My submission to the FiveFootWay "Magical Spaces" project in 2007, writing about the porch in my old Katong home.
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"But what was in the space?"
"All things," the young man answered.
"Our dog under Pa's car, the dog bowl, Ah Ma's and Ma's plants competing all over the place, last year's Ang Paos still fluttering on them in shades of red, wind chimes, the overhang of our neighbour's mango tree, slippers that revealed who's home."
"When the car is out, Mimi the dog would stretch and run - fill up the space. Sometimes mangos fall ripe, sometimes they fall because mynahs pecked at them. Their fragrance fills up the night air, and bats - yes eventually I realized they were bats - swooped around. At least that's my memory of it."
"But what else? Surely there was more?"
"Small pools of wax, filed even smoother by shoes skating by. The wax from the Lantern Festival candles. Ma was always worried we would set the house on fire, so we were only allowed to play there. Mimi wouldn't come close to the flames. He's actually male, but we got him when he was already eleven - we didn't get to name him. When we wanted him to sound macho, we called him 'Ah Mi', like 'Army.' Haha, imagine that. He's a great dog. People always asked me what breed he was. You know, that's what people care about - the breed. I have endless stories but they just want to know the breed."
"I guess he's just another dog, Pavlovian and all. Even before I took Psychology 101, I tried to trick him into running towards me for a photo. Of course, tapping the dog bowl worked."
"How's he doing?"
"Well that must be more than ten years ago. I wonder how he liked to be under the car. We had a kennel that we never used it much. I hate to admit this, but sometimes I played those skipping games with my two sisters. A kid neighbour always spied on us jealously, and we nicknamed him "Pong Pong" after that buoyant fruit. We also gave the mynah with recurring baldness from fights a nickname that is too embarrassing to tell you. We would yell 'Pong Pong' and that confused Mimi. He would bark at us, thinking it is a game."
"You guys weren't kind - to neighbour or animals."
"Well I guess my compulsive e-mail checking habit came from running to the mailbox every half an hour to see if there is any new mail, although we would see the postman pause at our door when cycling by if there really was. But partly because my Ah Ma would randomly comment that she thinks she saw or heard the postman. Thinking back, perhaps she knew that we liked to dash to the mailbox. It probably took us just ten seconds, the dash - that was how small the space was."