When you see a person whose hair is dark and oily on its surface, with a spectacle shaped like two square ice cube, with a face that show little smile due to his no-nonsense character, you are actually seeing my father.
My memory on my childhood time is not as vivid as I would have liked it to be anymore, but I could still remember some details regarding my father. I can recall how he came home drunk after work in the night and tried to play his mark of ‘Drunken Fist’, I still can recall the way he shouted at me when I did something wrong, or the way I was beaten by him, I still remember why he locked me inside the toilet after I came home from my kindergarten class one day.
Having come to this far you may think the reason I do not remember as much is that those times were not moments one would like to remember, but no! Apparently we all gone through bad times while we were walking through wonderful time in life, the same applies to me when I think of my father and me while I was still a kid who was always eager about growing up fast! Some 20 years back then, it would be a norm if you see my father leaving our house late in the night and came back home half an hour later with packages of noodles or food in his hand, back in those day I might not realize that he had to go get those food not because he was hungry but because his children wanted to eat, and he did this quite routinely, sometimes the 4 of us would go out and sit at the stall there and order the drinks and eat the Hokkien Mee or Wan Tan Mee over there. After all those tiring hours that were tasked with work, my dad did not get to go to rest after come home, because his children would not let him to! So the tired man would had to play with both his sons, those were the moments I wished I could treasured but the bad news is I do not even have a picture of those wonderful time.
There were quite a lot of special moments to recall and linger with if I were to indulge myself into thinking about the once-in-a-lifetime childhood moment which I have spent with my parents, coming to that point I really must express my gratitude towards both of them for sacrificing so much just for the betterment of me and my brother who is a couple of years younger than me. I tried to be appreciative all the while but I think the frictions that I encountered happened to every teenagers in the globe because as I age, I began to ‘acquire’ the ability to make argument with them, sometimes even behave foolishly by making them being the receiver of my emotional side and my temperament, which is bad of me, shameful.
Coming back to my daddy, almost ten years ago when we moved from Penang to Selangor, he must have gone through a very tough time making the decision that saw him leaving the island he was brought up in, leaving his friends and brothers to come to a stranger state, it must have taken him undefined courage to step this out. I may not understood the rational of him abandoning his hometown in those time, but now I think everything would not have happened if it were not for the better future of me and my brother. There are a lot of thing that I have not learned to understand, however I am sure I know that being parents will never be an easy responsibility.
This year, my dad will be waiting for his 50-th birthday to come in month November, 50-th year of wisdom behind any man is not an ordinary milestone, I am sure you will agree with me on that. It is like a half-time call for anyone, a mark that often become a symbol to a better second half to most people, but when I look at my dad, his health level has been on the decline, prolonged commitment to medication must have stolen away his state of well being, it pains each time I have to see him taking on the pains cause by his illness, the fact that he would always say ‘I’m fine is okay’ made me feel even more helpless and I wish I know a way or two to share this pain. Painfully, I haven’t known what I could do to ease his pain.
My only wish is that my father will stay or at least maintain his state of health in many more years to come, because I have just started to gain the qualification to try to repay my parents sacrifices for bringing me up, sending me to school, universities, buying me gadgets that I desired and many more, the depth of my debt towards them is unfathomable one, it will not be repaid no matter how fabulous I may be able to achieve in the near future. I love you, my parents!
