Time fell away and by chance there I was back in the day (Roy Harper)

Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash

Memory.

This week, I was asked for a memory of a time when communication became distorted. I responded with an incident that happened about 35 years ago (the incident isn't important any more. It was 35 years ago!)

My memory is pretty vivid for that moment though. Still.

Oh okay. Here it is:

In 1989 while teaching in Nelson, I was on a school camp. A guide and I had taken students up a mountain and while there discovered a student had brought marijuana along. The guide and the student returned to base camp, while I waited and came down off the mountain with the rest of the students. When I got back to base camp some time later I rang my wife who told me she knew everything as a local newspaper had already published a story which contained many inaccuracies. Basically, their angle was blaming the teachers, asking what we were doing while this was going on and basing their story on the testimony of the student and his parents. I was incensed and spoke to the Principal, desperate to get our 'truth' out there. He told me that we couldn't win with a 'he said, she said' battle with the newspaper. So the sense of injustice lingers. He was right btw - no way to win against the press.

But is all that accurate? Although the memory can play tricks, it's certainly as I remember it.