Camp 6 Loloho, Bougainville Island
Click on image to go to the Bougainville Copper Project website
Happiness was a red plastic chair when my "home" was a 9x9-ft donga tastefully decorated with PLAYBOY centrefolds of girls waxed to the point of martyrdom, when all my wordly possessions easily fitted into a 2ft-wide metal locker, and when my needs for comfort were satisfied by a red plastic chair on the porch.
Photo courtesy of Roy Goldsworthy, now residing in Malaysia
It was on Bougainville Island where it all began, the dreaming of a bigger and better future and the searching for wider and farther horizons. More than fifty years later, I put this old bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty (under the OSASCOMP-rules, is "bleached-out" a colour-adjective or an opinion? Please put me out of my misery!)
Colour or opinion (or coloured opinion), I sit on it often and dream of the past, with my horizon no farther away than across the river.
Happiness is a red plastic chair on which I sit along the banks of time, only to wait, like a fisher of memories, for the past to swallow my bait.
P.S. A certain expat, originally from Sunshine Vic. but now residing in Trump's America (and officially designated on the internet as a Republican voter), emailed this photo, hastily scanned, of himself and three fellow-donga dwellers (presumably not all in the same donga) at Camp 6 in Loloho, suggesting that happiness is FOUR red plastic chairs.
