On this day ten years ago, the phone rang and a stranger's voice said, "This is Sheryl from Brisbane. We're across the river at Nelligen and would like to come and visit you." "I don't know a Sheryl from Brisbane", I replied.
"Yes, you do", the voice said. "I'm Sheryl. We worked together in the ANZ Bank in '67." OF COURSE! And so we met again after 48 years.
Back then Sheryl and I not only worked in the same bank but also lived in the same boarding-house about which I had written here. She had found the story on the internet some years ago and contacted me then by email but I had since forgotten. She and her husband Roy were campervanning up and down the East Coast and calling in on friends.
Sheryl had been more of a teenage crush than a friend to me as she was by far the best-looking sheila in the bank. I had been in Australia for just over a year and owned no more than the clothes I stood up in at a time when a car was 95% of a young man's personality. With just 5% personality and a thick German accent I never stood a chance.
And to think that more than fifty years ago, I would've willingly given up on the idea of seeing the world, would've willingly stuck with my dull 9-to-5 job in the bank, would've had kids and a big mortgage on a small house with a white picket fence around it, the full catastrophe ... IF ONLY SHE HAD SO MUCH AS SMILED AT ME!!! Just the faintest echo of Somerset Maugham's "Red"?
