Ahead of Father's Day tomorrow, I'm dedicating today's posting to my late father.
My dad died in 1983 while in a coma from a stroke, when I was 32 years old. The hospital had called before sunrise, and I rushed there but I was not in time. But his body was still warm.
I recently found a Remembrance notice I had penned on behalf of the family, which appeared in The Straits Times' Orbituary page on 26 March, 1986. It read:
In Loving Memory of Mr Khoo Ghee Tam, Departed 26.3.83
Your presence is ever near us,
Your love remains with us yet;
You were the kind of father
Your loved ones will never forget.
Always remembered by beloved wife, children and grandchildren.
What do I know (apart from what were my memories) of my father? As I was the seventh of seven children, the early "blanks" about him were filled in by my siblings.
The son of a karang guni man, he could sell fridges to eskimos. That's how -- during the prewar years -- he got into Raffles Institution (and did well too), and that's how -- in those days! -- he secured a place in Anglo-Chinese School for brother No 2, How Tiong, because he could quote chapter and verse from the Bible although he also said the Holy Book was a great work of fiction.
I nearly never had the chance to be the happy result of the union of a sperm and an egg (ditto for my sister How Eng; we were both born after the Second World War). During the Japanese Occupation, the defiant side of him led him to bow less than obsequiousely to a Japanese guard at a checkpoint. The ****hole cracked my father on the head with his heavy wooden-butt rifle. Amazingly, my dad survived -- but only because he was wearing a hard safari hat.
Soon after the war, brother No 4 How Yong -- a toddler at the time -- got lost in teeming Chinatown. My father had started work at the Shell facilities on Pulau Bukom island, and it was some hours before he got to Chinatown. From the accounts told to me, he went around banging on some sort of improvised drum for days, yelling to all and sundry that he had a missing little boy (those were the days when someone could have easily taken away a lost child for adoption).
His persistence paid off. A woman told him where my brother was, and the then family of parents, one girl and four boys was complete again.
My own memories? These are snippets:
* I must have picked up my hunger to devour the newspapers from him. As a boy, I would watch him read the papers at breakfast, and I would ask him questions;
* It was my father who prepared breakfast for me when I was a boy. In those "pre-cholesterol" days, he firmly believed in at least an egg a day. Roti prata bought from the market was a treat;
* I may look erudite to some, but my father knew better... he called me "lazy to the bones" even till my secondary school days. He was right... I have the red marks (and ducks' eggs) in my report books to, er, prove it;
* But his love was such that, when I finally persuaded him to get me a tiny (600cc) Honda car when I got (amazingly) into university, many a night -- after I had come home from uni -- he would take the car out to the petrol station and fill up the tank for me.
* Apparently, the only movie he ever saw was one called "Fire Down Below" (no lah, it was not an X-rated one). It was said that he fell asleep soon after it started;
* Apparently, the only pop song he knew was one called "Seven Lonely Days Make One Lonely Week";
* He would scold me if I, er, crooned "House of the Rising Sun" while in the showers. He was adamant that he was no gamblin' man;
* A maxim he taught me was "Your wallet should never have cost you more than the cash you are going to put inside";
* Last but not least, he also told me: "Don't start looking for toilet paper only after you have shitted."
Happy Father's Day, my father. This song below is for you:
http://www.redsal.com/papa.htm
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