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.
In 1524, when he was just sixteen, on a panel shaped like a convex mirror, Parmigianino painted himself, his hand in the foreground lengthened, out of shape. He captioned the painting “Self-portrait in a Convex Mirror.”
The wife and I had to pass through the Vatican Museums to get to the Sistine chapel, which lay at the end, and was to be the highlight of the route. But we did not mind making our way through what seemed like an infinite series of rooms, every one of which offered a trove of priceless artwork, and demanded a long, serious viewing, and this alas, in view of the limited time and the big crowd, we could only spare a few minutes of.
In many ways, the American Civil Rights Movement reached a tipping point in the 17-minute “I Have A Dream” speech of Martin Luther King Jr. On August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, King spoke to over 200,000 civil rights adherents during the what was called “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.” Writing for the New York Times, James Reston observed, “Dr. King touched all the themes of the day, only better than anybody else. He was full of the symbolism of Lincoln and Gandhi, and the cadences of the Bible. He was both militant and sad, and he sent the crowd away feeling that the long journey had been worthwhile.”
