beyond toxicity

“Daddy, thank you for bringing me there at the playground!”  –I was the happiest man alive when Gabby uttered those words in verbatim. A simple one hour stroll to that nearby park cum playground became a memorable late Saturday afternoon for the two of us.

The father-and-son-date-at-the-park was originally set in the morning of Saturday, 04/14/2012 but despite Gabby woke up early on a weekend with a statement, “Daddy, I’m on time!” -referring to his punctuality to our morning call time of 7AM, it didn’t push through because he chose to play with his mom’s ipod leaving me to a cup of coffee while surfing the web and the cable TV channels.  And so I told him, “If we’re not going to Taman Riang  (Riang Park which is several blocks away from our appartment) this morning, if you want, we’ll go there late this afternoon when the sun is almost down.”  Then he replied casually, “OK!”  

After I spent hours post-lunch time on marking mini-test papers of my students which I brought home and other stuffs to while away time, I almost forgot my agreement with my son. At few minutes past 3PM, Gabby reminded by requesting me, “Daddy, punta tayo sa playground!” (“Daddy, let’s go to the playground!”). I told him, “Anak, mamaya, mainit pa!” (“Son, it’s still hot; we’ll go there later!”). 

If you must know, our present appartment here in Butterworth, Penang also has its own playground however, Gabby’s interested to explore Taman Riang for he sees and passes by it daily with his service-van-driver, Aunty (the usuall petname of Malaysian older women, as Ate or Manang to Filipinos) who picks him up to and brought him back from school every morning and afternoon.  Finally, I assured him, “Gabby, we’ll go to the playground around 5PM.”

As Tina chose to stay home to prepare and cook food and continue her devotion to watching “The Vampire Diaries,” Gabby and I geared up and got ready to go. Then the unexpected happened. It started to drizzle. And not for long, it rained hard. So I told my son that we can postpone again the stroll to that place.  But I felt he really wanted to go, hence we both waited for the rain to stop.

Apparently, what we saw, what we did and how he and I enjoyed the moment were all documented of course, on those photos.

Quality time for family however long or short is absolutely important. I am blessed that I have my family here with me.