Posted on 30 March 2005 @ 12:35 in Family
“And how old are we this year?” Dr Lee, the neurologist, asked when we brought mother to see her last Friday.
“79,” I replied.
To be exact, 79 today.
Happy Birthday, mum!
Actually, for a long time, mother didn’t know her date of birth. Well, she knew her Chinese lunar birth date, but not the English equivalent. Then one day many years ago, I read in the local tabloid about a service that could help determine an English birth date based on the Chinese one. So I sent in mother’s Chinese birthdate and a while later, the answer was published in that section of the newspaper. I cut it out and carried it in my pencil box for years. Unfortunately, I don’t have it anymore.
So now, we know both her Chinese and English birth dates. But it wasn’t added to her identity papers. And when we went to apply for our new identity cards, some smart aleck in the IC Department decided mother’s birthdate to be 26 January 1926. Our mistake for not adding it in years before, and also for not checking the new IC before accepting it.
Well, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just words on paper. Meanwhile, she turns 79 today.
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Posted on 29 March 2005 @ 23:01 in Music
Sunrise (see previous entry), sunset (this entry). One’s a picture, the other’s a song.
Okay, enough of that nonsense.
deesee had posted an Elton John song a few days back, one that is more than six minutes long. This morning, I was listening to another long Elton John song, and it got me wondering which was longer. So I checked the Internet and found that mine is longer by 10 seconds.
It seems EJ has a penchant for long ones, cuz he has another song, “Someone save my life tonight” that is also more than 6 minutes long, as well as that 11-minute+ elegy, “Funeral for a friend (Love lies bleeding)” .
But this 6′ 47″ song is a long-time favourite that, like most of his early hits, has lyrics penned by Bernie Taupin. It’s a sad one, about Indians and cowboys, and particularly about the twilight years of an Indian warrior. Bernie sure has a way with words. The arrangement is lush, too.
Here you go, “Indian Sunset” by Elton John and Bernie Taupin, from the 1971 album Madman Across The Water.
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Posted on 29 March 2005 @ 16:26 in Pictures
View outside my bedroom window around 6:55 this morning:
Yes, it’s a brand new day.
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Posted on 27 March 2005 @ 22:36 in Family
My brother was home for the weekend, and yesterday evening, we went out to dinner with our parents. We got mother to sit in the front of the car so she could easily see all that went on in front of her. She looked around the inside of the car, spotted the glove compartment and said she wasn’t going to open it.
She remembers!
This afternoon, I was using the Magna Doodle lookalike tablet to write Chinese characters for her to recognise. I was writing the characters for Sunday and finishing up the second character when she said, “it’s missing one stroke.”
She remembers!
You may think it’s no big deal that an old lady remembers the last time she opened my car’s glove compartment and couldn’t get it to close, or that she knows when a Chinese character is missing a stroke. But this old lady, my mother, suffers from dementia, so little things like this mean a lot to me. It means we’re still keeping full dementia at bay.
I’m grateful. Very grateful.
Thank You, Lord.
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Posted on 27 March 2005 @ 14:57 in My Faith
And I with Him.
And all believers with Him, too.
Thank You, Lord.
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