Egerton Chang, Contributor

One of my biggest failures has been my inability to use chopsticks. As a Chinese Jamaican, I suffer the ignominy every time I eat at a Chinese or Japanese restaurant. What's worse is that my wife, who is a mixed Jamaican, and children, can use chopsticks, a couple quite proficiently. My six-year-old son is learning with the aid of a rubber contraption that is freely available at these restaurants. And that's the best I can do.

It's not from the lack of trying. Over the years, I have made numerous serious efforts at using these two pieces of sticks. I have always attributed this to my large family, 12 other siblings to adulthood, and that I found it a matter of survival to use a fork rather than chopsticks in such a cut-throat setting. But that has been a lame but amusing pretext concocted to hide the fact I have been an abject failure.

It's amazing that sometimes we link our measurement of failure or success to the small things in life. Somehow we feel that getting the red light at every traffic signal in the morning is a sign of failure that can set us off for the entire day. What about ending in the wrong lane that is moving much slower than the others?

Extra effort

On the other hand, there's the measure of achievement we derive from getting our child to take the one or two extra mouthfuls of breakfast. We happily delude ourselves into thinking that this will make him/her smarter or have the extra energy to last the day. Or getting our young athlete to do that extra lap around the track or in the pool. Somehow this will turn him/her into the world's greatest athlete, we like to think.

I am not a very social animal, so whatever friendships I have developed, I treasure most of them, at least in my mind. Such was my friendship with Sybil Christie. She was an assistant officer at the Jamaica Citizens Bank when I started working there fresh with my MBA in 1974. I was a management trainee and she was an assistant officer at the King Street (head office) branch. She had a personable yet acerbic and caustic personality that somehow I got attached to. We developed a friendship in the short two years I spent there.

Anyway, we only 'bounced' into each other a few times after that and communi-cated not much more over the 35 years since. She may have developed some detractors, indeed enemies, over the years, nevertheless I always remembered the good times I had at Citizens Bank.

Shortly after Easter last year, I decided to open an account at a bank where she had worked at a senior management level, and in speaking to the branch manager, learnt that Sybil had left that bank a couple years earlier. Around the beginning of August, I was told that Sybil was terminally ill. "Terminally ill", what did that mean? Was it three months to live or three years? Was it really terminal at all?

Sybil, I was told, was now living in St Ann's Bay, some four hours round trip away from Kingston. It was around the time of the 12th IAAF Berlin World Championships and I knew that Sundays were the best, indeed the only time, given my work schedule, I could visit. This particular Sunday, the 100 metre finals for men was being run and I had to think long and hard, and then over and over again about whether to go and visit her, knowing that if I didn't, it could take another few months to go ... or never.

The evening races were scheduled to start at 11 a.m. (Jamaica time), so it either meant that I visit very early in the morning and try to return to Kingston by then (virtually impossible), or ... . Anyway, I decided it was now or never. I called a mutual friend, Tony Magnus, who had been the manager of the Collections and Recoveries Department in those days, and told him of my plan. He didn't hesitate. So we headed out.

The day turned out almost perfect. We arrived a few minutes before the broadcast commenced. We had a couple of drinks (non-alcoholic for me), we reminisced, we watched the championships. Sybil offered us some cake, we drank, we reminisced, we watched. We never mentioned her affliction or asked how well she was doing. We chose to pretend everything was normal.

Lasting memory

That Sunday, August 16, 2009, will be indelibly etched in my memory as Bolt won gold at the Olympiastadion in Berlin in a world record 9.58 seconds, and Powell won bronze, his only medal to date at a major track meet. In addition, Kerron Stewart and Veronica Campbell-Brown won their quarter-finals, and Aleen Bailey and Shelly-Ann Fraser also qualified for the women's 100 metres semi-finals. Moreover, Novlene Williams-Mills and Shericka Williams qualified for the women's 400 metre finals, having won their respective semi-finals. And there was Sybil.

Around three months later, I was speaking to the same bank manager who had told me about Sybil and she asked "if I knew". "No, know about what?" I asked. Sybil had died two weeks before and was buried a little over a week later.

I am glad I put all behind me and just did the right thing. Even if I had missed Bolt's world-record run. Bolt was the icing.

Where friendship is concerned, don't put off anything any longer, do it now. If you have been meaning to call a long-time friend, do it now. If you need to tell someone close that you are sorry, or "I love you", do it now. If you have been putting off going for lunch with a relative, stop procrastinating, do it now.

I am glad I went that Sunday in August.

Egerton Chang, a businessman, may be contacted at Egerton Chang e_rider69@hotmail.com or feedback sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.