Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.
Mark Twain
You might be working at your office cube, or walking around your neighborhood or eating in a restaurant, when you hear the unmistakable sound of laughter. The times may be dark, yet the memory of distant laughter can bring a sense of joy, reverse isolation.
This connection to common things — events, emotions, memories — is what allows us to move on against the odds.
Visible without light
Context obvious
Yet mysterious;
Knowledge
Through absence.
We feel the power
There on the page;
An indirect reality
Like a book
Of ancient runes.
Our minds understand
Matching key to gate;
A simple flat image
Our stories in code
For all to see.
Singapore is essentially on the equator so there is a period of adjustment for the erstwhile expatriate, unless you have moved here from the Sun, then good to go. Arriving in 1991 we needed to acquire housing, and here is the terrace house we lived in until we departed for Korea in 1998. It was on a street called Jalan Puteh Jerneh, a Malay phrase meaning “clear whiteness“.
These cold water flats were built in the 1940’s as British Army troop barracks. They are called terrace houses in Singapore; what we would call a townhouse here. Being cold water only we also purchased a couple of these “instant-on” hot water heaters; one for the shower and one for the kitchen sink.
We tried to survive without air conditioning for a while, but eventually broke down and got two small A/C units, one for each floor.
We did a lot of our food shopping up at the Holland Village Shopping Centre, and the open air food stalls behind it, jst a short walk down Taman Warna.
For movies and fancier restaurants we would take a bus to Orchard Road, just down the way.
Owning a car in Singapore was a luxury I could never afford, so we would ride the above conveyance all the time. The kids loved riding up top in the very front, reached by climbing a curved staircase. Matthew was 2 years old when we moved to Singapore from Japan. His first word was “buh”, meaning bus. He was a mass transit kid from the get go.
Mass transit in the city-state is very affordable, subsidized by those who drive personal vehicles taxed at a rate of 117%. The way Singapore justifies this is, “we have this great mass transit system but if you want the freedom to drive hither and yon at anytime day or night, then here is your tax bill kind sir.”
Anyway, the double decker buses were a great way to get around, along with the (subsidized) trains and taxis, equally affordable. Sometimes we would take the kids out and just go places in MassTransit Land. The downside was that occasionally we would have to wait for a connection, out in the equatorial heat.
For someone who has spent a significant portion of his life in tropical environments, I have built an odd, extended relationship with snow and ice. Or perhaps it was just Winter seeking retribution, knowing I would escape, briefly, its icy embrace.
Growing up in Laurel Maryland, way back before it became subsumed into the inevitable metroplex, my brothers and I roamed the rural territories morning to night. Ice skating was a favorite pastime, although only my older brother John mastered the art of those slick driving speed skates.
Brother Bill and I preferred figure skates, because the teeth allowed for quicker starts and controlled stops. I tried speed skates but just couldn’t get it, landing with all four limbs splayed out on the ice like some arctic water bug.
In late spring the ice grew thinner in response to the call of physics, yet we would continue to skate on ice that was not safe. It was so thin in fact that the glassy surface would bend underneath our skates as we glided along, and form an ice “wake” behind us. This ice would would “sing” beneath our blades, a popping and echoing symphony caused by the contraction and expansion of frozen water, a fact unknown to us at the time. It was just so cool (no pun intended).
One day we pushed it too far and I went through and under, fortunately not far from the edge of the pond. I tried to crawl to the safety of land but the tipping ice sheets kept dragging me under, like an early failed experiment in evolution. I could briefly see the ice surface from under the water, a.k.a the wrong side of a frozen pond. I was eventually able to crawl ashore, soaked from head to toe in icy water. As we walked the mile to our house, my clothes began to freeze in the cold Maryland air until they were like cardboard–very cold and heavy cardboard. When I slid out of my pants on the porch, I remember that they stood up on their own, as if inhabited by the invisible man.
Thick ice doesn’t bend so easily. Once I fell on pond ice so thick and hard that I broke my collarbone. The doctor who examined me called it a “green break”, akin to how a green tree branch bends and splinters. For some reason this image of bone shards fanning out from my collarbone terrified me more than a clean break. I had to wear an ace bandage wrapped around both shoulders for weeks while the bone reset. I shudder today when I think about those *shards*, brrrrrr.
In earlier Good Stuff entries I have written about the toboggan rides down the hill and across the frozen pond. And the ice storms here in North Carolina that shut down traffic and snap tall trees like matchsticks.
In the big game of Fenton vs The Cold, the cold is definitely winning.
whoisfenton 