The lame walk again (Sign No. 5)
As readers of this blog know, my friends and I distribute bread every month to the residents in a rental block. We know the residents reasonably well by now, as we have doing this for several years. About two years ago, I visited one of the residents and found a stranger sitting in his house. It turned out to be his sister, and she told me that he had suffered a stroke and was in hospital. As I chatted with her, it dawned upon me that I knew so much about this uncle. That he loved to eat pork knuckles. That his cure for everything was garlic boiled in rice. That he loved visitors and had, just recently, generously opened his tiny home to host a dozen relatives who had come from Indonesia to Singapore on holiday. That he had one son in Singapore and another in Melbourne. I even knew about this sister, on whom he had spent his little savings to visit in Sydney, when her husband passed away. In short, Uncle and I had b...