sisters in learning and sisters at heart, life lies before us....here's luck to the start.

There are some people who say that the friends you make in school
are some of the best friends you will make in life.
I tend to agree with that notion.

I've always wondered what ever happened with the friends
and classmates I had from school, especially the ones
from back when I was in Primary and Secondary school.
Yup, the teen and pre-teen years...the growing-up years.

It's hard to keep in touch with people sometimes, especially
if, like me, your family kept moving every 2 years while
you were going to school and your telephone number and address
kept changing.

I've found that one good outcome of being in the public
spotlight, is that you become the conduit through which
lost relationships and friendships are rekindled.

This past trip to Singapore in August 2005 was amazing for
the very fact that I re-kindled many friendships that I had
lost touch with over the course of years.

Old school mates and friends I hadn't been in touch with for years
sent emails to the Corrinne May website inquiring if
the singer-songwriter 'Corrinne May' whose songs
they had heard on the radio or whose face they had seen in the newspaper
was the same bespectacled Corrinne Foo who was a prefect,
or the same Corrinne who sang with them in the church choir
,or perhaps the same Corrinne Foo
who was in the National Cadet Corps back in Raffles Girls' School.

"Yes!" I wrote back, excited over the possibility of catching up where
we had left off, memories of slogging over schoolwork, sending girls
to detention class for having too short hemlines,
marching on parade grounds carrying AR-15's and
hours spent at choir rehearsals suddenly
sweeping through my mind's eye like
a movie playing with the fast-forward button pushed down.

Over the course of the next few days....in the scurry of emails from
friends getting in touch with friends...a whole network of lost friends
was found, everyone contributing ideas of where to find so-and-so.
Ahhhh...the wonder of the internet.
I don't think we could have found everyone in such a short time
without the internet.

We set a time and a place to meet ; a pot-luck gathering.
I could hardly wait.

I had carried these images of each of them as 16 year olds in
my memory for so long, and I now wondered how each of them had
changed over the course of the past 16 years.
Would I be able to recognise them?
Would they still have the same personality quirks?
would we still be able to pick up from where we had left off 16 years ago?

The day finally came.

I walked into the meeting, carrying a tupperware of the
freshly sauteed vegetables that my mum had helped me whip up
to contribute to the pot-luck dinner.

And there were the faces I knew...all still recognisable...all amazingly
the same people...yet now with grown-up jobs, new families...
the same giggly awkward girls from yesteryear were now the upwardly mobile
single career women, the new mothers, the new wives,...we had all grown
to take on new roles, new responsibilities...but to me....we were all
still the 16 year olds from yesterday and it was such a joy to get
back together with everyone to reminisce on the good old days.

We even managed to remember some of the old school songs
we used to sing together on the school buses.

Amidst the chatter and the food and the singing and the catching
up, a sense of warmth, a sense of joy enveloped the room and
it was wonderful to behold.

I think of that night as an amazing reunion, women,
successful career women,
entrepreneurs, mothers, women all in our 30's who knew each other back
when we were on the cusp of discovering ourselves and our potential,
back when we were gawky, geeky, awkward, wearing braces,
and I feel so honoured to know that even today,
we are a part of each other's lives, and I am amazed
to see how each of us has blossomed, walked our path,
taken different roads,
grown with the maturity of our 30 something selves,
and yet we are in so many ways, still the giggly,
pinafored classmates from 16 years ago...
and there is a certain comfort and a joy from knowing that...

and suddenly, that old school song,
the one we sang so many years ago,
morning after morning,
bleary eyed,
year after year,
by route and not really realising
the words/meanings....

suddenly, the words of the song ring true and I re-discover
the beauty in the words of the old school motto
'Filiae Melioris Aevi'....
'Daughters of a Better Age'

"Rise sisters rise, the world is all before ye,
Fear not to grasp what fortune sends.
Sisters in learning and sisters at heart,
Life lies before us,
Here's luck to the start."

And what a wonderful start it is.