RIFLE RANGE BOY: F.R.A.N.C.E.

Still rocking after these years!

I remember that the last week of the school year used to be a sentimental one. With the year-end exams over, teachers would be busy tallying the results and collecting loaned textbooks.

We saw it as the best times of our schooling years. Classes would be left unmonitored. No teaching would be taking place, as the syllabus would have been completed by then. Some students would bring in their guitars and songbooks to strum popular tunes then.

Some would be busy writing poems and filling up their autograph books. Offhand, I remember cheesy limmericks being mentioned.

'Drink hot coffee,
Drink hot tea,
Burn your lips and remember me!'

Then there is another, a song actually.

'Roses are red,
violets are blue,
sugar is sweet,
and so are you.'

In the midst of all that, a common phrase is often used by those sentimental at heart, which
was the abbreviation F.R.A.N.C.E. It meant 'Friendship Remain And Never Can End'. It can be described as superfluous and meaningless, but it meant a lot then.

Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to attend my wife's schoolmate's daughter's wedding reception. One moment that plucked the sentimental strings of my heart was on stage, a group of about ten, singing songs of the bygone era. Apparently, they all had one passion: singing. They used to meet periodically when they returned to their hometown and sing along at karaoke. It was heart-melting to see them crooning to the evergreen tune of Teresa Teng's 'The Moon Represents My Heart'. Forty years of friendship still going strong after the challenges of life and the ups and downs that the voyage of life has taken them. One song is enough to evoke forty years of memory.

These types of moments are epic.