Falcon City - Re Visited

He needs a wife!
My son, his grandmother Beatrice Goerst, God rest her soul, used to call him,'the mixed up kid'. When he was born I was not close by to welcome him to the world, he was born at Asunta Hospital in Petaling Jaya, Kuala Lumpur and I was working in Georgetown Penang at the time. When his Mom and I went our separate ways, I was not much there for him especially when they moved to Germany where he grew up a teenager. Now he is trying to find a home for himself in this Middle Eastern Country  I can only visit him every now and then; but mixed up as he still is I love him and I know he would go the extra mile for me.

The eel jumped out of the tank and killed itself, perhaps out of a sense of being left for another by its owner, and now the shark has taken over as the lord of the tank. I miss the eel as I had watched him grow from the size of no wider than a pencil and no longer than three inches to a foot long black and white spotted graceful lace in the water. I enjoyed coaxing him with shrimps and slices of squids from the refrigerator; he was finicky when it came to feeding.
Sadly enough we are all living in a fish tank, most of us just don't know it, we are under the illusion that we are free; simply because our tank is too vast to notice; perhaps after death we just might or if ever we get a chance to step out into space and look back.As it is our tank is fast getting smaller and smaller with time.With technology and the Internet, with the advancement of transportation and the breaking down of borders our fish tank is shrinking and not much for the better. There is so much discord in our tank today that soon we will be needing a major cleanup, perhaps a change of the water or the adding more chemicals to make sure the environment is safe or getting rid of those we see as threatening to our existence like the shark kicking out the eel.   

When I was growing up a teenager on the East Coast state of Terengganu in Malaysia I used to pilfered from my father's pants pocket hung on the wall everyday and i would find at least twenty cents there sometimes a little more and sometimes less; but there was at least twenty cents. As I grew into adulthood I had the audacity to say that the most my father ever gave me in my entire life was fifty ringgit and this was when I had visited him upon returning to Malaysia for a visit from the US. Now on looking back I regretfully realize how blind I was not to see that my father had been giving me my pocket money all along by pretending not to notice that he was missing 20 to 30 cents from his pocket every day. Had he given me when I asked him then it would mean he also had to give to my twin brother to be fair. My Father favored me over him without a doubt as my mother favored him over me. Sometimes we fail to see the small things the little plants for the forest.

No man that I know of has designed and redesigned his space more than my son and i admire him for this. He is an artist by his own right an interior designer with great taste for colors and arrangements. He is no Mozart but he got the piano just to see how it would look in the living room! However unlike his father he is more meticulous and exact when it comes to getting things accomplished, he has his mother to thank for this;  I had made the right choice in looking for a mould to cast my son,. He has her will.

My long conversation with Diego the Emirates Air Bus bar tender was about the perception of what is wealth, what is it to be rich in this life. We talked about the successes of the likes of Richard Branson ans I had Branson's book at the bar and it was what prompted the conversation. I had also told him that in essence I was a bum with not much to my name financially; I am the ultimate 'starving artist' but there I was having a drink served by him and spinning tall tails spanning from Alaska to South America visiting my children in Dubai,and perhaps later in Switzerland after leaving the beautiful city of Georgetown, Penang. Wealth is another grand illusion, it is relative, it is not a matter of having or not but what you do when you have and when you don't; to be able to accept both being rich or poor without discrimination, that's the secret. 

My twin brother today is perhaps already a millionaire and his family is well taken care of God bless him and I am still without a home of my own and drive a Kancil, (the size of a mini), my children, oh well you know this already if you have been reading my blog. It used to bother me yes, I cannot deny that, perhaps I even envied my brothers their wealth and comfort but now that I look back at what I have in my life: I don't think I was meant to be rich, financially. To reflect lamely from a Zen perspective, because I own nothing, everything is mine.