Granite Banks

December 10: If I could nail my childhood down at any particular place at all, which hasn't been razed to the ground and rebuilt upon or anything, this must be it.

Dad took me down for bike rides the last time we lived near here. Most times we went once around, all 6.17 km of the gravel path. Sometimes we went twice. But today I didn't have a bicycle, and jogged instead. I looked at the sky when I reached the first jetty and it frowned back. There was going to be a shower today.

People would expect the gloomy disposition to herald death and doom; it was far from what I expected. The place was lively near everywhere.

I came here last week and found catfishes skulking around the granite boulders. Along with it was a swarm of other unidentifiable fish, and some terrapins. Today the floodgates at Sungei Pandan lit up and it was quite pretty, never mind the fact that I never saw it in action. The construction in April seems to have put in a load of new pipes to factories, in addition to the ones that were already added for the four or five years when I turned my back.

The route bends to the left if you go south from the first jetty (closest to home). Soon you reached the second one, which is green. Then you ran into a swarm of swallows and a swarm of small flying insects whom the swarm of swallows preyed upon. Halfway to the third jetty, which is white like the first one, you saw a goanna swimming in the water. Bloody goannas, now they're everywhere.

Meanwhile you look left and there are the sandy or muddy estuary of Sungei Pandan I never noticed while I cycled past that place when I was a kid. It looked today more sandy or muddy than it should be but hey, it might be the low tide.

And also the terrapins sometimes I would sight basking along those pipes which would go down and disappear gently into the water, but those folks I didn't get to see today. Maybe they're expecting the rain; maybe the goanna ate them, I don't know.

And on my way back past the green jetty I recalled Dad and I climbing the gates, went to what I must have been thinking to be the middle of the lake, and bothered the swarm of fishes of indeterminate species by spitting into the water. Dad dropped this habit only insofar as he gave up smoking, but that's for another day I guess.

It's too late into the night to write about my thoughts about being as close to nature as I like in the days after enlistment.