justina forever

Earlier in the week, Dad and I had made plans to hang up my artwork on Saturday, Valentine’s Day. I had the whole day planned out in my head: I’d take him to a nice brunch, we’d go to the hardware store to buy art-hanging hardware, then we’d hang everything up together. But Dad obliterated the dream-day I’d concocted as soon as we arrived at the brunch restaurant down the street.

“Thirty dollars for breakfast? Let’s go to McDonald’s!” (I do love a McDonald’s breakfast set but had thought it might be sweet to take him somewhere nicer for a change.)

To Maccas we went, and then to the hardware store, but it didn’t have the sawtooth hangers I was looking for, so we took a bus to the mall with the art store. Hardware procured, we got sidetracked poking our noses into other shops, then ate some chendol at the food court. Home we went, where we debated the best way to measure out how to hang stuff on the walls before landing on some combination of tape measure and eyeballs.

Once I got over my fear of making holes in the walls of my rental apartment, we got to work! We were so absorbed, we got time blindness and didn’t realise it was already 7:00 — and we still hadn’t eaten lunch.

“Mala place?” Dad said.

“Yes!”

We put on our shoes and stepped outside, but it was pouring. So I cobbled together dinner from leftover zongzi, airfryer salmon, and some sad-looking carrots I found at the bottom of the produce drawer. (For a brief moment I felt bad for feeding my dad subpar food all day: fast food for breakfast, dessert for lunch, and now sad leftovers and scraps for dinner? Bad daughter!)

Revived with calories, we agreed to continue our work. Why stop? We had momentum! I was hammering a nail into the wall when the doorbell began to chime, a frantic finger pressing the button once, twice, ten times in a row. Was the building on fire? I bolted to the door. There stood an eighty-year-old man in a white V-neck tee wielding a long-handled shoehorn: my downstairs neighbor, whom I’d never met before. He looked irate. 

“What are you doing? What’s going on here? My wife is not well! She’s trying to rest! What is all that noise?”

“I’m so sorry,” I clapped my hands over my heart. “I lost track of time.” I thought he was going to smack me with his shoehorn. My dad came over to defuse the situation.

“My daughter and I were trying to hang up her art; we’re so sorry for the noise. We’ll stop now.”

The man looked past my shoulder at the dog paintings on the wall and said, “Oh, those are great!” I began to cry as I imagined his sickly wife suffering from my foolish, inconsiderate hammering. As tears streamed down my face, my dad asked the man how long he’d lived in the building: twelve years. He had retired long ago.

“What were you doing before you retired?” I asked.

And then…

I’m not sure what can of worms I opened, but this man and my dad started talking about their pasts: where they came from, what they did over the decades, all the many friends they have in common. Ten minutes went by. Then twenty. Then thirty. I invited him in to sit in the living room, poured them some rooibos, and he and my dad talked and talked and talked for one and a half hours. Every now and then, they’d stop to marvel at how much they have in common, how similar their senses of humor and general philosophies on life are, how many people they both know.

Wow, I thought, this guy’s poor wife must be wondering what the heck’s happened to her husband, because here he is yapping away with my dad. I asked him if he’d brought the shoehorn to smack me with it, but he said he’d carried it out of the house by accident.

Some of my art still isn’t up. I guess I’ll work on it later.