Wee Were Here: Lights We Cherish

After having consecutively written off two Saturdays because of work and national commitments, we were really looking forward to this weekend. We clambered out of bed at half past two in the afternoon, and decided we should be tourists for the rest of the day. That meant we only left the house at close to six in the evening.

A week before we set aside the evening to catch the fireworks from the third National Education Show, which is actually a full-dress rehearsal for the National Day Parade (NDP) for Primary Five students. But as we only finished lunch at a quarter to five, we cancelled our booking made the previous week for dinner at Southcoast, an Australian pizzeria close to Marina Bay Sands from where we could watch the fireworks as we munch on dinner. We arrived in town close to seven, and took a saunter towards Esplanade Bridge, camera in hand and tripod slung across my back. A pleasant breeze and the mellow evening light combined to produce a cool, untropical evening.

As the speakers from the celebrations at the nearby Floating Platform boomed, the people who had made it possible rested, ate and got ready for the logistical whirlwood that would descend upon all once the stands disbursed their crowds. Bus drivers picnicked and caught up with each other. National Servicemen returned to their assigned positions as marshalls and reminded each other of their instructions. Policemen with their buzzing walkie-talkies patrolled the broadwalk where another crowd was steadily building in anticipation of the colour that would fill the skies at the end of the Parade.

For Mary and I it was a case of thoughtfully reacquainting ourselves with a thoughtless familiarity on a stroll we have taken so unthinkingly so often before - the parkside path along Connaught Drive on the fringes of the Padang, past the Tan Kim Seng fountain and its weathered classicity, the Cenotaph in its inviolate ivory and on the lawn next to it, with each step towards the Esplanade Bridge and its dancing evening lights on the river, a splendid view of the Singapore skyline emerging like steel shoots out of the low canopy. These are vistas forgotten in the purposeful haste with which we lead our lives, revealed in its stark glory against the night.

Below: City lights. City we love, lights we cherish.

All along Esplanade Bridge people waited. An army of photographers had already been encamped all along its length. Tripods had been set up near the rails, on the parapet between families and even on the verge dividing the walkway from the road. We managed to secure a spot close to the Esplanade itself. It didn't proffer the best view, but then again nowhere did. Another bridge was being constructed right in front of it.

Below: mind the gap; lights on water atop the Floating Platform.

There we waited for time to stop, as it does five times every year at eight in the evening when independent Singapore's birthday lights explode in the sky. Against the red-green afterglow the angular silhouette of the crane on the unfinished bridge before us cut a sharp contrast, a reminder that we can never finish writing the story that is Singapore. And that when time moves again at ten past eight we move again. We build again. We toil again. And then come August once more we wait again. Not just for the NDP fireworks, but for the lights in our own hearts. For the lights in our lives. The lights we celebrate. The lights we cherish.