rituals

I miss our family rituals, the mealtimes (whether at home or out), going to church, sending/picking up you guys from school or camp or wherever you hang out with friends... of course you still have them, just without me... And in some ways, it's good that you can relieve me.  Why do you think we sent you for driving lessons?  It is a relief, especially for mummy who does not enjoy driving hahaha...

Mealtimes became the most important ritual for us after you guys grew up because there weren't really any others left where all of us were together.  When you were younger, there was still school, CCA, tuition, and sometimes just fun stuff like going to the beach or somewhere.  But Mummy and I knew that mealtimes would be important and that's why we got a round dining table which is so much more conducive for conversation.

When I was growing up, going out for meals on weekends was our ritual.  It was nothing fancy, usually at a hawker centre or coffee shop to have zi char - my mother would not eat anything that was not Chinese.  But it was about the only time we would all be together.  My father worked hard and we did not see much of him on weekdays.  Another ritual we had was that on Sundays, I would always accompany them to the market where my mother would do the marketing, and my father and my brothers would have breakfast in the coffees shop.   My father liked it because one of my distant 'uncles' would also make it a point to go there, and they both got on really well.

One other family ritual was the annual Qing Ming festival.  This is a picture of me at my grandfather's grave at Bulim cemetery (in Jurong) - it's gone now, after the government acquired the land.  My father would drive, we would always park around the same place, and then make the short trek to the grave.

There were no signs, no real paths and after one or two visits, the directions would be sort of a fuzzy memory.  It's not frequent enough for you to quite do it with your eyes closed.  I mean if you walked the same path every day, you would create a path.  That's how paths are created.  But if you only do it once a year, it's not frequent enough and yet not quite far apart enough to forget totally. That's why that short movie by Kelvin Tong called Grandma's Positioning System) made me cry because it brought back memories of my parents, our family, and our version of that ritual.

Anyway, I hope that when you guys have your own families, you will remember to create these rituals.  And have new ones with us too.

And remember to visit each other...