When I was trying to think of a title for this post, and probably a lot more in the same vein, I thought of using

The Life of an Ordinary man

or

The life of an ordinary person

and realized that political correctness wasn’t going to make the title any easier to create.

The other thing is that should we have the right to say our life is ordinary?

What is ordinary life?

Is it the life the Joe and Jane Average have?

Dear God, I think I’ll just give up and go home.

Then I started thinking about school and the first girl I liked. I was five, and with absolutely no understanding of what I was feeling, I think it was great we were just friends.

It was 1958.

That was a long, long time ago.

No need to worry about politics, where the next paycheck was coming from, can I afford the car payments, and why do my children hate me so much.

Five was a great age. You go to school, sit around having fun, have an afternoon sleep, you always got a bottle of milk mid-morning (pity there was no flavoring in it) and lunchtimes you sat outside near the oval and made daisy chains in summer, or ran through the puddles in winter.

Or play on the monkey bars.

I remember the school, Dandenong State School. A large gothic, or so I thought then, building, that looked really scary from the outside, and then, when you met the teachers, really scary inside.

It had a quadrangle and a bell.

We had an assembly every morning and sang God Save the Queen.

Halcyon days indeed.

We lived in a house in Bess Court.

It was odd how our places of residence were reduced to a street name.

From my first, Valetta street, I think the first house my parents moved into.

Later in a foray into the past via genealogy we discovered my father had qualified for a war service loan and built the house himself.

We stayed there for a few years, then moved to Warren Road, for a very short time. There was no rhyme or reason for this move but it was notable for one reason, my younger brother was born while we were there.

And one single other memory I have, that I used to go picking jonquils in a field behind the house

Then we moved to Bess Court, where we stayed for a number of years, what literally become a house of horrors, a time that consisted on only bad memories.

While here, I started grade school.

Then it was a move to Henty Street, where I spent the rest of my life before getting married and moving out.

Each had a significance, and a definitive set of memories, some good, some bad, some really bad, some all at the same time.

As for that ordinary, perhaps we’ll explore it tomorrow.