First Impressions - Column

Something strange struck me on Sunday morning.
It began like most any other Tauranga summer Sunday morning: A half-wakening to the awful whine of a mosquito, an instinctual, poorly guided slap to my own face, resulting in a sudden, angry jolt to consciousness.
After that came the usual spreading of the curtains, the same cursing of the wall of sticky humidity that slapped me in the face once more, and the drowsy trudge to the letterbox to fetch the Herald on Sunday.
But last Sunday, something was missing.
I didn't even notice what had happened - or what hadn't happened - until I arrived at the mailbox to look down and see not a shirt, nay even a singlet, but just a bare, slightly sunburned chest.
Then came the real fright - another chap across the street, a complete stranger and also obliviously topless, greeted me with a quick upward jerk of the jaw and a "sup bro, mean as heat eh?"
"Dude," I replied, "this heat's insaaaayne. Gotta be over to the Mount today, fully".
How could this have happened? Somehow, at some point, I had become - dun-dun-duuuuun - a Tauranga local.
It was only a few weeks ago that I was strolling along the Marine Parade boardwalk in jeans and a flannel shirt in the afternoon heat, casting waspy aspersions to the dread-locked kids sitting there cross-legged in their board shorts in front of their laptops.
"Only in Tauranga would you take your bloody laptop to the beach ... it's like this bloody city's version of Starbucks," I chortled to my girlfriend.
Later that day I was in Pak'N Save on Cameron Rd, trying to find beer cold enough to combat the weather, when another one of these dread-locked, topless kids lunged past my face for a chilled box of Sol.
The kid's sweat-soaked armpits narrowly missed greasing my forehead, before he clutched his beer and sauntered off to the checkout, his Havaiana jandals flipping and flopping against the concrete floor.
"Bloody hell, surely he could've thrown on something more than cargo shorts," I muttered.
But by last Sunday morning, there wasn't much to tell this little snotty and me apart.
After my almost involuntary neighbourly exchange with the chap across the street, I realised the only garment I was sporting was a pair of the same type of baggy cargo shorts that I'd scowled at in the supermarket.
I must have bought them in a humidity-induced haze at Bayfair, during some bizarre transformation that I couldn't quite recall.
Strange, I thought, that this could strike someone so far removed from sunny Tauranga as me, a proud product of Taranaki who someone once described as a "lumpy, white, ruddy, iodine-deficient mountain yokel".
I'd planned to spend my annual leave catching up with the folks back home next week, but how could I now when I wasn't sure where home was? It was a curious quandary, perfectly suited to Neil Diamond's 1971 sulk I Am, I Said.
With lyrics slightly altered, I sang it to myself.
Tauranga's fine, the sun shines, most the time ... And the feelin' is lay back ... Palm trees grooow, and rents are looow ... But 'choo know ah' keep thinkin' about ... Making mah way back ...
Well I'm Taranaki born and raised ... But nowadays, I'm lost between two shores ... Tauranga's fine, but it ain't home ... Taranaki's home, but it ain't mine nooooo mooore ...
So lost was I for answers that I quizzed every new Tauranga resident I could find, including a poor contractor who was trying to reseal Cameron Rd at 8.30 on a weeknight.
"So when did you know you'd become, you know, a local," I asked him.
"Immediately ... as soon as I moved here," came his unexpectedly polite answer.
But Jennifer, the friendly bartender at The Flying Burrito Brothers, said her initiation took a little longer. "I think it's when you go to Blues, Brews and Barbecues, or when you know to go to the Mount Mellick on a Tuesday night, 'cause that's when it's real busy, you know."
Well, I've already done one of those two things. But am I a Taurangian yet? A shirtless, jandal-wearing, laptop-at-the-beach Taurangian?
I can't be sure. But until then, I'll be what I am - a solitary Taranaki man.