Chai Chen, New Zealand!

...and now...the end is near...and my oydessy ends... I see the black monolith in my study room and I leave the many folds in the stream of life in New Zealand to be back ...

To all my many dear Kiwi buddies, especially E & S, dedicated to you...here's one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost and his famous poem...THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Yes! I will miss all the good times and the wonderful memories...the tears and the laughter...the open skies and the many, many days of coldness and warm sunshine on our faces up in the hills and the mountains...picnics beneath towering casuarinas...trees of avarcadoes, mandarins and kiwi fruit; shrubs of berries, cherries and lemons everywhere...

E... I'm sorry I didn't keep my word after all that you did following my accident... You will be repaid in manifold ways in future!!!

Memorable Books in a Kiwi Public Library

What have I, an avid Piscean reader, born on February 23, been reading all this time? Sorry, you'll have to guess which books some of these memorable lines come from...

"It was the English playwright William Congreve who wrote that heaven 'has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned' ".

"Human madness is oftentimes a cunning and most feline thing. When you think it fled-it may have become transfigured into still subtler form".

"I have loved justice and hated iniquity".

"(New Zealand's) Prime Minister Helen Clarke was born on February 26, 1950".

"Time travel might be within our capabilities in the future".

"Stanley Kubick compared the form of information to the black monolith in his film 2001, the mysterious source of knowledge that seemed to appear at successive stages of human evolution, each time we were ready to be taken to the next level".

"He who fights monsters-should look into it that he himself does not become a monster. When you gaze into the Abyss, the Abyss also gazes at you".

"We are all one. No tree has branches that fight with one another".

"Five Jewish men who influenced the history of western civilization: Moses said the law is everything; Jesus said love is everything; Marx said capitalism is everything and Einstein said everything is relative".

"You are regretfully invited to the wedding between my perfect son, The Doctor and some Two-Bit Tramp".

"MI5 in the 1950s seemed to be covered with a thick film of dust dating from the wartime years. The whole organization was rather like Dickson's Miss Haversham. Wooed by the intellectual elite during the war, she had been jilted by them in 1945".

In a Kiwi Farm...

Today, as I was driving past a Kiwi farm, I spotted a wolf playing among the sheep...

I wonder how there could be a wolf in New Zealand!!!

A Beloved Witness for Christ to the End

I was researching in my archives when I came across this carbon copy of a letter written by the late Garnet Dearnley, from New Zealand. In it, he aptly described his experience in Miri here in those days. In delving deeper, I learnt more about him and actually came to the realisation that this European truly loved my old school, Saint Columba's School and its founding mission, the Anglican Church.

Sadly, the late Dearnley, a jolly lecturer at Tanjong Lobang College died at quite an early age in a fatal motor-cycle accident near where he is presently buried, in the oldest Christian graveyard in northern Borneo, between St. Columba's School and St. Columba's Kindergarten. His grave is closest to Abang Indeh Road with abundant yellow daffodils growing beside it and has the friendly handsome gent's pic, placed there by his son whom I met over a year ago.
Every day, as I bring my wife who works as the headmistress of St. Columba's kindergarten there, his face would be seen with a friendly grin.