Every time I see a toothpick, I think of my father. Last summer, when he was hospitalised for various problems including malfunctioning kidneys, he taught me yet another lesson. Without meaning to, of course.
After a meal, he used the toothpick that the hospital had provided to clean his teeth. Then he took out a tissue, used an edge to clean the toothpick. His attendant moved forward to take both from his hands, but he waved the guy away. Carefully, he rolled the toothpick into the tissue and put it in his pocket. “It is not to be thrown away without being used fully,” he told the room in general.
Who recycles a toothpick and a part of a tissue, I wondered. Not rhetorically. I wondered in a very real way about the mind of someone who did not see even a toothpick as something to use and throw - well, at least, not throw it away till it had stopped being useful.
A long time ago he told me about how poor the family was when he got married to my mother. I was ribbing him in a friendly way about her having brought a lot of furniture - “dowry” I called it - and we were bantering about the life and times of his youth. Suddenly, he stopped bantering and said with complete seriousness. “We needed her to bring that furniture. We were so poor that there wasn’t even a bed for her to sleep on, so she had to bring one,” he told me. I felt humbled by his admission. I felt privileged to be sitting in a huge house that he and my mother had saved up to build - that they had worked every day of their lives till they retired to ensure that neither my brother nor I had to go through that sort of hardship. It is so very easy to take one’s life for granted. And it wasn’t only the house. It was the education - the best that they could afford - which gave us our foundations.
I must confess that I have had my eye on the sofa set that my mother brought in her “dowry” and have been trying to persuade my father to let me have it. But he simply won’t. Not because he does not have a far more expensive one now. Or because he can’t buy a dozen. But because, I guess, this is one of the few objects to hold on to since my mother passed away. Curious, though. Most of my memories of their interactions throughout my childhood and adulthood is of the two of them bickering - nagging each other for something or the other till one or the other snapped. I wouldn’t have thought that he would feel sentimental about the furniture, especially since I was only interested in the sofa set - not everything else.
It isn’t just a matter of sentiment in the sense of where it has a connection to my mother. I think there is this “waste not, want not” idea that guides his life. None of us ever leaves any food on our plates - even if we are full to bursting, there is absolutely no way that we waste food. This was one of their teachings. As a child, I suffered much trauma as I was not allowed to leave the table till every grain of rice had been eaten. I tried once or twice to stuff my mouth with the last bits and go and spit it out in the bathroom. But every time I was caught. How the hell did they guess what I was about to do? Luckily, I grew up and never had this problem again because I would only serve myself the amount that I could eat without overdoing it.
Now, I appreciate this thing they taught me - and I try without much success to teach Pooky and Tyger (and people in school too) to know the value of what has been put on the plate by the labour of someone else. I did not need lessons in the “interbeing” to learn not to waste.
I think the whole idea of hanging on to the sofa, the toothpick, the tissue, all stem from the same place. Look after the earth by not wasting its resources. Interestingly, my father would never proclaim that he is an environmentalist. He has never preached “reduce-reuse-recycle”; but he has practiced it and taught us to do the same.
Every time I put an unused tissue into my pocket or bag, I know that it is my father who is doing this. Every time I hang on to a toothpick that I haven’t yet used, I know that deep inside me my father lives and thrives. And each time, I remember the hospital, and I know that each little thing in this world has some value, and indeed that it has the right to be valued - even a semi-used toothpick.
