When I was a kid, my parents moved to a flat house right beside the Kudat Golf Club. The scenery was beautiful, and I mean REALLY beautiful. It was breathtaking. OK, maybe that was from my child point of view because I was only about the age of 7 when we moved there. Imagine a home surrounded by pine trees. It’s like Christmas everyday! And because the flat was situated not far from the sea, you could feel the breeze blowing to your face whenever you pop your face out the window – especially if you’re living on the 3rd floor like us!

I remember singing my lungs out to the song by Sir Cliff Richards – The Evergreen Tree. The pine trees would “dance” along my song too. I swear! (OK, I thought they were “dancing” to my song.. it turned out that it was the WIND that made them “dance”.. I was only 7, what do you expect?! :P)

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Life beside the Golf Course was great. We tend to find golf balls on the lawn whenever we go down to play in the evenings. Mind you, these balls sells for RM5 per piece if you offer them to the golfers. LOL, seriously! In fact, looking for the golf balls became a part of our daily job! Sometimes the golfers’ caddies would come to the flat and asked for their “lost golf balls”. Of course we’d say “Oh, I didn’t see any.”. Hee..hee..

Can you imagine me, my brother and our cousin, David (who happened to live with us) would be busy scouting the lawn everyday for a golf ball? Hey, RM5 is A LOT that time ok?

3 golf balls = RM15 = TOYS from Love Kun Mini Market!!

My mom’s boss plays golf too, so normally we’d sell the golf balls to him – at a higher price of course. (and he didn’t mind!) It was such an achievement for us, being able to sell those golf balls because we felt like we did something that we enjoyed doing and we earned money from it.

Now my point here is, during my childhood time, we enjoyed doing this kind of stuff. We had so much time on our hand that we filled it with golf ball hunting, burung keruak hunting, fishing at the Golf Course pond (although it has a sign that stated “NO FISHING”), building mini houses made of rocks for the frogs .. and many more.

It makes me wonder sometimes.. if modern toys are really good for our culture and our kids. With the existence of PS2/PS3, X-Box, Internet, Online Games etc.. will our kids (or my future kids) be able to really enjoy life as kids? Will they even bother to play galah panjang, buaya-buaya, main jadi-jadi (Police and Thief) and many other traditional games that we enjoyed during our childhood days?

Do they even know what main jadi-jadi means?

Give a kid a set of guli (marble), he might not know what they’re for. Give a kid a computer, he’ll happilly scream: “Let’s play Counter Strike!”

Yes, that’s the reality in today’s world. Is that bad? I don’t know. I can’t tell each and every parent how they want to raise their child or which toy their child should and shouldn’t have. But are we going to let the old, traditional games to just extinct in the future?

I think the answer lies on ourselves. Whether or not we’re going to let these traditional games fade along with these modern “toys” is all up to us.

As for me, when I have a kid of my own.. I would still play taxi with them whenever I go back home to my daddy’s hometown. (Because my daddy’s home have a huge lawn and coconut trees too!)

Taxi: A game that consists of 2 person. A “driver” and a “passenger”. The “passenger” sits on a coconut pinnate while the “driver” pulls the pinnate to a destination desired by the “passenger”. Sometimes, the “driver” pulls faster in an attempt to make the “passenger” fall. Hahahaha!