Flickers from my past

It only needs two fingers to slide on a hand-held new fangled device to zoom in on every street, alley, and corner of a city. Atlas - maps on paper - are superannuated like many others - yellow pages, dictionaries, and to some extent books. Yet, after all these years, a handful of such relics from my past have miraculously managed to find their way to my luggage and shelves despite multiple domestic and international moves. 

It's not often that I lay my eyes upon their withered covers inseparably clinging on to the book to keep its shine untarnished. But today it so happened that I bumped onto a pocket atlas while dusting the shelves (not a thing I do often, but the layer was too thick to pretend it's not there). My dad had gifted it to me when I was a blooming 12-year booming with curiosity. Dad believed it'd pique my interest and help me with map-pointing - an exercise to put dots on the right places within the outlines of country, continent, world. In those days, places were merely names with no pictures, no street views, no landmarks to assist visualisation. Nevertheless, with his neat handwriting he had labelled with care my name and class and it eventually took up a special corner of my little heart.

Keeping the duster aside, I rubbed that label lovingly and started leafing through the 10 cm by 18 cm book of 96 pages. For a moment I smiled to myself out of sheer nostalgia (conveniently forgetting all about the thick white layer sitting blithely around my books). None of the pages popped up the usual red drop of Google Maps to prompt my current location, so I hunted down the south eastern part of Australia 🇦🇺 to page 59. And there, in little and big, thin and thick fonts were now-familiar names scattered all over - Parramatta, Newcastle, P. Macquarie, C. Byron (eastern most point of Australia ), Jervis Bay, Goulburn, Wollongong, and so on. Some of these are part of my everyday life, while others are destinations we covered in two recent trips this summer - South Coast and North Coast.

I couldn't contain my thrill. It was so contagious that my son and spouse soon joined to ponder how those places were always there but they meant nothing for anyone then. Whoever knows where life takes you?

Here are some clicks of the flickers from my past that have now paled to insignificance in use but haven't fallen by the wayside of memory lane!

Pocket Atlas with dad's handwritten label

Page 59 with now-familiar names that went largely unseen then

My pocket dictionary and a popular book in High School years with customary brown paper cover - 36 years old

Physical Science books of VII and VIII, marauded from dad's trove - he treasures maths and science books like they were Kohinoor

A page from my maths practice copybook - same sums, just the exercise number and sum numbers are revised in the newest editions that I bought for my son (who never cared to give a cursory look; he'll never know how terrifying and brain-teasing KC Nag could be!)

Dona, Sydney, February 2023

Added after 4th June 2023:

These tales of terrors of Year Twelve were at my parents' until they brought them to during their recent trip.