An Old Cobbler Friend -- by Emily Yoong

My good friend from Melaka, Emily Yoong, emailed me this article that she wrote on one of her life experience. I want to share with you as I believe it speaks volume to all of us.

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We all come from different walks of life and we have different childhoods and they will be a part of us and actually mould us into what we are today. We cannot choose our parents but our history occurred to us for a purpose and God's eye were watching then too.

Next door to my late-father's goldmith shop where we lived , was an old cobbler who worked outside my dad's shop and lived upstairs. A group of homeless men rented the place to smoke opium but they lived there too. He was my friend for as long as i could remember and until i was 12. I would watch him mend shoes and haggle prices with the people that walked past and sometimes patronised my dad's shop. These 'princes of the earth' would come in to purchase goldplated ornaments to adorn themselves and make themsleves presentable for the coming kenduris and let the copper goldplated pieces pass as genuine gold ones. they would also sit at my dad's shop while waiting for my dear friend to attend to their broken shoes in need of repair. With these earnings my friend supported his opium addiction.

During his spare time when business was slow he would pick up cigarette butts , remove the remaining unsmoked grass in them and then rolled it into cigars for his own puffing. I would join him in his venture after my schooling hours. But I was more enterprising . I noticed that my grandfather who was with us during the day as he needed to do his goldsmithing , was also rolling cigar grass in white pieces of paper to make his own cigar. So I collected more cigarettes butts to help him save on having to buy the grass. Good kid i was. !! But my friend soon grew old and his opium addiction was too much on him.

One day ,he fell from the stairs and the neighbours called an ambulance and sent him to hospital . But as he did not have any identification papers, the hospital would not treat him and he was sent away to walk home. He couldn't work and must have gone begging on the roads. One night, on my errands at the alley across the bridge from my house I saw a crowd gather. I joined them and my eyes met those of my dying friend. At age twelve i looked into the hollow eyes of dying and death and I then walked home, feeling helpless I could do nothing for my friend. And I felt the helplessness of being helpless. And the helplessness of being alone and dying.