In this piece of memory, my little brother is two years old. Every day, while I am at kindergarten, my mother takes him out on a walk in the neighbourhood. My brother leads the walk on his yellow ride-on car and my mother walks closely behind him.
Their walk starts with a visit to the playground right in front of our apartment, then continues toward a place that is most important to my brother. At the furthest end of our community premise, there is a hill, and on that hill is a small open area where the out-of-service local buses come and stay until their next service hour. This is a place my brother enjoys his bus-watching.
When they arrive, sometimes, they find a bus or two waiting there, and my brother exclaims in joy. He sits there and observes the buses in detail forever until either they leave or else my mother suggests that it is a good time for them to leave. Other times, when there is no bus, my brother sits there and wait for a bus to appear until finally a bus arrives or my mother suggests that they have waited for long enough and now it is a good time to leave.
On their way down the hill, my brother speeds up on his ride-on car. Unlike me and my mother, he is fearless of the speed. He kicks the ground hard before letting the gravity take him down the hill at a high speed. My mother runs behind him, but he’s too fast. She cannot catch up with him.
In the middle of the slope, there is a pothole. It is not huge, but large enough to catch the wheels of a ride-on car. As my brother comes down the slope at a high speed, his ride-on car gets caught in the pothole and comes to a sudden halt. Before he knows it, my brother is thrown away from his ride-on car and falls on the ground face down.
“I’ve told you, Sweetie, haven’t I?” says my mother when she finally catches up with my brother, who is now crying. “I told you not to go so fast! This is the reason. Now you’ve hurt yourself!”
You would think that my brother surely learns the lesson after the painful fall. But somehow, every time he comes down the hill after his bus-watching, he forgets about the pothole. As he speeds down the slope on his ride-on car, his car gets caught by the pothole and he falls on the ground.
I cannot recall if he eventually learned the lesson – I have to ask my mother about that.