I think of my first introduction to life's troubles, was when I was about eight years of age. The death of a really special person in my small world. That is the one outstanding traumatic event in my primary years.

I had a good friend called Jenny, she wasn't a personal "best friend" I had one of those too, a friend called Jean who I am still friendly with after 50 years. Jenny was a wit of note, at 8 years of age she was smart mouthed, clever, exceedingly academic and not bad at athletics. Given she was also small, Welsh and a girl she was going to be our first superwoman, and we all knew it.

Jenny had a "gang of four" and I was one of them. This meant a lot to me as I was a migrant child with not a lot of friends. Jenny had head-aches, she would go a bit red in the face and have to lay down. She did not play on this illness, being a comic this meant when she was supposed to be sitting down taking life easy instead she would roll on the grass, laugh until she almost cried and we would all do the same. She was leader of the pack.

Then we came back from our long summer vacation and Jenny was not there, she had "had an operation" during the holidays said our new teacher. Jenny came back for a visit just once, she was thin, wore a headscarf and had lost her light-heartedness. She listened to all WE had done but didn't share what she had been through. We found out afterwards she had had an operation for a brain tumor, the cause of the head aches. But in our eyes she was still Jenny, our chosen leader. We so looked forward to her coming back to school and leading us into a new bunch of mischief.

We were all stunned when three weeks later the teacher announced that our friend Jenny had died. DIED? That was what old people do. Not young people like Jenny.

I think that was the last time I was a member of a gang, an insider, a laughing, let-it-all-flow person. I did hit that phase again later in my teens but not with full enthusiasm. I think I will always still be a part of Jenny's gang maybe because I never got to resign. It still seems a bit unreal because I didn't get to say goodbye to Jenny. Small children were not supposed to attend anything but the funerals of close family members, and in some cases I think the same applies today. There was no counsellors rushing to school to help us all cope and nothing happened when a child died who attended your school except for a minute's silence when all you could hear was coughing, shuffling of feet and some stifled giggling among the kinders.

I don't know why I thought of Jenny today, maybe it was the bright headscarf I saw a child wearing on Friday when we went shopping. A small brown eyed child with a laughing mouth but sad eyes.

Some parts of our lives are like patches of quick sand, we stumble upon them on a long stretch of sand that seems peaceful and serene, we don't see the warning signs that have fallen face down on the sand. Strokes affect the lives of some people just like that because they are sudden, seemingly come out of no-where and the life you had can be sucked so quickly down into them.

I often ponder the posts here, re-read them a few times, coming back to ones that I think are particularly relevent to what I am going through at the time. I think the written word has a lot of advantage over the spoken word. You can go back over it until you can get the meaning behind the words.

I know like Asha said in one of her replies to a previous blog that we don't feel that we are "wise enough" to reply to posts or blogs and some people can't spell or write what they want to say. But we have all had experiences that are worth sharing. And we can enrich the lives of others by using our own experiences to support and encourage others.

We all need signposts and bus seats and wailing walls. A signpost points the way, there are some great signpost people here. A bus seat is somewhere to sit and wait and that is what some of us do in chat, we sit and wait and someone comes by and chats for a spell. A wailing wall is where you just put your head on those sun-warmed bricks and cry out your troubles. Those cries echo through our Newbie posts and other forums. Go gently with Newbies, remember when you were one.

That's me waxing philosophical again. Funny what memories can be stirred up by such small events on the pathway of life.