To Each Man, His Friend

When you walk into a new school there is usually a million questions running through your mind. Will you be accepted? Will the teachers in charge be acceptable people? And most importantly what will happen to the friends you already had and will you find new friends? I'm not quite sure if the thought processes were as complex or dramatic for a five-year old going for his first day of school, but I am sure he would at the very least understand the significance of what was about to transpire, a right of passage none the less.

As I stepped into St. Joseph's College on that fateful January morning in 1991, I met one of the most significant influences of my relatively eventful life to come. Memories of my first day of school are hazy at best, it was a dingy sort of place with baby blue wooden partitioning creating make shift classrooms. There was a particular smell I always associate with my grade one classroom, which I later realized was the unbearable combined aroma of vomit and urine. You happen to magically show up in this strange environment with the typical 90s "mickey mouse" water bottle your mother hung around your neck and got you to promise never take off.

Walking around weighed down by a heavy liquid filled canister hanging from your neck and an ever present insecurity about your bladder control wouldn't be considered the most optimum friend making scenario. However when your five-years old it seems that's exactly what you need to be doing. To your fellow five-year olds it seems that water bottle was a figurative "bling-necklace" in a hip-hop circle and that rectangular folded napkin pinned to your breast pocket symbolized equality and a beacon calling out to your fellow napkin-pinned peers.

On that first day of school I met a chubby, tall and obviously hyperactive and giggly friend. To this day I'm not entirely sure what triggered it but sometime during that first week we both decided the other guy wasn't so bad after all and he ended up become my very first friend in the world, and still remains to this very day seventeen years later. That would be "Loku Damian" (Big Damian) because there happened to be a relatively diminutive "Podi Damian" (Small Damian). Today he's referred to by a single consonant, D.

That first year would pretty much consist of D and I getting into mischief; mostly terrorizing our fellow classmates and especially the sumo wrestler like behemoth in the opposite class. Over the years we would grow up around each other and pretty soon for me, he would be the only one I can truly relate to in those vastly turbulent teen years. Just like the start of our relationship which I now know to be a life long deal, it seems impossible for D and I to get together without getting into mischief of one form or the other. Only now the trouble we were attracting included psychotic thugs and pseudo gangsters! Many years later after being in different school, different social circles and later different continents altogether we've still managed to be those two insufferable five-year old brats who met in one dingy grade-one class room and swore to be best friends for life.

It would seem we've stood the test of time my old friend.