Meeting my schoolmates again

Yaacob whom I have just reconnected after the first meeting of my Secondary classmates, organised another small reunion at his house on the 31/10/2007. My wife, son and eldest daughter followed as well.

I was pleasantly surprised that Yaacob had managed to call more friends even from the other classes as well. When I stepped into his house, I could easily recognised most of them but they did not automatically recognised me. They needed some time to do so. Well, this was to be expected as I had put on a lot of weight since they last saw me in the 80's.
I could recognise Kassim immediately but the person that sat beside him looked familiar. I knew he should be from our school but certainly not from my class. He introduced himself as Razak, somehow remembers me and I directly asked him whether we had interacted before. He smiled and I felt like a jerk asking him that question.

We tried to catch on each other but the time was too short to do that. Yaacob brought out his photo albums and as I flicked through it one sad thing that came across was my pictures appeared only a few times and this was because I never liked to be photographed during that time. I felt a bit disappointed and remembered that I wasn't all that conspicuous due to my low self-esteem. This made me eager to know how I was like during that time of my life.

I tried to recall all those in the picture and just say out names of people that were our classmates. I called out Irene and tried to picture her in my mind how did she look like. Looking at our class photo, I could spot her. Across the room was a lady that seemed to mix with the rest rather well and I could not recognise her at all. I hesitated for a while whether I should ask her to introduce herself. As I could not contain myself any longer, I politely apologised that I could not recall her at all. She turned out to be Irene !!! I felt embarrased and happy at the same time that we could meet after all these years. Slowly the picture of how she was and resemblance immediately surfaced. Irene used to be very athletic and wore a rather thick pairs of spectacles. The adult Irene is totally different without her glasses but I could now remember the way she talked.

When Magis came, somehow I knew how he will look after all these years. I want to share my life experience with them and to hear their life story up to this point of our life. Perhaps we could organise a retreat in a resort. I will certainly follow up with this and get all of us connected again.

PS. My investment has appreciated to 30% as at 2nd Nov 2007. Call me if you are interested...