Last Word
On Misleading Pasts
Ochieng does not like picking unknown telephone numbers on his phone mainly because there are so many scammers out there especially in Kamiti trying to find a gullible soul out there to interest in their milliard scams that surprisingly people still fall for.
Ochieng nevertheless picked the call, more out of reflex than consciously and was pleasantly shocked when the caller introduced himself, it was a classmate who he had not seen or heard about for over twenty years.
Ochieng had to ask how he had got his number and was reminded that in the current world, your mere presence on the internet leaves a trail and anybody seriously trying to track you down will only need to be an online sleuth to find you.
Of course, Ochieng is aware of this otherwise disquieting feeling that someone out there, without your express permission is tracking your every move, mainly for marketing purposes but also for other undisclosed sinister reasons.
The reason for the call was that the classmate was organizing a class gettogether and he had tracked down thirty one out of the fifty two who were in their class and informed him that the number would have been thirty five but four had unfortunately passed on.
They spent some time discussing the cause of death of their colleagues, somehow the death of a person you knew, even if your recall of them is blurry is still poignant in that it reminds you of your mortality and you could have been in that statistic of four.
What astounded Ochieng was the amount of information that the caller had on the classmates and he even began to wonder if he was a disengaged friend since he knew practically nothing about colleagues that he had spent at least four years with in secondary.
There are those that even proceeded to university with him but since they were in different faculties their commonality wore off gradually and by the time they hit the job market any remaining tenuous links were severed.
Yet here was a classmate with an encyclopedic recall and information on his class mates yet Ochieng could not recall exactly what he excelled in and since Ochieng’ s love for books had him in the library quite often, he does not remember seeing him there.
In the ensuing conversation, that took well over ninety minutes, Ochieng would recall a name and the caller would update him instantly about the whereabouts of the classmate and what he was doing in life including marital status.
Of course, the names that Ochieng was reeling out were of those colleagues that stood out in one way or another, either positively or negatively and Ochieng realized that a majority passed school life as nondescript students.
What struck Ochieng was the realization that how one performed in school was a very poor predictor of what people actually turned out to be in life. Yet in school the storyline was to work hard and the world oyster would be yours.
A nostalgic desire to go back to the good old days when an American rebuke was sufficient to declare a country a pariah state is long gone and having a president that the world cannot decide whether he is a clown or a maniac doesn’ t help.
That rebellious ne’ er-do-well, who got suspended twice with a threat of expulsion on the third misdemeanor was now a respectable partner in a highly regarded accounting firm and the class‘ choppie’ is currently in a rehab having lost the battle to the drink.
The call had another more surprising twist as the conversation pivoted to our former teachers who without exception ended up
106 MAL69 / 25 ISSUE