Cheeping gratitude

Hung over from this weekend’s stellar camaraderie, too much good food and only a little alcohol, Mother. Dinner at the Ambassador’s was absolutely first-rate, comforting both in terms of company and food. (Chicken curry! Beef rendang! Glutinous rice! Gula melaka-coconut milk-sago dessert! And more! …Ouf.) Especially grateful to have made a particular new connaissance. Priceless, too, were the identical looks of ecstasy on our faces as we demolished the impressive amounts of provender, followed by a prolonged session of somewhat dazed conversation, consisting in large part of very vague travel plans and variations of “Gosh. I’m so full.” Haha… It’s been a long time since I’ve felt as sated and carefree as that. While still immobilised in this sluggish state of satiation near the end of the dinner party, Shakespeare laid his head in my lap, gazed soulfully into my eyes and drooled liberally. That was just to make sure that you were paying attention and not skipping the “information bits”. (= Shakepeare’s the ambassadorial dog, a glorious collie; he was after the peanuts that I was holding. Groan, my newly laundered formal pants that I had to re-wear the next day! Such is the price of greed, though his tongue was agreeably warm and smooth on my salty fingers.

For what’s a household without an animal domestique? The only real pet I ever had was a goldfish named Baba, companion to my sister’s Bibi. I have no idea who named them and why. They lived in a spartan fishbowl on the mantelpiece when I was 6 and we were living in Beijing for a year. Sadly, it wasn’t a long relationship – Bibi went belly-up first because she was sick and refusing food, while Baba followed soon after because he had been vacuuming up Bibi’s uneaten rations. Poor little dudes. I’d loved watching them eat.

I remember being not at all traumatised and rather interested in how the small body rose to the surface when the poor goldfish died. What an inhuman 6-year-old! I guess I didn’t really deserve a pet, as I kept begging my parents for when we first got back to Singapore. Down the road, MyCousinYuan was lobbying for the same cause, to the same reaction of, “You know very well who’ll end up taking care of it. No.”

Petless, we fawned over the neighbourhood dogs, the principal of which was a poodle, Bobo. I promise I’m not making these names up. Poor old Bobo came to a distressing end when he was savaged by a neighbour, a husky: this same husky was run down on the main road a couple of days later. Doggy karma, or probably that huskies just aren’t suited to our climate.

Once, Yuan and I found a very mysterious baby animal nestled in the grass near the canal in the park. It was a half-puppy-half-kitten, all black but for one tiny white paw, that went “yah yah yah yah yah” incessantly in a disproportionately deep voice as Yuan carried it back (and I carried our rollerblades – I only remember because I kept on dropping them). We had to let it go and I’ve never been able to forget it, nor figure out what it was.

Then came the June holidays of our 13th year and with it, the arrival of the Bird. Wei Kor brought a baby sparrow back from school; it had blundered into his classroom and couldn’t fly properly yet. Yuan took charge and made it a nice cosy tissue-paper home in a shoebox, feeding it little bits of bread soaked in milk. He brought the Bird over one fine day and it stayed with us from then on, graduating from the shoebox in the house to a roost outdoors.

I have rather fond memories of us nursing the Bird back to health, of holding its fluffy, fluttering body in cupped hands and inserting bread into its cute little beak. We even “taught” the Bird how to fly by persistently tossing it into the air from the top of the slides in the playground, the highest point we could reach because the trees weren’t knobbly enough to climb. It is to the excellent Bird’s lasting credit that it managed to integrate into the local sparrow community despite such a dysfunctional upbringing.

The Bird was the best sparrow ever. My Mother referred to it as “your stupid bird”, as in: “Chen Liang Si! Your stupid bird got in and poo-ed all over the place again!” (She uses my full Chinese name when she’s annoyed.) But she was the one who bought the bird’s bread, so I know you loved it too, Mother. Coming back from school, the Bird would fly at my head in a most welcoming manner once I opened the gate. I’d feed it in the garden, sometimes burying the bread in the loose earth to simulate digging for earthworms, which was as far as my extremely limited knowledge of wild sparrow behaviour extended. If it was feeling particularly amorous, it would nestle in the folds of my pinafore and fall asleep for a while and I’d cramp up from holding as still as possible to keep it there as long as it would deign to stay.

With the inexorable passage of time though, the Bird grew more independent, wilder and inevitably distant. One sad day, no more cheeping greeted my arrival. I think it visits the garden with its friends from time to time though, and I like to imagine that its progeny, if any, harbour an evolutionary preference for little bread balls soaked in milk. Or, it might’ve been eaten by a cat. Eurgh, I really hope not.

Whatever the case, the Bird allowed me a glimpse into the wonderful world of having a pet to call your own, on top of ultimately teaching me the valuable lesson of how to love and to let go. I read an article not so recently about how the number of Parisians who own dogs is going down for various reasons such as the price of upkeep, financially and otherwise. The crotte (droppings) that characterise French cities may shock tourists and defeat the locals, but it seems rather a pity that the ubiquitous image of a French family with pet should be sloughed off in the name of progress.

Aaanyway. That was a rambly post, which can only mean one thing: I’m procrastinating again. This time, it’s a paper due too soon. Augh. Wish me luck.

We saw the Eiffel Tower while on the métro. Conversation ceased as everybody turned to marvel at the little piece of heaven that is Paris by night, while safe and happy in the company of friends. Thanks for the lodging at Fontenay-aux-Roses yet again! (=

~ by grossomodo on November 14, 2006.