Pen Pals

Not all of our time in Melbourne was spent retracing my past life there and exploring the city. As noted in a previous post, we ventured out one day to French Island looking for koalas in the wild. And on the hottest day of our stay, when the temps soared to 39C, we headed to the ocean side of the Mornington Peninsula, which promised to be slightly cooler, and where we could dip our toes into the sea.

We stopped at Portsea surf beach first, but saw that there was nowhere to escape the relentless sun there, so drove further along to Sorrento Ocean beach, where there are some cliffs that offer a modicum of shade and a deep pool to cool off in without wading into the surf.

The one weekend we had in Melbourne was set aside for a visit to Kay, my first and oldest friend in Australia, along with her family: Frank, her husband, their daughters Jennifer and Sally, their grandsons Jack and Thomas and Sal’s (now fiancé) Dave.

Kay’s father, John Wilson, worked with my dad on the engineering project that took our family to Australia in 1970. My dad’s company had secured the contract in 1967, and my father made his first visit to Melbourne that summer. He was there for three months, and the Wilson’s offered him a kind of home away from home while he was there.

As their daughter Kay was about the same age as me, my dad suggested we become pen pals, (as you did in those days, quaint as the concept seems to us now). Kay and I began writing regularly to one another, exchanged small gifts whenever our parents travelled back and forth between California and Australia, and looked forward to the day we would actually meet in person.

When we did finally meet as 16 year olds, the friendship was already cemented by three years of correspondence, and it felt like we’d known each other forever. Although we didn’t live that near to one another and went to different schools, our parents’ friendship meant we saw a fair bit of each other, even after I went away to university in Canberra.

After I left Australia and Kay and I each married and had our children, we still kept in touch and their family visited California a couple of times in the intervening years. I was very anxious to see Kay and her family again and was delighted when they invited us to spend the weekend with them in Mt Evelyn, at the edge of the Dandenongs.

We arrived around lunchtime and had a chance to catch up on the past 20 years of each other’s lives before the rest of the family arrived later in the afternoon. The peaceful setting of their lovely home among the trees felt miles away from the city and we enjoyed visits from some beautiful native birds.

Kay and Frank’s grandsons Jack and Thomas are utterly delightful young lads- mature, poised, friendly, and quite entertaining.

We only got to spend Saturday evening with Jennifer as she had to work the following day, but we enjoyed hearing about her work as a policewoman and about her partner who was away that weekend with his son’s sports team.

The rest of the family joined up on Sunday for breakfast in Lilydale and an excursion to the mountains where we walked among the trees in the Rainforest Gallery and climbed the observation tower at Mount Donna Buang,

We ended the outing with a brief visit to the cute town of Warburton, where the Yarra River flows through as a lovely mountain stream.

We returned to Kay and Frank’s for a late lunch and more conversation before departing late that afternoon. It was so wonderful to catch up not only with Kay but with Jennifer and Sally too, to meet Sal’s partner Dave and to get to know them all a little bit better.

With a friendship of that long a duration, especially because we shared some formative years together, it doesn’t seem to matter how divergent our lives’ paths have been or how long we have gone between face to face meetings—each time we have met over the past 50 years, I have instantly felt an easy familiarity with Kay and the years between visits seem to collapse into nothingness.

Life has dealt them some big challenges in those years, but they are an admirably strong, supportive and resilient family. And Kay is still the same warm, lively and genuine person I remember from the very first pen pal letters that passed between us back in those innocent days when we were only 13 years old.