Thursday 13
th of April 2006.
Nothing much happened on this day or at least not that I am aware of.
I am sure if I had a look in a ‘On this Day’ book or trawled the internet I would find some important person had been born on this day, or died, or that some record had been broken, some famous person married or murdered … who knows, the world is full of memorable events and moments in time.
Here I am trying to write about Thursday the 13
th of April 2006 and it is already a day old.
How is that? I want to start a blog about my journey forward and I start by writing about yesterday?
Today is Friday, that’s Good Friday.
Now there is a day with significance!
Why not just start here, Good Friday.
It could start something like,
Today is Good Friday, I chose to start my blog here, the first day of Easter as a symbolic departure point on my blog journey.
But no, I have to start with a yesterday, the day ‘before’ Good Friday.
Thursday 13
th of April 2006 my ‘Good Thursday’.
Dawn breaks rather spectacularly on Good Thursday in Katoomba at around 6.00 am. It is not unusual for me to see dawn break. I have been getting up at this time for years now. The really funny thing is that every day I wake up well before the alarm goes off at 6.00 am but every night I always set the alarm for the next day. You know, you would think that after ten odd years of turning the alarm off before it goes off you might just think, dam it, I don’t need that alarm anymore. But no, every night just before I climb into bed I reach for the alarm and check it is set. OK, so getting up at dawn is no big deal for me but yesterday, Thursday 13th June 2006 is the very first time I have photographed it before going to work. Here it is,

It is not such a bad sunrise as far as sunrises go and as good as any to start my blog. Actually, I would have been just as keen to start on this day had it been raining and blowing a gale. It was just a happy coincidence that it began with a clear and welcoming sky. The truth is I would have taken a photo regardless of how the morning started, I’d decided that the night before. So, although I sit at my laptop here the day after constructing text my blog really did start yesterday with my camera. I started my blog visually and continued that through the day. I like writing but my greater passion is images and it is probably only appropriate for me to start my blog in a more emotional way. Images are emotional, text is intellectual and while I give both credit I trust emotion a little more than intellect.
Having placed my blog, if a little crudely, in a position in time I suppose I should also give it a little context. Actually, I have just decided I don’t think I will give you too much context at all. I could go over the years and events of my life that have delivered me here kicking and screaming in my middle age but no, I have just decided to skip that. There is something a little tragic about getting too romantic about the past for me. It is a bit like the radio stations that play, ‘nothin but the hits from the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s and 90’s’ There is a whole breed of radio stations, ‘generation radio’ whose audience is committed to when music was ‘real’. It is like life progress in a linear fashion then at some point someone grabs a pair of scissors and cuts that linear progrssion and creates a tape loop of what has been, game over. This is the baby boomer middle age generation to which I belong. A largely affluent generation able to spend like no generation before and perhaps to come. Now, I suppose what I ‘should’ do is re finance the house, buy a red convertible or Harley Davidson and spend the weekend either polishing or driving my expensive toy and sit back and dream about my superannuation payout at age 65. No, think I’ll pass on that. So, Good Thursday is the day I tear up the script. Sentimentality has a place but not as a lifestyle.
Moving right along after the dawn. I first started driving school buses in the Blue Mountains when I first moved here then had a break of about nine years to go to uni and then work in Sydney then recently moved back up the mountains to spend more time with my daughter who now lives with me on a week about basis. Driving is a fairly easy casual job, two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon. I have been doing this as well as running a fairly upmarket guest house. I don’t really need to drive the school buses but I actually enjoy annoying the children with my bad jokes and singing opera and I just love the smell of stale peanut butter sandwiches.

Anyway, I do lie a little. I have decided there must be something wrong with getting up early every morning. If only school started at 11.00 am. But no, I am 7.00 am out of Katoomba for Springwood, route 526. Or, at least I was. On Good Thursday it was with great joy and anticipation that I started bus 1073 for what I knew was going to be my last journey down the mountain to Springwood High School. As I climbed on board to start the bus I know that this was the beginning of my journey. I built up air, closed the doors and I was off.

Now, just to prove to you that I am regressing I need to introduce to you a companion. Meet Tiananmen Square otherwise know as Miss T or T square. I suppose you are entitled to ask what is a middle age man is doing with a two headed Chinese doll/thingo. I wish I could give you a quick answer. Dam it, this is a blog isn’t it? Who needs quick answers! T square is the much loved two headed doll of my daughter Meagan. She has two other all time favourite dolls, chocky and roast rabbit. I know, you are already starting to wonder, what kind of a guy gives his daughter one doll named after a place best known for a massacre and another rabbit doll named roast rabbit? Good question!
To answer this you have to understand one thing. Dad jokes are supposed to be nerdy. Dad jokes are supposed to annoy children. They have to be humourous enough when your children are young but shocking enough that your children want to leave home early. We have all heard dad jokes and sayings like when passing a cemetery that it is the ‘dead centre of town’ and that people are ‘dying to go there’ or when your child says that something is not fair you say, ‘neither is a black horses bottom’. Did you hear about the man who goes to the zoo but when he arrives there is only a dog!! ......it was a shitzu. I remember a particularly nerdy joke from high school where a mate said, “I can speak Japanese” I replied, “yeah, what can you say”. He replied, “Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki, Mitsubishi” So you see, when it came to naming the two headed Chinese doll/thingo that grandma had given my daughter we were trying to think of a fitting Chinese name. The dad humour had to draw back to my adolescence and came up with Tiananmen Square, an event still vivid in my mind. Well, that joke took about ten years to play out.
Anyway, I have decided I needed a travel companion and as my daughter will be otherwise occupied with school I decided T square would be the perfect travelling companion. She has a perfectly curved back and ideal for a pillow and if I am ever harassed or in dire trouble with terrorists wanting to relocate my head from my body I can grab T square from my backpack, start cuddling her like a four year old child, speaking incoherently and drooling at the mouth and play the part of an imbecile. Less generous people might say it is a role I could adopt easily, lol! Truth is, Miss T is a tangible link to both my mother and my daughter and it will be good to have her along for the ride.
Therefore, it was only appropriate that Miss T came with me on my final bus run on Good Thursday.



So that's it. Good Thursday came to pass. But there was one last thing. The day had began with an extraordinary sunrise so it seemed just prefect for the day to be bookended with a similar sunset.
