All Bonny Once

The evening class & I
(No women in the class. They weren't allowed out at night.)

A year or two ago, I got an email which I thought came from a sister-in-law, inviting me to join Facebook so that I could see her photos. I did this, setting up my own profile. I then found out that she didn't have any photos uploaded and that the email was automatically generated from Facebook itself. Before this, the only thing I knew about Facebook was that it wasn't "cool" any more (to young people), because the Prime Minister at the time, John Howard, had a profile--and he definitely wasn't cool.

I uploaded a few photos and nothing happened for over a year, except that a few ex-colleagues with Facebook accounts and also living in Sydney, contacted me asking to be my friend. And then I got a friend request from someone whose name I didn't know and whose message showed that he was not a native English speaker. I responded, asking him--I had encountered the name before in my years of teaching English, among my Arabic speaking students, and recognised it as a male name--why he wanted to be my friend, when we didn't know each other. And he responded by asking me a few pointed questions about my life: wasn't I the woman who taught in Cairo at the I.L.I., and then went to Hawai'i. . .? etc. Yes, that was me. But who was he?

The messages went slowly back and forth between us through Facebook and when he sent a photo, I realised that he had been one of my students in Egypt. He had changed his name somewhat when he emigrated from that country. We had become friends while I was in Egypt. We snailmailed each other for a while after my time in Cairo, but had somehow lost touch over the years. He said he visited me in Hawai'i but I have no memory of that. (Why is perhaps not salient here, but it's not the first time I haven't remembered something that a friend/acquaintance swears is true. Is this part of the human experience or am I getting Old Timer's disease?)

This contact brought back old memories and sent me trawling through my photo drawers. I looked and wept at the time gone and friends lost. And not only friends lost, but selves: the daughter, the traveller, the young woman, the backpacker, the partier, the expat, the dancer, the student, the girlfriend . . . "All changed, changed utterly".

And yet, inside I feel the same. The mirror brings me back with a start. What happened to that young woman? I look at myself now and think how bonny I was. At the time I did not think so. But in the comparison to the woman of many summers who now inhabits this space, I was Helen of Troy. And we were all bonny once.