One of the few perks of ageing is the connections it provides.
This has been brought home to me recently, gentle reader, by a number of encounters which appear at first glance, absolutely random, but when considered carefully are an inevitable result of longevity and mobility.
Yesterday my bride and I went to check out a garden just out of town owned by a mate I first met in 1971 when teaching at the State School for Spastic Children at New Farm, Brisbane. At the time he and I were the only males on staff, and I was fresh from a year in Vietnam.
At the gate was a charity tent staffed by two women about my age. They introduced themselves and somehow during the conversation, the fact that they were both teachers, and had worked in Townsville, emerged.
I explained that as a special school principal I had opened two schools in Townsville. Turns out that one of them was a very good friend of the ex-principal of one of the two schools which had amalgamated, and he and I had collaborated a great deal at the time.
Sadly, he had died last year, but she was able to show me a photo taken a few years ago in which he looked very happy. He didn't seemed to have changed much.
I then chatted with the bloke who owned the garden (although his wife is the main hobbyist - this bloke is into restoring cars rather than creating gardens). In this conversation I discovered through the medium of a discussion about classic cars, that another long lost acquaintance of mine in the seventies is also well known to my mate. The long lost acquaintance is into Alfas and Porsches, the gardener Citroens.
His son favours Peugeots, and I gifted him my old 404 about ten years ago. It's undergoing a slow restoration, and I'm on a promise to drive it when it's finished, if I last that long. It is indeed a very slow restoration. The son is a busy policeman.
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| The car I gave away. |
When you think about it, these connections weren't all that unusual. Special education was a small but rapidly growing segment of the education community in Queensland back then. The progress and expansion since has been incredible.
The nomenclature has changed for the better. Calling a school "The State School for Spastic Children" would not be possible these days.
The term "spastic" describes just one of the manifestations of cerebral palsy. The fact that it has gone from the language except when used by nitwits as a form of abuse is no bad thing.
