For lovers and patriots

There I’ve been all week it seems, nose buried in computer, answering mail from people in physical pain. There is an urgency to physical pain. You feel the need for relief jump out of your computer screen. I have arthritis. . . I’m on chemotherapy. . . and there I am anxious that I’m not responding fast enough. Over the years I have developed a strange sensitivity to other people’s pain, its almost telephatic. I have also learned how to shield myself psychically, to close a glass door inside me that keeps other people’s pain on their side, otherwise I absorb it like a sponge absorbs water. I want to help but don’t want to be pulled down into the whirlpool of physical suffering out there.

Then I saw it at the bottom of an e-mail message inquiring about Kinotakara. I almost missed it. I think it winked at me and because it beckoned so I knew there was something I was supposed to think about. In its strange way it was a message for me:

DANCE as though no one is watching
LOVE as though you have never been hurt before
SING as though no one can hear
LlVE as though heaven is on earth. (Souza)

It haunted me all day. Oh heck, I forgot, it’s Valentine season, when therapists’ offices are packed to the rafters with "loveless" folk, a holiday of sorts that columnists pay tribute to and all I said was, "I know of these foot pads that took away my physical aches and pains. . ." and give you what my daughter picturesquely called putik (mud) feet.

I blink at this verse at the bottom of someone’s e-mail and find myself taking the time to wonder – when was the last time I danced as though no one was watching? Well, one Sunday morning when no one was watching I played my Jobim CD and pretended I was dancing the bossa nova with dance partners of yore, my dear departed friends, Chito Feliciano and Roger Alcantara. I used to be good dancing with real partners, not DIs. Last time I danced was with a DI who called me Tita. Made me ask myself – has it come to this? Maybe that’s what caused the beginning-of-the-year depression. SING as though no one can hear. I do that all the time, though even I wish I could not hear. Yes, those gigs decidedly contributed to the beginning-of-the-year depression.

Someone should kill whoever wrote this greeting card platitude for the lines LOVE as though you have never been hurt before and LlVE as though heaven is on earth. (Souza) because they sound good but they don’t make sense. Who is Souza anyway? Brother of the guy who composed those marches? I have a sneaking suspicion he’s a philosopher I should know and I’m verging on ignorance here, but who cares? Okay, that’s enough, Sue, I hear a friend’s voice in my head, making me realize that I am sungit, crabby, cranky. You would be too if you spent Valentine’s night stuck in traffic, stuffing your face with salty butong pakwan (watermelon seeds) until your lips were swollen. I too would have wanted a candlelit dinner but all I had handy was butong pakwan.

But February is not just famous for Valentine’s Day. It is or should be significant to us for other reasons that one of my writing students, who wants to remain anonymous, reminded me of when he wrote this essay about color in class. I thought it should be published today:

"We are often clear about what basic colors mean. Red usually stands for courage, conjuring images of love and devotion or of blood and violence. Blue, we’ve been told, represents royalty, the color of the brave and the bold, the lofty expanse of the wide blue sky or the tender blue mantle of the Mother of the world. White stands for virtue, the virtue of purity. Spotlessly clean, pure and bright, white is the color of purest light. Green, they say, is the color of hope. The growth of the harvest, the lushness of the forest the green grass of longing for the green pastures of home.

"And yellow? Well, yellow is the color of the sun, the yellow color of gold. Yellow canaries singing and men turning yellow as they grow old. ‘Yellow’ was a name you didn’t like to hear when the guys around you saw you cowering in fear. Your eyes turned yellow if you had the fever or Hepa A, B or C and had a sick liver.

"But the yellow that I will always remember was the yellow of a million ribbons everywhere. Those yellow ribbons at EDSA that fateful year that changed a nation forever. The yellow of recovering innocence lost. The yellow of rebellion against a most cruel host.

"The horde of yellow in tears, defying and standing up to the mighty, the historic, unwavering courage of yellow people power.

"Yellow is the color of not forgetting.

"Yellow is the color of a nation remembering.

"Yellow is the struggle still unfolding.

"Yellow is the color of a thousand bright mornings that are sure to blossom with every sun rising. The beautiful yellow of a million sunflowers blooming on the mountainside after a long distant night of rain pouring and wind howling of the many colors of the rainbow, yellow is the color of a new beginning."

I teach: "A memory is a picture charged with emotion. We remember an image and we remember the feeling that came with it." More than Valentine cards, I remember the images of EDSA, viewed from a distant TV set as I moved from Daly City to Burlingame my heart in my throat worried about a child I had to leave in the Philippines. My heart and throat remember what February means to Filipinos. It is the month we set aside to flamboyantly celebrate the way we love romantically and patriotically – in senseless rhyme and exuberant bursts of color. Maybe I have been expressing the way I know to love now – helpful, responsive, admittedly short on flamboyance. Perhaps my way now – nose in computer, telling people how they might relieve their physical pain – is not so irrelevant after all.

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