thank god

I had never been too confident of my mum with her 'blind-to-things-ahead' way of walking, plus her 'idle-shouldering' of her bag, multiplied by her unsteady footing.

Well that confidence hit a new low after we stepped foot on the uneven roads of Malaysia.

Dad was in his usual 'blame-others' mode when he had to retreat from his attempt to cross the busy road. He was the first to attempt to cross but failed to and was forced to walk back because there were simply too many cars but the old man's ego was simply too big to swallow. Don't ask me why, but in his senior years, he has totally mastered the art of turning something insignificant into a talking point and so, he does it this time by unnecessarily pinning the blame on us - that he had to retreat because the rest of us were too slow to cross.

Mum, who isn't one to take anything lying down, retorted indignantly at him. Never mind that we were crossing the road. And it didn't help that my dad gave her this pompous egoistic glance. I couldn't help but laugh at the whole absurdity of it all.

"These are my parents?!!!" I mused to myself, holding Mum's right arm tightly as we stood on the road divider and waited for the opportune moment to cross another road. When the road cleared, we started walking and the next thing I knew, I found myself falling towards the ground.

Apparently, Mum had miscalculated the height of the kerb (I have to admit, the kerb was higher than normal) and so in her misjudgment, she tripped and fell, dragging me (who weighs slightly more than half of her) down. I exclaimed in shock, but in reflex, managed to tighten my hold on her arm and pull her up just before her face hit the tar road, in the same split second that she tried to use her left arm to break her fall.

We were extremely lucky that the flow of traffic had miraculously slowed down and there were no cars heading our way... Mum escaped with a scar on her left knee and a sore left arm but the fact of the matter is, we could've died!

"If we had died on the road, I think I'd have gone straight to heaven", I told Mum in jest much later, referring to the saying that "Heaven lies at the foot of a mother".

And another funny thing to note... Though Mum fell on her left, the handbag that she was clutching on her left shoulder was strangely unscathed.

"It's as though the road knew that the bag was a gift from someone", Mum hinted.

And I couldn't help but smile...

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(19 April 2008)