Twinkle Twinkle

My old school-friend Sal reminds me of what long time friendship means. And what’s that you say? Well, here’s the thing, for me it’s the reference to the ‘long’ bit that gives you a clue. Long time for Sal on the other hand has meant long-between letters, long-between chats and long-between camping trips. She’ll laugh when she reads that last bit, a light chardonnay-sounding laugh, delicate and full of the honeyed fruitiness that comes with age. She’s much loved by me my friend Sal. p>

I don’t always get to tell her that these days (she lives there and I live here) but I’ve always felt that way about our friendship. Do you have a friendship like ours? Cherish them; they are the everyday pearls hanging in aqua space between growing and still growing. All their growth takes place below the waterline, out-of-sight but definitely not out of mind.

I can’t remember how we became friends exactly and perhaps in the scheme of things that’s not as important. That we have remained friends all this time is the thing I like to celebrate. These days, despite all the mod-cons for communicating with each other it still appears all too easy to let friendships slip past the point of no return or even fall between the cracks, I’m sure we never really intend it to be that way.

Sal and me used to go camping alot together. On Friday afternoon or early Saturday morning we would load up Bluebell (Sal’s faithful little blue car) and head out along Te Aute Trust Road, up onto Highway 2 and along Te Hauke strait towards Havelock North. Toward our beloved Waimarama Beach.

The drive as I recall is disarming for a number of reasons, firstly because if you’ve never grown up in the country like Sal and me, you’ll probably never understand the true sense you can have, of having a place to stand. Somehow this sense stamps itself indelibly into your psyche. We don’t ask for it, it just does, as if, somehow, we become its mark. Deep somehow calls to deep.

The city where I live now can make me feel quite closed-in but it’s easy to get back the spaciousness when I think about that drive East. Secondly, there’s the off-hand beauty of it all, the still clean air and the hills. Blackey thinks I’ve become quite nostalgic lately and perhaps I have. I miss the hills.

We used to pitch our tent (would sleep 4 comfortably or 6 at a pinch I suppose) down the east end of the beach, near the commune frequented by the likes of Bruno Lawrence (now there’s a name synonymous with huge slabs of N.Z. musical history).

I wasn’t going to go here, but really, it would be irreverent of me not to. In October 1971, Bruno formed BLERTA (short for Bruno Lawrence Electric Revelation and Travelling Apparition). His idea was “to have a travelling band of musicians, actors, light show operators, movie people and friends on a relaxing holiday-type tour of New Zealand, to get away from the high pressure show business scene”.

Some of the people that made up that caravan went on to become iconic Kiwi Entertainment legends. Blerta’s song “Dance All Around the World” remains in my Top Ten Favourite of All Time songs. Sal and I were oblivious to standing so close to history when Bruno with a campervan load of kids came down to the beach for a swim one day. We knew it was him and we just thought he had lots of kids!

We did sleep under the stars once, we dug a hole in the sand, threw in a horse cover, added a top blanket and another blanket between us and the other Horse cover on top. The night sky at Waimarama is the original 360 degree flat screen monitor. Its surround sound feature is better than anything you’ll buy in a shop these days.

There were far more practical reasons for not sleeping in our tent that night, a bunch of rascal types called Elsmore, de Groot and Janssen tripped over our tent guide ropes leaving it teetering nervously and near hysterical with fright earlier in the day. It was the best excuse ever to sleep under the stars and that experience alone proved that magic still exists.

And now as then, when I can see the stars in the sky, I’m reminded that the story of friendship, long time friendships are and can be as real and as enduring as those stars in a Waimarama sky. Twinkle, twinkle little stars indeed.