#71: Christmas with Melancholy

I'm back from Muar, my mother's hometown, where I spent Christmas and Boxing Day there.

It's quite a journey to there. My mother and I were waiting for my mother's friend in the Mines to start off this journey. After she and her green Myvi arrived, we then started the journey.

But the journey back to Muar was over 200 kilometres. A book about Classic Railway Journeys in the West and an album in my phone made great companions, and this album I'm listening to, is Illuminations by Josh Groban, another artiste from my Favourite Artistes List.

The companionship made the ride pleasantful, as the scenery outside the car window was suddenly became enjoyable because of the tunes by Josh Groban and the description of those pleasantful railway rides from the book I'm reading. The undulating mountains at far, then the lush green view of plantations, later the quiet sights of the oil palm plantations, all of them was as though creating a symphony, not those grand symphonies, not those bombastic and grandiloquent symphonies, with trumpets and horns and violins and flutes and all kinds of percussions blasting out, but those that makes your mind at peace, or makes your mind go wandering around, or make you observe the things around us more specifically. Those symphonies that made you feel really, really good, like Josh Groban's Galileo. You should go get the album.

Anyway, the melancolic part starts when I saw my grandfather just discharged from the hospital and transferred to a recovery centre for the elderly on that very day, and the condition of the centre is just next to any ordinary old folks home. Yes, there are people ready to help you, but his allocated bed is not ventilated, there were a lot of other people in the centre sharing the service, and those people made my mother and aunt and uncle who went there along begin to regret the decision.

Then, the conflict of the rationale of putting my grandfather in the recovery centre arises, and the search of an alternative to the problem's solution begins.

The sentiment kind of ruin the whole day for all of us. What a Christmas!

But otherwise, being in my grandmother's house is a fortune for me as it is cool, peaceful and quiet. It's something rare for people living in the urban area. My sister thought that was something bad, because she don't like the bathroom that is dirty in her perspective. It was satisfactory for me, in fact, going back to my grandmother's house is a treat.

Well, spending my Christmas in a different fashion is not bad at all.