If I could just go back and know what I know now....

Chad Morgan sang the song – probably wrote it too considering the political incorrectness of it – and set a lot of people thinking. What would they change or do over if they could just go back with current day knowledge.

Given the opportunity, there are things I would change and things I wouldn’t. Let’s face it – some mistakes are just too much fun to only make once, but I would maybe hone them a little just for the enjoyment factor especially when it was just my pony and me. There are times when I wonder how either of us survived some of our adventures especially around the flooded creeks. It’s a good job he could swim because I never learned how.

What would I do different? I would definitely skip the boarding school experience because of its effects at the time and ongoing into my present day. Not a good experience! What I would definitely do again and again is life on the farm – as a kid - because that time was full of fun times and learning curves. Because I only spent about 2½ months of each year at home (the rest being in boarding school) I had a lot of living to fit into a short time. Suffice to say I love practical jokes – both getting and giving – and I had a very capable and willing partner in crime with the brother closest to me. There was a 6 year age difference, but our mutual love of all things horse related meant there was a strong bond between us and still is to this day – much less so with our older brother. Unfortunately Dan has a selective memory and when I remind him of some of the things we did, he insists they are all in my imagination and absolutely never happened. Makes me wonder sometimes what he would change if he could go back knowing what he knows now. I know for sure he wouldn’t give in to his nagging little sister quite as much as he did back then.

Ì was then, and still am but to a far lesser extent, a wonder-what-would-happen-if kind of person. Eg mixing two pretty coloured liquids should just have given a different colour, but when those pretty coloured liquids happened to be chemicals in the high school chemistry lab the results were nothing short of spectacular. Fortunately it was a kind of delayed reaction and the only damage done was to property and not person. I was quite the hero for the next couple of months until the lab was repaired enough for classes to resume. Needless to say I was not a member of the chemistry classes any more. That is one of the mistakes I class as being too much fun to only make once, but I lacked the nerve back then.

As I write this, there are many more memories flooding in, and strangely, a lot of them are things that happened at school – like the time three of us boarders were told to clean up the big laundry and burn some old tea-towels. The understanding was that we would burn them under the copper, but we had a better idea – we hung them on the clothesline and lit them with sticks from under the copper. What we didn’t think about was the line full of starched wimples and habits that were just close enough to get severely smoked while not getting burnt. Most of the nuns were quite displeased with the smoky aroma hanging around them for the next week until next laundry day. Needless to say, we three were forbidden to go anywhere near the laundry again and our punishment was to write 5000 times – I must not play with fire. We did it willingly though as we decided it was worth it and we had worked out a way of doing it so we wrote eight lines at a time making it much less arduous. When I think about it now, I realise we could have burned down the laundry and refectory building and probably the whole dormitory complex as well which was only the width of the walkway away. The buildings were all wooden with the exception of the convent itself and the primary school building, both quite a distance away from the ‘scene of the crime’.

So, to cover the topic – if I could just go back and know what I know now – I don’t think I want to, and if it did I don’t think I would change things – well not much anyway. Everything from back then has made me who I am today and while I drive myself (and others) nuts occasionally, I’m happy with the person who inhabits my skin.

In hindsight though, I think I gave my Guardian Angel quite a workout sometimes, still do occasionally, but hopefully by now he will be used to it.