Size 8....

While vacuuming the lounge room, regretting the comment I’d made about her having been a size 8 when we married, I starting looking at the photos we have around the place. I use an upright Hoover vacuum, beats as it cleans the carpet but more importantly, it has a rubber bumper, you can push the thing around without really looking at what you’re doing.

The photos on the walls are mostly of the kids, at the ages when they were still human, five, six years old. Young enough to be cute but old enough to know when to sit on the pot and poo. It’s funny, I’ve always said to people, jokingly I thought at the time, “I believe in the barrel method of raising children, put em in a barrel when they turn six, feed em through the bung hole, and hammer in the bung when they turn sixteen". Now I know the truth, damn good method, it’s a shame I didn’t really believe it myself back then.

Those photos certainly bring back memories, number one son when he started in scouts, number two, catching his first fish. I never thought to keep taking photos of things like the second fish, or the big one he caught one day, or the first scout camp parents day. The memories of those times are still there, only sometimes it takes a photo to breath them back to life. This wasn’t the first time I’ve looked at a photo of the kids at that age and said, “where did I go wrong”, meaning “I wish I could go back”. As they say, you can’t go back, but with a selective memory and a good imagination you can relive the good times, just as you might have wanted them to happen.

That’s where the little photos tucked away on the back of the sideboard come into their own. There I am, 19 years old, strong as an ox and bronzed from hours of surfing, the future wife in her size 8 bikini, she couldn’t have looked better, even if she had a beer in her hand, offering it to me of course. The old Hillman Hunter GT in the background, God that was a great car, took us everywhere and cost me a fortune in maintenance, loved it anyway.

The early 70s’, wow, if the radio wasn’t blaring we were asleep, and we didn’t sleep much. At about 16, you feel as if your life has finally started, you’ve discovered the opposite sex and know pretty much all you’re going to need to know. Until you reach the end of your teens though, you really don’t stand on your own two feet. I moved out of my parents home at 19, into a flat with three other people, that would have taken a lot of stupid, or courage, didn’t take me any of that, I was in love.

I won’t digress onto that memory here, the end of this piece of paper is too close, I’ll come back to that story another time. The photo of my future wife and I, mentioned above, stands alongside another photo from the same time in our lives. I don’t just think, I know our lives would not have been such a pleasure to live in those days, without the other two couples beside us in the second photo. At that age, all having started our first real jobs around the same time, all having met each other and become friends within a brief six month period, well, it's an absolute wonder, at least to me.

The six of us, three bronzed supermen and three sexy size 8s', for a few years there, we were inseparable. We all had other friends of course, but every weekend we found ourselves as a group, going somewhere doing something fun. That brings me back to the start of my story, when we married, my wife was a size 8, when they each married, my two bronzed friends also married size 8 beauties, the same ones from our little group. After we all married, we grew even closer.  Fridays were dinner nights at one or the other couples flat. Of course I had to do the cooking when it was our turn, knew that before the marriage, can’t blame anyone else.  We played cards, danced, talked and danced again, we often watched the sun rise together. We also learned to deal with noise complaints.  All that dancing, perhaps that's where the size 8s' began.

This whole size 8 thing came up today, figurativly, simply because I noticed that the size 10 jeans she wears are looking a little loose, in a rather sexy way...... Those were the days, who says you can’t take them with you?

JAWhite
April 2011                                                          Return to Main Page