A Belated New Year's Resolution.

 One of my 'New Year's Resolution', as I always mad several each passing year in the past is that  would die and be reborn; I want to be a born again. A born again what? I want to be born again as who I was when I was five or six years of age living as  did in the fifties growing up as child among the mangrove swamp at Kampung Selut, Sungai Pinang. I was born alongside my twin brother sometime in August of 1949, we were born among the mud skippers and century crabs the murai taik and ketam selut, the wild and shrply hutan deruju, a nasty looking bush that looks like the English thistles, the rpickly plants that they hang around doors during Christmas, we were born in a village where the high tide would reach three to four inches just below th surface of the house floors. This is where I would like to be be reborn; #96-H Sungai Pinang Road, Penang.

I would like to die from this physical and be reborn living along with my mother and father, Aunties and Uncles, siblings and cousins; Rumah Nenek or grandma's house., it was called. I would like to be able again to take a swim in the high tides among my chidhood friends every chance i got, catch watter snakes and shoot at unfornuate birds and every creature that was unfortunate enough to become a target with my catapult. Look for Siput  Lokan buried in the mud beneath the Hutan Deruju while getting ierced mercilessly by the the thorns. I would like to fall asleep everynight to the rythm of the old grandfather's clock, tick! tock! tll the the whole village and its denizens false silent. I would like to the shrill call of Burung Murai or magpies and bulbuls, the call of the roosters and throughout the kampung announcing yet another morning to rise and play! Waking up to discover surprises, what the night's high had left behind while I was asleep, a dead duck a torn up doll or a Japanese rubber slipper with a broken strap, the flotsam would often included human waste that was being lifted from the open toilets around the village and delivered to your doorsteps. Yes, I would like to die and be reawaken bakc into my childhood years growing up ni a mangrove swamp. 

My second resolution is to sleep and enjoy my dreams as I wish them to be, now a cowboy in thw Wild West now Tarzan or the Apes in the heart of the African forest, now Morgan the Pirate then Robin Hood, I used to look forward to sleeping at night becaue i had the ability to become the Hero and Director of my own dreams. No mountains too high nor rivers too wide and I could fly, I could fly like the birds that see around when I play around the village. The nights were always dark all around us outside the 'Atap' house buit six feet up in the air mounted on stilts, we had no electricity in my childhood years and the smell of kerosene lamps filled the air as we slept. I could be who I wanted to be in my dreams and for me as a child I learned much from my dreams; I was free to create as much as I wished, whaever roles I chose to enjoy and nightmares were very rare.

These are my two New Year's resolution and silly as it may sound, I could not think of a better desire for a resoluton to make. The rest are minor ones like I will donate my body to the Medical Research Institute for their use upon my death. This I wish to do if feasible in honor of my mother's memory in her struggles against Tuber Culosis spending 9 years of her life at the Lady Templar's General Hospital as case study for TB. For nine years as a lab rat, my mother devoted her time to sewing mostly of teddy bears and rabbits to be donated to the orphans' homes during Christmas. During those nine years we hardly saw her as in those days traveling from Penang to Kuala Lumpur was an undertaking that requires some of money and we could barely imagine as kids. All I can remember was the day we sent her off a the train station in Butterworth, I think it was the first time I saw my first train, what a thrill despite sending my sick mother off to spend 9 years of her life being cut and open in her chest. In her later years my mother carried her scars around with pride as only her smile would betray otherwise every time our eyes met.I could never reach out and hug my mother nor she me and for this I wish to remember her by donating this physical body towards medical research (if it is still acceptable when the time comes.)

Yes, that's about it my New Year's Resolution of this year 2021. I realize that most of it are just wishful thinking, but lets see how much of it will manifest in the course of time. I have lived through some of the most exciting and eventful years in the history of this planet on looking back seventy years from the time my twin brother and I appeared right in the middle of the mangrove swamp known as Kampung Selut, Sungai Pinang, Pulau Pinang.