Sydney and my life there
Sometimes feel a million light years away
Tonight at a UNSW networking event
I met people who understood that life
Knew the place names
The geography
The way of life
Standing in a hotel bar
On 45th and 6th in Manhattan
And having this wave of memory
The Morven Brown building
The library
The walkway
The Basser steps
Studio One
The huts
The coffee carts
My office halfway up the steps
The myriad of wonderful people
All the late nights painting sets and rehearsing and galavanting around campus
The late nights finishing essays hours before they were due
The early mornings on the walkway
Being a Yellow Shirt and a NUTter and a revuer
Switching from Education to English and History
Falling in love with English literature and women writers and creative writing and critical theory
Falling in love with original research and archives and piecing together the puzzle of the past
And then AJ told me about summer camp
Then Heather told me about Buck’s Rock
Then Kris, then London, then Aaron
Then cancer
New Jersey
And now, nearly twenty years later,
I’m standing in a bar in New York
With the new dean of the Arts faculty
And other alumni from all walks of life
And one of them went to COFA with someone from Buck’s Rock
Because the world is small like that
And taking a deep breath
And feeling so thankful you got to live it all