Not a very good Saturday

I decided to wake up a bit early today just to make sure that I can get my hands on the Saturday edition of the paper, or to be precise, the Recruit section of the paper.
As HB once said, Saturday is the day of hope.

Anyway, another reason why I decided to do it is that I wanted to get at the uncle who ran the mom-n-pop shop downstairs. Not that he's mean or annoying or anything. He's the cheerful, kinda' goofy, happy-go-lucky type that always makes fun of me when I run downstairs and try to get the newspapers. He used to say "good morning" to me when I do, even when it was already 1 pm. Occassionally, I would get the very last copy that he has, and he would say: " Very lucky today, hor?"

So there I was, grinning happily as I grabbed my copy of the paper and walked to his "counter" to pay for it. He wasn't there though, he was busy arranging some stuff in another corner of the tiny shop. That's when I noticed the shop looked a bit more spacious. Some stuff were missing.
I asked him about it and that's when he told me ," You're gonna see less and less in the next few days."

I thought it was one of his silly jokes again, so I smiled and waited for his punch line.

"Seriously, I'm folding up the business. Someone's gonna take over next month."

This is coming from a guy who told me and my aunt that he doesn't mind losing money every month for the past few years, just so he has something to do to keep his mind occupied.

I thought that business was really bad now, but he told me that he wants to spend time with his wife who has just been told that the breast cancer she had 2 years ago is back.
At this stage, he and his wife were told that any therapy is basically only to try to slow down the cancer from spreading anywhere else.

"Nothing I can do" he said.
"I must take care of her...... must take her to see "the world" now...."

I was speechless.
The thought of my grandpa crossed my mind.
But there's no point in mentioning that story to him now.
He seems to be dealing with it much better than I did in a relatively similar position.

There was a brief silence as we looked at each other.
I was afraid that if I stayed any longer in the shop I would start to cry.
A deep breath and sigh later, I said a weak good-bye and left. I wish I could give him a hug or tell him to hang in there, but I didn't know the chinese word for it.

The other day, when I dropped by his shop to get a top-up card for my phone, I ended up looking at some of the old pictures he had from back in 1968. He was happily telling me how pulau Ubin used to be so much fun back then. Another day, he was proudly "introducing" me to the pictures of his grandchildren that he proudly displays on the shelf behind his counter. And yet another day, I met one of his grandsons in the shop, sitting contentedly on a tiny stool in one corner, happily munching on some snacks that I suppose he raided from his grandpa's shop.

I'm sure gonna miss seeing him around....