Familiarity

I left off where we were making our way to JFK Airport for Vancouver with the hope I would write to you from there. I never did. Surprise, surprise!! Now in the warm of our hotel room in Whistler after a quickly-put-together but wholesome dinner, and a week later, let me recall Vancouver. As a…

From NYC to YVR

It never got nearly as cold as they had described when we were in NYC even though the mercury dropped below -8 Degrees Celsius when we were there. Indeed, it had been sunny most of the time, and I needed sunglasses to go out of the hotel. Central Park looked rather frosty and barren though…

Back to New York City

I went to a few weddings and funerals recently. Weddings were inevitably in respect of children of friends, long on speeches and slapsticks but sometimes short on thanksgiving, while funerals were of friends, some older but some not so old. I met a long time friend at the last funeral and we went all the…

Our Sixth Anniversary

I have no wish to go back in time to those very early days when I longed for festive seasons such as Christmas. One supposes that it is easier to make children happy, but it won’t serve too much purpose to recall what made me happy those days even though I can never stop recalling…

My Year Ender

Many friends I ran into often asked where I had been recently, citing the images or impressions they had gleaned on the Facebook pages. Strangely enough, Su and I barely left town in the last year. Indeed, apart from the month from mid March, we were home bound for the whole of 2014. The mind…

Freedom

It was more than two months since I uploaded my last letter. In between, my IT friend helped me to revamp my website to give it a more modern outlook, but I have yet to update my homepage and change other rather dated material. Nobody though seemed to have noticed the change, for I have…

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Happy Mother’s Day

I have never met my grandparents on either side. My mother wrote a manuscript of over 20,000 words in the early Eighties when she was about to be hospitalized for an operation of some sort. She dreaded the process and was afraid she might not survive it. She had our father make copies of what…

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Pray for Pope Francis

We have Labour Day and the Birthday of the Buddha coming up with Saturday and Sunday sandwiched between, so that we can expect some outflow of holiday makers and a corresponding inflow of tourists mainly from the Mainland during this so-called golden week. But already, and rather sadly, the media has roundly reported that Mainland…

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Living and Planning

Easter has come and gone; and before I could send emails or electronic messages to friends and acquaintances, as I had planned. Increasingly, I find it unrealistic if not impossible to live through plans, which would make me a liver, as opposed to a planner. This liver – planner thing, I recall, was very much…