After sending David and Luke back to Calvary Care Home (CCH), I was planning to go back to my own nest before the boys' fellowship which I thought would be held there later in the evening. But as Albert P's car could not take in all the passengers and he avoided driving the old CCH van which sometimes broke down, I had to help to fetch some of the boys. Even though it would be more than five hours' waiting before they finished their tuition, I preferred hanging around in town to making another three 35-minute trips between Bukit Baru and Paya Rumput.
I was thinking whether to spend my afternoon in the public library or other nearby places when the thought of just staying at CCH came to my mind. The home administrator kindly gave me the permission to be the guard.
When the children, Albert, Martha and George left respectively, I was all alone at CCH for the first time. There were neither TV aerial, nor DVD player, nor Internet. I had brought a novel but some of the author's vocabulary in the first few pages was already too tough for me to understand without a dictionary. I was in a state of being brain dead and all I was doing was just letting my mind and body rest. What a precious moment to find back my homely self!
Albert had telephoned to suggest that we changed the venue for the boys' fellowship from my house to CCH. Other callers rang the fixed phone several times, which prevented me from taking a nap. So I got up from the sofa, took ingredients from my car and the fridge and started preparing the dinner in the kitchen.
While I was plucking kernels from the maize, I fell into the nostalgia of those days when I cooked meals for my guests or tasted my friends' homemade dishes in France. The Toitot were the ones from whom I had learned to be a good host or helper in the kitchen. I used to lay the table for breakfast, lunch or dinner, spent quality time with my friends chatting and appreciating the food. Back to Malaysia, I had been missing all that homely atmosphere around a dining table, which I could not even find at home in Batu Pahat.
There was only one chicken left in the fridge. Since there was the boys' favorite sweetcorn, I decided to leave the meat for Martha to cook during the weekdays and made use of vegetables to fry tempura. The boys who came back later from tuition without any snacks were already hungry. Despite my medium culinary skill, I just needed to serve the hot dishes cooked with love and presented my trademark smiles to win everyone's stomach!
When I saw those satisfied faces, my tiredness was temporarily gone.
Temporarily only.
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