what did you do when you were young?

2 weekends ago, some of us were making the last minutes of sunday stretch by swapping childhood memories. It was amazing how light-hearted and happy we got just by recalling past silliness. Nostalgia has a magic of its own. Somehow reminiscing about the past is such a human way of forming connections: it's always interesting to get the know what someone was like before you had ever met them.

We discovered surprising little links between the hijinks we got up in school to what we were ended up doing as careers. The irrepressible Redbeanfish was devising codes for her little Famous Five gang to communicate in; enterprising CL was once hauled up by her primary school teacher for being an illegal sticker seller: she had rubbed her mother's perfume on ordinary stickers to latch onto the then-popular "scratch-and-sniff" sticker craze' ; I was always creating stuff to share with my classmates: I cut bad albums with badly written lyrics superimposed on popular songs. I created magazines full of hand-drawn pictures of my childhood mates as celebrities exiting out of limos, hand in hand with hot guys. I had a flourishing little business where I made paper dolls for friends and regularly updated the dolls' wardrobes with new fashion lines of paper clothes.

We also discovered surprising propensity for mischief that lay behind mild mannered faces: A used to make flying leaps off her family balcony in defiance of her screaming mother; SpyMaster used to hide snails in unsuspecting provision shop owners' deep freezers, in between launching water bombs on innocent passerbys.

There were also anecdotes of how childhood shaped your ethical outlook: I will always remember how I cheated on my chinese exam in Primary Six. My chinese teacher had seen through my pathetic attempts to cover up and chose not to reprimand me during the exam. Instead, after all papers were handed up and all people had left, she took me aside to tell me she saw everything I did and told me never to cheat again. It was pure grace. I never expected it from a chinese teacher I had always associated with fiercely knitted brow, tightly pursed lips and a red pen of fury. I never cheated on a test ever again.

You gladly leave some things behind in childhood: your secret and ill-thought crush on Jordan Knight from NKOTB, your deep desire to go for a Richard Marx concert, your notion that Richard Clayderman was the classiest music on earth, your ill-fitting pinafores.

But some things you should just never let go: your irrepressible search for cheap fun, your belief that a good day is always just around the corner, the simple presumption that you were creative and the notion that all you needed was to make the most of today. Tomorrow would worry for itself.

As to all my friends: I raise a glass of ribena (or if you prefer, lukewarm banana-flavoured UHT milk in square little cartons sitting in the sun) to all our todays and tomorrows. Grow like a Champion, Grow.

How glad I am for such lovely company along the way. :)