Just me in Borneo…and what to do now…

I’m not quite sure what my friend and I were watching…it looks important and more than a bit astonishing. No clue after fifty-five years I’m afraid.
I’d love to go back and see if the young gentleman with me in this shot from sometime in 1963 is still around. I’m not sure I’ll get a chance to do that, but…well…it was possible to get there in 1962, it’s possible today. We’ll see.
It’s kind of hard to believe that the kid in that photo is sitting at a keyboard in Honolulu all these years later. Wow.
The only thing that hasn’t changed is that I still wear those sorts of shirts. These days they’d probably have hula dancers on them instead of oriental dancers, but really…not much has changed. I still look out at the world and wonder…what the heck?

This will end up as part of another set of slides I’m digitizing, but I’d been remiss this weekend in getting anything done and when I saw this I knew I had to say something about it.
Here’s the thing. For me, living in Borneo was not, at the time, something special. When you are four, five, and six years old, the world is just the world. Yes it was different from where I’d been before (New York City – 110th and Amsterdam in fact), but I was with my parents and I didn’t really have a sense that other kids didn’t get to do this. I certainly got that sense when I got back, but at the time, it was just my life.
Perhaps I’ll have more stories to tell as memories come back to me, it’s hard to know. I will continue to write them down here as I recall them though. I’ve sort of made an agreement to do that.
You might recall I said I would contact the Borneo Research Council and offer the slides to them. Well I’ve heard back and…you know…I’m going to save that for another story. Suffice it to say they were as happy to hear from me as I from them. It does mean, however, I keep doing this.
Till next time!