tomorrow's memento

i've been going back to my family home to pack up my things. having moved house four times, many things, especially those from my childhood, have been thrown away, lost, or passed somewhere on. while ploughing through my belongings, as one would do for a loved one deceased, i was glad to have held on to some things and not thrown them away. like the locked drawer choked with letters and cards, some dating back to my early teens, from pen-pals, past loves, future loves, friends, loved ones all.

there was this aerogramme my uncle sent when he was studying abroad, exhorting his thirteen year-old nephew - me - to be more responsible and be more concerned about his parents now that i was a young adult. he left when i was in primary one, and i remember the huge turn-out at the airport, with my aunts and uncles hugging him and tearing and all. then there would be the monthly aerogrammes, sometimes he wrote to me, which i would reply, possibly in my kiddy-scrawl and spelling errors. whenever he called home everyone in the family would get very excited and hushing everyone up and rushing to speak to him. when he finally returned after some seven or eight years, i was already mid-teens, gradually segueing back into the 'typical quiet and conservative asian family' relationship he wrote about in that aerogramme. along the way he's also slipped back into the normalcy of singaporean life, gotten married, lost his american accent and ponytail, and when we celebrated his forty-ninth birthday during a recent christmas gathering, i wished i had kept those early letters.

then there were my old photographs, marking time over the years, recording changes, the different and increasing circle of friends, as well as the ones i'd always known and who'd always been by my side. having seen one another since the we were kids, in our innocence, in our exuberant, if reckless youth, it's difficult to see that year after year, years have passed, just by, just like that.

I had lunch with my dad a few weeks ago in the city, and dinner with him yesterday. when he was my age, at twenty-eight, his eldest child - me - had just celebrated his first birthday. now he's fifty-five, not old by standards of old-age, but soon, i suppose. the crows-feet and worry-lines are appearing, the softening of the skin and his irises glacial. he's always been a very quiet man, and i've inherited this reticent trait. i remember how when i was three, he used to carry me on his shoulders and run along the beach at changi, his favourite haunt since his teenage days. i remember the rides on his scooter along the expressway where i would stand in front, bracing the wind. there're the smurf toys he used to bring home after work, and there was this huge, sudden slap across my face because i was running late for school and still dilly-dallying. then there were the movies where he would ask me, after it had ended and we were walking out of the theatre, "how was it?" and there were the many meals together. he was a good dad, but there were always the silence, not of animosity or awkwardness or indifference, but a comfortable kind of silence, quite easy, quite warm. as i grew older, the conversations began to flow more easily. maybe there're more things to talk about - work, money matters, family matters, me, him. it was an indication of my maturity. talking to my own father as if he were a friend makes me feel like a father myself, makes me feel i've really grown up, and that he's grown old, and that one day he'd be gone, and then me along.

what would happen to these things then - these old letters and cards and photographs, faded receipts and movie ticket stubs, my first bottle of cologne, printed-out emails, letters of acceptance from the various universities, school essays, expired membership cards for assorted establishments and institutions, magazine cut-outs and faye wong memorabilia of those crazed days - all these in a big cardboard box with my name on top, what would happen to these precious things, these mementos of and from my youth, once upon a time?

i don't know. they would most likely be buried or cremated along with me, immolating a lifetime of memories. perhaps a loved one would hold on to, if not all, then some of it, creating from it new stories. or some such. i cant really dictate terms from my grave. but i do know that in the intervening years should i re-open this box to reminisce over these accoutrements, trying to relive old - and young - days, i would invariably chide myself for not keeping enough.
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Yet do thy worst, old Time; despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Sonnet 19, Shakespeare