Archive for March 2nd, 2010
Crutch – Part 1
It was a quiet evening in early June, 2002. I was 13 going on 14, and my mother – like any other mother trying to raise a lazy teenage boy – was desperately looking for a way to motivate her son to do anything other than to stay at home and play video games all day long.
On this evening, however, I wasn’t playing video games. I was lying on my bed, reading a book (Harry Potter, I think) under the muted light of the setting sun.
“You’re going to spoil your eyes like that, I tell you.”
“Aiya, won’t one la.”
“So how? What are you going to do during the holiday? Don’t tell me you’re going to just stay at home everyday and play computer games.”
“Aiya, don’t know la.”
Like any other mother exasperated by her teenage son, she shook her head, shrugged, and then sighed, all in one fluid motion.
“Aiya, you ah – ,” she stopped mid-sentence, apparently unable to come up with something else even more banal and inconsequential to berate me for.
This was how a typical conversation between the two of us would play out back then. So, thinking she was finally done, I returned to my fourth or fifth read-through of my Harry Potter book.
“How? Do you want to learn how to play guitar?”
I looked up from my book and saw her standing at the same spot, but with a Yamaha course brochure sticking out ominously from her hand.
“Huh?”
“Aiya, I’ll go sign you up for it. I don’t want you to stay at home and idle the whole holiday.”
“Er, anything.”
And that’s how everything started.
