In the Beginning - Remembering Jenny (Nov 1989)

[l-r] (front) Jo, Janet, Jenny, Don [back] Tony, Richard, Gerard, Geoff - Our Company's 1989 Inaugural Corporate Games Team (one sunny Sun day in Nov 1989)

I've written about the End, so here is the Beginning ..

The inaugural 1989 Fairfax Corporate Games was how I met Jenny. We both worked at the same company and responded to a call in the company's newsletter, to help organise a team.

I'm not sure I had seen Jenny prior to that, even though we had worked in the same building on and off over a number of years. I was just back from three years working out of Tamworth, my main childhood home town. It was a big company in those days and the Head Office filled a 40 storey building on the corner of Park and Elizabeth Streets.

I remember the first meeting to help organise the team on Level 23. We both got out of separate lifts at the same time and walked in opposite directions to find the meeting room. We couldn't find the meeting room during our opposite navigations of the inner core of the building. When we bumped into each other, I asked her if she was looking for the meeting room for the Corporate Games. She said yes. And, in those first moments I noticed her beautiful blue eyes and friendly manner.

I did not know she had a sister, Joanne, who also worked at the same company, and it was only on the day of the event, that I realised Jenny was an identical twin. We all had a great time and at the end of the day I had to rush off quickly to attend a 5 day residential work course at Dover Heights.

I thought of her often and did not see her again until a few months later, when Jenny rang me out of the blue to meet so she could give me the photo above. We met at my desk on Level 26 and at same time she gave me this photo, she had the courage to ask me to partner her to a friend's Wedding. I was in shock and did not know what to say. What was a beautiful women like Jenny asking someone like me to partner her to a Wedding. How brave was she, and how shy and uncertain was I.

So, I made her endure a night of uncertainty, telling her I had to check that the Wedding did not clash with a hockey game I was scheduled to play on the same day. What was I thinking? I was always going and said yes the next day. At the same time I asked her out to dinner and to see a movie on Fri 30 Mar 1990, so we could get to know each other a little better before the Wedding.

The Wedding was duly attended and I even managed to play my game of hockey before the wedding, scoring a rare winning goal. It was my day!!

A month later we were out in the city with a group of Jenny and Joanne's work friends (I was hanging out with them by then - they were all accountants and I was the engineer), and as we passed a rowdy group of men, I instinctively held Jenny's hand. Whoops - but she held my hand back and did not let go.

That was our beginning, our destiny for a life together, until the day she transformed herself into our memories.

And, it is through our memories of Jenny that she lives on, this photo and post being just one.