It was already dark when we arrived in Burgos, Spain. We left Fatima (Portugal) early in the morning and made a side trip to Salamanca. On the bus I wrote a poem and slept, while the wife took pictures of the countryside with her phone camera.
The man had a quarrel with his wife. In lower households, the clash would have sent the plates flying and the man seeking the shelter of a wall. But the woman did not even raise her voice, which, whether loud or soft, the man would find deafening, his guilt being the butt of her barbs.
When we stepped out of the church, I saw the moon floating behind the leaves of a tree, a sight I found too magical to pass up, and so I whipped out my phone camera, positioned myself to get the right composition and took a shot.
How passing is memory. Age can eat it up. A lady, who is pushing 90, does not remember the current date, or for that matter recent events, and might ask after someone every fifteen minutes or so, and, of course, kindness dictates that she be politely answered just as often.
I am tempted to require the front office, if someone wants to see me, to ask the visitor, “Are you still alive?” Am I serious? Yes — more or less.
Still the best way to look at the month of May is by looking at a flower. But which flower? It depends on where one lives. We have a vine that crawls on a trellis and covers the walk beside our house with yellows, and just outside the kitchen, sitting on top of an abandoned wall, as though tossed up by their long stems to rest there, are small white flowers, perfect in their size and purity to ring a bride’s head with.
For some reason, I thought of Aristotle when a young couple came to me to be civilly married, in particular how, in his Nichomachean Ethics, he discusses the nature of love and friendship.
He gave five tips to be followed daily to have a long life—eat five small meals, instead of the regular three; drink no less than six glasses of water; shun the elevator for the stairs; find a quiet moment; hang out with happy people.
I didn’t know what got into me—I took a shot of my lunch with my phone camera. It was not because the prandium was great. Why, I only had fried fish, squash stewed in coconut milk, rice and a banana, and—to complete the credits—bottled water. Perhaps it was the way I arranged the items on the table. But really, it was because the man and woman who sat on the bench in front of me had their arms around each other, and, inasmuch as I like mysteries, I felt like stealing a shot of that ineffable moment. But, which made me believe that suspicion is instigated by the devil, the man mysteriously turned towards me, and so I just aimed the camera at the food instead.
During our visit to Lourdes, France, the bishop who accompanied us suggested that we do the Way of the Cross on a hill behind the basilicas of the Rosary and the Immaculate Conception. The wife and I had second thoughts about joining.
Since Ash Wednesday or thereabouts, the weather has remained torrid. As the heat grows with the hour and all but reaches boiling point at midday, I look forward to the evening and its coolness. But the humidity continues even beyond midnight, and makes me sweat in sleep despite a hard-working electric fan beside the bed.
Six o’clock in the morning—I knew it from the clock on the wall, and from the neighbor’s car, which had just pulled out to ferry the children to school, an event that, without fail, occurred at six o’clock in the morning.
The space around the house is given to plants and trees. When we first came, there was nothing except grass, two or three clumps of bananas and some shrubs. At the back was a gentle slope, more a suggestion than the presence of a hill. It had wild guava shrubs. I fenced it with Ipil-ipil, using seeds I had collected during my trips to an island in the course of my work.
