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February 24 i was half way through this when i had an idea of what to write abouti can ollie. get on a skateboard. head towards a set of stairs. pop. up. wheee. land. roll. it's great fun. i do it everyday, over and over again. i can make the board rotate and land on it again. i can ollie, make the board rotate and land on it again. i've been doing so since adam was a boy. adam was a boy i went to kelburn school with who, unless he got famous for playing soccer (which he should have) has probably spent the past twenty years being tom larkin's brother. of shihad, of course. kelburn was one of the suburbs that our whole lives were wrapped up in, like a tortilla. we went to school there. scouts there. broke wind ows at the school there. ate fish and chips and smoked winfield blue there. we even went to church there. in fact there was probably more to do in kelburn back in the eighties than there is to do in dubai nowadays. i'm talking in the days on tane gray, bret mckenzie, stuart mcmillian, julian morris and of course laurence walker, jeremy knowles and alex mcbride. mates with a capital mmmm. not to mention the girls.
i love the way my life has moved on since then. the people i met during my years in karori literally stick with me. i learnt to play in new ways and the years i spent at tea coll still come to mind frequently. i don't mean the classes, although some of them. hand on heart (literally) i can say i loved every single day i went there. reflecting on it now, i understand why it was given then affectionate title of t.coll. where do the apostrophes go in teacher's' college? a teacher shoud know, but maybe doesn't.
there is no doubt, those days were awesome. but so are these days. family, sun, skating great collegues, skating. you see, ben started school today. he was taken off for the morning to kidzone, about 15 minutes drive from our complex. i took him out last week to buy him his spiderman schoolbag, spiderman lunchbox and wateready drink bottle (the spiderman one cost as much as the previous two items added up). off he went this morning at 8.45, with jenny. his class is called the kittens and ben will go there two mornings a week from now on. i add this to my earlier comments because for me this is yet another special time in my life. my son now attends a school. for ben, i hope that he has adorable memories of these years of boyhood. i hope names stick in his mind and that he looks up his fellow kittens on facebook one day. ben is triumphantly clever and not slightly cute.
i pray deeply that his life will be happy and that he will learn to serve others, love others and make others laugh their heads off. February 11 give me fivei have literally countless brothers. i wish i could write books on all of them because each one has had a terrific effect on my life in ways i can only guess they are underwear of. i mean unaware, of course. ask my friends. i tell stories about them all with enthusiasm and pride. their acheivements in their personal lives impress me most and give me much to emulate.
months ago, in october, i did something with brother nick which gave me a great deal of both pain and satisfaction. the pain came in the form of bleeding toes from the walk. unlike my blisters the satisfaction remains. together we walked to the top (and the bottom) of mt aaron, jebel haroun, mt hur... whatever you want to call it. it's a beast of hill planted in the south of jordan about 4 hours from the sign that says you'd be (literally) nuts to even think about getting to the top without a guide. preferably moses himself. i say 'moses himself' because as you know the mountain was named after king moses' brother, princess aaron, who is apparently burried in the muslim tomb atop the cragged monster. in the same way that moses and others carried his dear brother to the top after his death, nicholas carried me up by being younger and fitter and 'one who i could not let see me weak'. he may not have know that at the time. it was a wonderful, wonderful day when we walked up and back. i was so excited to be in petra and on the mountain and wearing my doc boots and seeing nic and everything all mixed in made that day one of those ones that i will definitely tell ben's children about one day.
as moses had a brother named aaron, so did his brother aaron - named moses. and as aaron had a mountain, so did aaron's brother, moses. jebel musa or mt sinai in egypt only a few hundred km southwesty of jordan. i have climbed it twice. once with my dear wife and once with brother matthew. matthew is good at climbing mt sinai because he appreicates the need for silence and thought when entering such a special part of history. jenny too was good at this.
i remember climbing with matthew and getting to the top. we waited a couple of hours, from memory, for the sun to go down (earth to go up). after i'd taken a really pretty picture of a cat on a wall with the church in the background, the sun went down. and so did matthew and i, back to our campsite. for some reason, as it was nearly dark, we decided to take a shortcut down a very steep, loosely surfaced path. talk about 'whooooooooa'. needless to say we got to the bottom with out dieing and felt very happy with ourselves for filling a day of our quick lives by walking in moses' shoes. wow.
i like the way that i have climbed the mountains of these brothers with my brothers. it feels both magnificent and significant (are they anagrams?) to have done so. thank you guys. thuys.
ben is due to have a new sibling in a few months. i pray that he will share even half the life shaping experiences with his bro/sis that i have done so with stephen, matthew, david and nicholas.
when discussing paperwork with the guy from the bank the other day, i asked him if he needed a copy of both sides of my drivers license or just the front, he told me that the front was 'more than enough'. did he really mean MORE than enough?
being in a family in whom i love and respect beyond my abilty to write about is more than enough to help me along.
daily fight? talkies? go for a sk8? game of monopoly?
yes please.
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