Visitations

I pounded on the door, and suppressed the urge to call out my uncle’s name. It was late, almost 11.00 pm, and the last thing I wanted was to attract the attention of the neighbors.

Enough of a scene had already been caused, I felt.

“Uncle Mark!” I hissed. A thin swath of light spilled out from the crack beneath the doorway, and I was certain he was inside. A quick check of the shoe rack showed that his shoes were still neatly stacked side by side.

If my parents were right, he hadn’t left his house in over 4 weeks. He stubbornly refused to pick up any calls, and had only sent the occasional SMS to ask after us, telling us he was fine. Well, I didn’t think so.

I took a deep breath, and made ready to rap on the door again. Heck, so be it. If he didn’t care about the neighbors, why should I.

Surprisingly, the door swung open before my knuckles could make contact, and my fist came dangerously close to knocking on my uncle’s face instead.

I’d expected him to look gaunt, withdrawn, pale. The type of face you see on people who have spent too much time indoors mulling over unsolvable tangles or lost loves. In my head I’d already braced myself for his thick eyebags and unkempt beard.

I didn’t expect him to look… well, refreshed.

“Adam? You should have called, I didn’t know you were coming.”

“Hello Uncle Mark. Erm… may I come in?”

“Oh, oh yes of course!” He fumbled around in his pockets for the keys, and the solemn padlock yielded quite gracefully once the appropriate key was applied.

When he closed the door behind me and locked it, I let out a sigh of relief, and flopped down on the nearest sofa. It was a long ride here, and the worst-case scenarios fermenting in my imagination did become a bit too compelling towards the end.

“We were all worried about you. Dad said that you were trying to deal with things on your own, and that we should give you time...”

“Give me time? For what? I’m fine, don’t know why you all kept calling, in the first place.” He splayed out his hands towards me. “What’s there to worry about?”

“Yea, you actually look kinda ok…”

He laughed. “What, I don’t come visit for a few weeks and you all thought I was sick and dying here?”

I was starting to feel pretty silly for getting so worked-up. “I was in the area anyway, so you know, just dropped by.”

“You are worse than a mother hen, I tell you. Water?” I nodded, and he shuffled off to the adjoining kitchen.

“Did you eat out today?” I called out as I distractedly leafed through some old magazines he had left by the sofa. “Don’t just eat hawker food all the time, you know. You can come over to our place for home-cooked food anytime you want.”

“Nah, outside food’s not healthy. Besides, your aunt cooked today, so I came back for dinner with her. ”

I froze.

He came back out bearing three glasses, and set them on the coffee table. “You of all people shouldn’t lecture me about food. You’re getting pudgy yourself, if I may say so.”

I forced myself to look across the table and directly into his eyes. They were clear, lucid eyes.

“Uncle Mark…” The strength was fleeing from my voice, and I wondered if he would notice. “You said that… she cooked for you today? Dinner?”

A puzzled look began to settle on his face. “Er… yes?”

He didn’t sound like he was lying or pulling my leg. I could tell that both of us were thinking the exact same thing – what the heck is wrong with him?

“Uncle Mark, aunty couldn’t have cooked for you today. She’s…”

“What’s the big fuss about?” His tone took on an annoyed inflection.

“She’s not here anymore. She couldn’t have cooked for you.”

“Tell that to my stomach, who is positively sure that I have had my dinner. Look, you can ask her, she’s right next to you.” He vaguely gestured to the empty spot next to me.

At that moment I became acutely aware of three things.

One, that the altar we had helped install at the far side of the hall was no longer there. Gone was the incense burner, or tablet, or picture of my aunt taken when she was about 40. He liked that picture the most, he said, because it was a year or two before the cancer came, and it was the last time she had smiled so genuinely.

Two, that there was the faintest whiff of honeysuckle in the air. I’m no expert when it comes to perfumes. I can barely tell honeysuckle from jasmine, or from the ten million other scents used for perfumes. I only knew the term “honeysuckle” because I had, in my younger days, asked my aunt where that distinctive smell around her came from.

Three, that reflected in my uncle’s clear, black eyes, was an image of my aunt sitting next to me. She was smiling.

