As I turn 90

After my two-and-a-half-month stay with my daughter Amelia in Mansfield, Texas, I left for San Diego, California Saturday last week on an American Airlines flight, while its company was still in negotiations with its pilots’ union. I was slightly anxious, being familiar with sometimes tense company-and-union relations in the Philippines during my years-long work with the Associated Labor Unions-owned radio station dyLA in Cebu City. But the flight was happily smooth and uneventful, thank God. By now, the airline company and union have come to a satisfactory compromise in the current nationwide financial slowdown. The slowdown has resulted in reduced budgets and salaries, and a laying off or forced retirement of working personnel, aggravating current mass unemployment.

My son Antonio and his family met me at the San Diego airport. After lunch we drove on to Glen Abbey Cemetery to visit the hilltop grave of my second daughter Raquel who died and was interred there last year. We then drove on, two and a half hours to Los Angeles, where Antonio and his wife Rebecca work and live with their three young daughters.

On Sunday morning we attended Mass celebrated by Father Paul Griesgraber, pastor of the Saint Catherine of Siena Church who is also recognized as a healing priest Together with other parishioners greeting him after Mass, I thanked him for praying in a healing session over my then ailing Raquel last year. When she came to after having been “slain in the spirit”, she told me it was a beautifully peaceful experience.

Weather wise, it continues to be an exceptionally a hot and dry summer season, even for this Cebuana used to our hot summers. Temperatures went up to triple digits, particularly across the southwestern United States including California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Montana, resulting in severe drought in Texas in the last weeks I was there. And yet, the last night I was there, a Wednesday, we were surprised to find it raining hard when we came out from the movie house showing “The Odd Life of Timothy Green”.

Earlier on Tuesday night last week, a lightning-laced storm rolled across a county north of Fort Worth, creating a spectacular climax of 106 degrees Fahrenheit to yet another sweltering August day, the heavy wind and short downpour bringing the 106 temperature down to the 70s.

It’s ironic that about that time, the Los Angeles Times reported flooding in the Philippines, with a photo of a girl shoulder deep in the swollen Pampanga River in Luzon. The floods had left nearly 100 people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands.

Later, the Texas Star-Telegram headlined the Olympics “clos(ing) with a blast” on Aug. 12th, with a photo spread showing fireworks exploding over the Olympic Stadium in London, a fitting finale to the 2012 Games.

The Honor Roll of winners and their awards confirmed my affirmed partiality to U.S. athletes: U.S. at the top with a total of 104 medals won, 52 of the U.S. medals won by women (there goes my Women Power involvement), and 34 Texas athletes competed in the Olympics (my partiality, too, since my daughter, at whose home I viewed the live Olympic coverage).

Among the athletes I especially admired for their performances: U.S. gymnast Gabrielle “Gabby” Douglas (truly gabby in the numerous admiring interviews later with her) together with her fellow girl/women gymnasts; Misty-May Treanor and Kerri Walsh Jennings who won their third consecutive Olympic beach volleyball gold medal; Kayla Harrison who struck the first gold in judo for the U.S; 24-year-old American Wrestler Jordan Burroughs who gave the U.S. its first wrestling gold in the Olympics; and swimmer Michael Phelps closing his career with his 18th Gold Medal, 6 Golds in the 2012 in London (4 Gold, 2 Silver). All hail, the Champs!

In a significant postscript to the 2012 Games, David Bauder of the Associated Press reported that the 2012 London Olympics “drove the power of social media-– partly to the chagrin but mostly to the benefit of NBC, which controlled images of the Games in the United States.” Of late, I have become more curious about social media, so I requested my daughter Amelia to look it up in the Internet for this technology “illiterate”.

From Wikipedia, I learned that “Social media includes web- and mobile-based technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue among organizations, communities.” Six different types appear – collaborative projects, blogs and microblogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. I must study it some more.

In closing, allow me this personal sharing.

My loving thanks to, with prayers for, those who remembered me on my 90th (yes!) birthday last Aug. 21st: my children Amelia and her family in Texas; Antonio and his family here in Los Angeles; and Ramon and his family in Calgary, Canada. Also to Comadre Lourdes Pantejo in Carson, California, and niece Stella Go in Manila in the Philippines. God bless you all!

Till next week, then, as always, may God continue to bless us, one and all!