Our Days are as the Days of FlowersPersonal Reflections by Antonio Calipjo Go, Forum Contributor I have just attended the wake of a friend who never woke from his sleep on the last and final night of his life. The irony of it all is that it was his firstborn son who found his already rigid body way past noon, when he went to visit his father to ask for money for the nth time. This son, being 50, was himself on the verge of being old; still, he was jobless, homeless and a junkie. Ironic, too, that just last week I visited my friend to bring him tomatoes I’d harvested from my backyard garden. And now, just like that, he is gone. Meanwhile, the tomatoes, his son told me, had outlived him, simply turned red and redder still, and remained uneaten on their kitchen counter. IMAGE CREDIT: BY VIKTOR HANACEK ON PCJUMBO.COM“Now is the time to be grateful with what is left for me to enjoy—the flood of love
I get for a lifetime of giving love, the soothing balm of the kindness of strangers”
I’ve lost some of my closest friends in the last three years and I sometimes get the feeling that the train’s been gone and I’ve been left standing alone by the tracks, my soul filled to the brim with overflowing emptiness. I came home in the blue dizzy twilight to a darkened house, half-a-century old this year, and my mind readily assumed its sulking, brooding mood. This house is old and run-down just like me, its windows droopy-eyed and bleary, its stairs sagging and sad from overuse, its walls echoing and reverberating the booming silence.
The boys and girls I raised from infancy have all gone hither and yon, looking after their own brood of boys and girls, busy building their own nests and hives. I deeply, profoundly miss their laughter and their chatter, pine for the days when they brought havoc and mayhem to every corner of the house. How I wish they were here with me, as they were when they, this house and I, we were young and green! How I wish they’d come visit, even if it is just to shatter my dishes, to punch holes in the walls, to break some windows and trash the house.
I find myself sitting by the window, staring at the driveway, hoping to hear the sound of wheels abrade the gravel, wanting to see one of their cars pull in. I wish they’d call more often, checked in and visited more frequently, brought their kids for me to hug and squeeze to death. Alas! All is neat and orderly. Everything’s in their right places—no broken things, no scattered toys. What I have is a well-tended garden of cacti and thorns and a house of pain, full of empty chairs and empty tables.
I am but human, living and alive at a time and place bereft of gods and heroes, damned and accursed for having a heart that hurts, that—I can’t help it—longs and yearns and desires. I resemble each of the eight billion human beings that walk the Earth—all of us bleeding when pricked, laughing when tickled, all bar none prone to bending, battering, and breaking. Grasses wither, flowers fade, tomatoes rot, and men die.
The night is abuzz with sounds—crickets and cicadas and birds asleep, twittering as they dream of bluer skies. The wind, without form and substance, moves the dense grove of bamboos behind the house, as if they were grass, and orchestrates a susurrus symphony that is nothing if not paradisiacal.
I am alone with my thoughts, alone by myself, trying to connect the dots of stars in the black velvet sky in the hope of building up there a menagerie of my own. I see what I’ve degenerated into—a lonely old man, a mere photocopy of my former self, rendered in sepia, tending to talk to myself as madmen do, arguing with my image in the reflecting pool, dancing with my shadow in the dark, baying at the moon, singing myself a lullaby to sleep. “Where is love to be found?” I ask myself. The answer comes back to slap me: east of the sun and west of the moon! Having come to my senses, retrieved my lost marbles and regained my composure, I now get it that such is the fate of men grown gaunt and grey. I’ve already shed my lifetime’s worth of tears and I shan’t be giving out another drop more. I’m done with being sorry for the things that refuse to change or for them that won’t be coming back. Now is the time to be grateful with what is left for me to enjoy—the flood of love I get for a lifetime of giving love, the soothing balm of the kindness of strangers.
To all the questions that bother me, I know that God will, as always and ever, be the answer. I am mollified by the certainty that as I near my own day of judgment, I am also coming closer and closer to the day when I’ll face The Judge Most High Himself. I’ll soon vacate this ramshackle house for that far other one, the one with no locked doors, no shuttered windows, no walls and no fences. I forgive myself for sometimes wanting to sing loud enough to be heard, for acting crazy enough to be noticed. Knowing that my days are as the days of flowers, I should for now focus on having a grand exit, my final move to Heaven.-----------
Mr. Antonio Calipjo Go, retired academic supervisor of the Marian School of Quezon City, is an advocate of good English usage who has been waging a lonely crusade against badly written English-language textbooks in the Philippines for many years now. Several of his no-nonsense critiques and deeply felt personal essays have appeared in the Forum over the years.