The Dressed Up Blackbird

Rummaging through my cupboard today, I came across a program sheet for The Dresser, a 2006 production. It took a while for the relevant memory to shake itself loose from the cobwebs, feebly raise a hand, and report for duty.

I came across The Dresser only because I was looking for a space to store away the program sheet for Blackbird, a 2010 production. I wanted to squirrel away this little keepsake from Blackbird, because it struck a chord somewhere, and I wanted to be reminded of it from time to time.

The scary part, is that I did the exact same thing for The Dresser, and yet, 4 years on, I actually had to pause to try to recall even going for it. Or even who I went with. And what we discussed as we streamed out from the theatre into the warm clammy Singaporean night.

To reminisce is to draw water from a well that won't ever run dry. No matter how sweet the water, or how bitter, or peculiar, there's always this sepia-toned muteness about it, in the same way that you can remember how a song sounded but you can't hear it.

The Cost of Doing the Right Thing

Doing the Right Thing is very expensive, as I've since learned.

Recently I had problems with a service I had signed up for. Two options lay before me - Option A (the Right Way) involved me filling out a feedback form, seeking an appointment with a customer relations officer, detailing my problems, awaiting the official reply... and subsequently another estimated 1500 administrative hurdles before I got what I wanted.

Option B (the Sith Way) was considerably shorter - threaten to leave the service and / or fully relate my woes to CASE or to the Straits Times.

My friends assured me Option B was the smarter option. The service would weigh the costs of solving my problem on the spot, against the costs of bad publicity in the press and defending the CASE complaints, and figure out its much easier to "pay me off".

But there I went, pursuing Option A on my high horse of ideals. By the time the service had rejected me enough times for the spirit of righteousness within me to turn into a flaming spire of anger, I was only left with... Option B.

Of course, my friends all chided me for "wasting my time" when I should have just opted for the "smarter way" out.

Isn't it strange though? Our society places such a high cost on the Right Way that everyone turns to the Sith Way, and yet, if anyone oversteps the line and is caught red-handed, he or she is immediately lambasted, and to keep with my metaphor, fined so very heavily for it.

The only place where it's actually alright to choose the Right Way and still keep one's head high, without having to pretend to ignore all the whispers of foolishness from the more hardboiled, is probably in Primary School.

It's the only environment whereby doing the Right Thing earns you pats on the head and stars on your score sheet, where the rest of the community is encouraged to laud your actions and to keep you in high regard.

After Primary School, I guess people forget those lessons.

Patience

I think it's funny how I'm most patient when I'm telling other people to be patient.

When my friends or family get into confrontations because they lack the patience to slowly resolve matters, I find that I can spend literally hours sitting down and telling them to be patient.

Walk a mile in the shoes of others, I'd say. Think about how just a few well-placed words will soothe tempers and derive solutions for both parties, I'd say.

It's tough following my own advice though. Sometimes you just feel like even when you're trying to help others, they keep lamenting the infinite intricacy of their own problems, oblivious to the simple fact that you can't solve everything in life.

I like to think that if even 40% of life goes well for you, that's cause enough to celebrate (pessimistic optimist? optimistic pessimist?

Solution to all problems?

Get a big dragon. A big, red, flying dragon that only, like, 5 other people have ridden before.

Yes, so I watched Avatar late.

Through These Glasses I See

Today I talked to a friend who's on the verge of a break-up. Whether they actually will part, that's tough to say. These things are unpredictable.

Strangely though, her relationship issues seemed so very crystal clear to me. Maybe it was overly-hasty judging on my part, but for that hour or so their actions, their thoughts, their feelings, they were all laid out in front of me so neatly.

I didn't voice it out, of course, but in my head I thought I knew who was at fault (both parties), why the problems were surfacing (again both parties), what they could do going forward (nothing much).

Maybe it's part of growing up, this way we accumulate so many stories that we can reasonably predict how the next one will turn out. Watch enough slasher flicks, and you can kinda guess which one's the werewolf in disguise, for example.

Human nature keeps playing out the same way I guess. It's just that the younger actors themselves have yet to realize that the dramas they are playing out are but scripts with differing variations but always the same themes.

On another note, I'll try to write more again. I think I slowly drifted away from the internet as part of some self-reflecting experiment, and now that I've found what I'm looking for, maybe I can come back to this very familiar and comforting black page of mine.