of kids who were strictly taught to learn everything differently, sometimes phonetically, in a classroom of children struggling with their learning skills. The teacher was a very old man, equipped with very old values — and he was a tyrant who didn’t bend or waver from the process he was meant to be teaching. I can’t remember the name of the method, but by the time Big Sis had reached the big school, the process had been shelved as a bad idea. It must have set back the kids who needed the most help, which showed in my sister’s progress through secondary education.
But why am I rambling on?
She mentioned a shocking memory even I didn’t know about. She’s not one for exaggerating, and I believe every word — especially when she explained it involved a fellow kid I can vividly remember.
One day in the phonetic class of struggling kids there was a problem. The old teacher sent a lad out for looking out the window or disturbing the class, and out into the corridor he went — with a chair to sit on. Not too long after, my sis got the same treatment for something else (probably talking to her friend when she wasn’t allowed to) — so she was sent out too, with her chair.
But there was a subtle difference in their punishments.
He was tied to the chair.
Yes, tied.
Sis said he was a good lad and didn’t like being tied up, obviously — and as she was free to help him, so she did.
And that’s where the escalation into bigger trouble happened…
Both kids ran out of the corridor and out of school (remember, they were under eleven), past the car parks in town, and both headed home in different directions. Big Sis was spotted by a guy in a car who took her home — what she thinks was someone who knew Dad or Mum and knew where we lived, but she didn’t know him at all.
Big Sis got home without any worries — just some act of random kindness.
After she told me, I didn’t know if I was more bothered about the rope-tied boy, the escape from primary school, or the stranger driving her home.
I don’t doubt the story, because that class was always a hotbed of truancy and frustrated schoolboy anger — really a dumping ground for “troubled” children.
I’m glad I missed that class, though I hated school in any class I was in (unless it was maths), so I was lucky, I guess.
It always amazes me — all those mid-to-late-70s experiments in schools, as the education system tried to encourage all students to learn something, even if it was nearly impossible to do. Social experiments too, in the new age after the 60s, left their mark on our lives — for better or worse — but the tales of the unexpected from Big Sis still shock me now.
With all the chatter, and my Darling back from the café, it was all too soon time for Big Sis to go home. I was so comfortable in her company, and the seat cushion together with my painless back for all that time made me realise I’m recovering fast.
Visits from family and friends are such a boost to me, but the trips I take down shared memory lanes of our childhood are so vivid sometimes it makes me wonder how on earth our brains keep so much information for instant recall.
I too need to remember to be myself — my old self — and get on with life, not sit and fester.
Plans for my Darling’s birthday will be checked tomorrow, when I treat her to a curry in the curry house in town where her party dinner will be held. Twenty family and friends all around her for a celebration I’m really looking forward to.
Also, it’s confirmed that both our boys and their gals will be with us on Christmas Day. Oh Lordy, that’s really cheered my Darling — the icing on the cake in a year that could do with a nice ending.
So onwards and upwards. I’m starting to think more positively about me — that’s the ticket, Mr U.
