Friends

How many of you have friends whom you have known since you were little? I can count the number of such friends on one hand which is really sad. I often wonder what ever became of some of them. I only have 2 friends whom I've known since primary school with whom I am still in contact with , Vincent and Edmund and even these 2 I rarely meet. I guess we grow apart when we start leading our own lives and different interests pull us away from one another.
I remember I "lost" my best friend in primary 3 when one day my teacher walked into class and announced that all students who lived in postal district 12 ( in those days it was only 2 digits) had to leave the school and go to a school neaerer their homes. My first reaction was whew! I live in district 11 thank God and then in the next instant I realized that my best friend Ng Beng Hwee lived in district 12; Oh No!!! We promised to call and write and exchanged telephone numbers and addresses. I think we made 2 phonecalls and exchanged one letter. I never saw or heard from Beng Hwee again.
In primary 4 , I lost another classmate , Koji Aiba. Koji was an expat kid. He was always so clean and neat and tidy. He wore these really expensive looking school uniforms ; well they looked and felt different from the starched cotton uniforms the rest of us wore. I figured his parents probably bought his uniforms in Japan. He left the school too after a couple of years. I guess his father got transfered back to Japan. We exchanged addresses but never wrote.
And then there was KC; my best friend in Secondary 1. He was physically the biggest boy in class. It was always good to have the biggest boy in class as your best friend ; you were never bullied. KC came from a very rich family. He was dropped off at school in a big shiny black mercedes with a driver and he lived in a HUMONGOUS house in Queen Astrid Park. BUT you would never know he was a rich kid when you met him. He is the most humble person I have ever known and he never ever flashed his wealth. KC left Singapore in Secondary 2 when his parents sent him to boarding school in Geelong, Australia.I remember wishing then that my parents were rich enough to send me to Geelong too but I knew they couldn't. So I said goodbye to my best friend once again. I gave him a vinyl record ( remember those black disks with a hole in the center? the CDs of our time hahahha) of the Titbits ( a 3 girl group that had just won the RTS Talentime). KC was in "love" with one of them ; I think her name was Bernadette deSouza. KC and I exchanged several letters and then I never heard from him. Last I heard , KC married a top Japanese geisha and now lives and works in Hong Kong running his father's empire but is totally "inaccessible" because of his social position and standing.
My friends tend to be "clustered" according to periods in my life.....from Anglo Chinese School days, from University of Singapore days, from Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland days,from San Francisco days, from the different organizations I've worked for and from all the periods in between. Every one of my friends is special to me because they bring back different memories both good and bad; happy and sad. So, if you have any friends you've had for a long time; treasure them because they are like rare gems and very hard to come by and once lost they may be gone forever.