Extended Time of Life!-Vacation in Palm Desert!

Posted by & filed under Personal.

This is the 4th night on vacation at Palm Desert, California. Having 4 days of leisure: playing tennis in the mornings, swimming in the evenings, dipping in the outdoor spa anytime, gives me a weird feeling that time has stopped for me even with the traffic muffling outside the Desert Breezes Resort and my life has held its short gasps, replacing it with a preparation for a quiet long deep breath through my nose into my soul…

All over this resort, there are these triangle-shaped leaf-like flowers, along the walls, over the fence, outside the windows…they are called bougainvillea, the same as in my parents city Panzhihua. Similar weather brings out very early spring with this easy growing flower. The passion of this reddish purple or yellow color couldn’t make the perspective white winter disappear in 3 days at Montreal, yet it brought back the days when I was accompanied by bougainvillea in Panzhihua 15 years ago…

Like here, there were — still are I believe — in Panzhihua, gated communities. We had a party before my boss went on his vacation back to England to see his 4 children and girlfriend. After dinner in the One-Street City, I invited the gang of my department to my parents’ empty dwelling to kill some time before seeing the boss off at the railway station at 1:00am.

When we arrived after dinner, the gate was still open. We had soft drinks, played cards and it was time to leave. When we got down to the gate… shit!… the gate was locked. Yes, of course, it would always be locked after 11:00pm every night! If only we had no car nor the old German and our big bear-bellied boss, we would have just got out by climbing over the gate and got a taxi!

I went upstairs to find some tool to open the padlock. Our German guy had pulled out a coil of rope, attached one end to the back of our car, one end to the gate and started the motor! Bing Bang! The gate was down before I knew his true intention. Then you could hear me screaming and yelling at midnight to the German guy about pulling down the gate of my father’s school! Yes, we had to bring the gate back to the job side, weld it up, bring it back and install it perfectly! Thank god, we were people who were working for the famous big german company Holzmann and who were building the highest concrete arch dam in the world at that time, fixing a gate was of no big deal!

The gate was fixed, so the school didn’t say anything, but one big branch of this bougainvillea was broken during the installation. I picked up some little branches and put them in my parents’ apartment where I had no one to look after them…

I grew 15 years, yet strangely I do not feel that I grow older. I am like a starfish, the longer I live, the more suction cups I have. The suction cups serve for me as sensing radars which provide me with information and knowledge that give me holding points for life. I feel that all these events: the reappearance of the passionate and romantic bougainvillea, the gated community, the similar type of weather, the repeat of vacation by different people at 15 years apart, are nothing but the extended time of my life. By having more and more suctions cups and extended time, my life is extended and beautifully stretched out in a way that you can not see from top down, but I can feel all the time. My life is not just one life. It is composed of many little lives, like a book of many pages and chapters, a piano of many little keys with each having its own strings and a soft-headed-hammer to make fresh, beautiful pieces of music, complicated and sophisticated symphonies…

I had been afraid of death and darkness. But since quite some time, I have been cool! It seems that life’s events have built up a stage for me to see life’s procedure and variations, to understand life’s pace and meaning, to grasp life’s essence by seeing and feeling the true nobility and grace of life itself. We truly do not get older! Wonderfully, we do get wiser and even younger in mind. The time and wisdom of life opened our eyes and heart, gave us suctions cups to hold strong our places, liberated our clouded minds, drove away our fear and it enabled us to live our lives over again and again, each life with more wonders, more beautiful variations of bougainvillea, fresher Satie’s Gnossienne and more energizing Fate of Beethoven…

Leave a Reply

  • (will not be published)

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>