Crawl into bed virtually dead

Last Tuesday I resumed my dance class at Sunshine Place. That made me count back to the last time I took classes there. Ten months! No wonder I felt after class that I would just simply drop dead. But we had old friends coming for merienda so I had to stay upright, smiling and awake, which is honestly what I felt like doing but my body almost refused to cooperate. That night I all but crawled into bed virtually dead.

Wednesday I went back to Sunshine Place to check out another dance class. I found my body could not move lightly to this easier class. It was still all knotted up from the previous day’s class. What do you expect when you’re 74? I sat with my old friends again, chattering and laughing with them over lunch and playing a haphazard albeit tremendous fun game of mahjong with Dotty, Angie and Maggie. We play for plastic chips, not money. We enjoy being that silly.

That night there was a party at home. My students from my first and second writing classes were mostly there — Ems and Silver, Cocoy and Rommel, Menchie and Leslie, Fred and Carmel, Josie, Tracy, Gigi. We always used to get together to write. That night we got together to sing. There were two new additions to our group. First, my husband, Loy Ventura, who served as an impeccable host coaching all the men to sing, while Gigi I think got the girls to sing. The other was my pianist friend, Edwynn Castillo, who can accompany anyone. It was a great party mostly of frustrated singers except for Loy, who really sings well.

We had a lot of wine flowing. I think I had three or four glasses to overcome the pain in my body. It somewhat succeeded, but this morning I realized the wine had brought my sugar up to 194 (my usual sugar hovers around 75-95). But who cares? I don’t. I have a ton of medicine to take to bring my sugar back down. We really had fun that night! But after the last guests left my spine was beginning to give way so Edwynn told me to go to sleep already. “It’s okay,” he said. Once again I crawled into bed virtually dead. That was the second night in a row.

Thursday is always my deadline day. That day I was relieved because we weren’t going to have a party so I could rest my less-tired body. My husband invited me to join him at the gym but my body didn’t want to. All it wanted to do was finish fixing my necklaces. I used to make jewelry. Did not realize until I had to move house that I had made so many. I put them in boxes and have not started fixing them until very recently. So I stayed upstairs and opened one of the boxes and began to sort things out. Then I noticed one of my dear old friends was trying to call me. So I called her. She was inviting me to do a little workshop on jewelry making. She wanted me to talk about the creativity it requires to invent a piece and the craftsmanship it requires to make it.

This must be God answering my prayers! I have stopped teaching writing because it bores me. I have also diminished my knitting because it bores me, too. But just this week, after I finally finished fixing my workroom, I made myself a lovely piece of jewelry — a necklace — and a thought darted like a butterfly through my mind: Maybe I can teach people how to make jewelry. Now today, here was my friend calling me, offering a small workshop.

I got very excited but had to put myself on hold because I had to have a late lunch with my brother-in-law and his family.

“Imagine you having lunch with your brother-in-law,” my friend giggled. “I know,” I said. “I, who once said she would never marry again, went right ahead and did it at age 74.” But I’m happy, enjoying myself. I’m excited about doing old things with a new twist.

 We left home a little after noon to travel to the south. Just a light drizzle. We talked, ate, laughed, traced relationships, told stories. We left at 4:30 p.m. but got home at 6 p.m. By the time we left it was raining hard and the traffic was so tight the road looked exactly like my car window: thickly speckled with water dots. Big, small, medium-sized, some trickling slowly down weaving between the other dots like those irritating motorcycles with riders in yellow, orange or blue raincoats. It was so depressing.

 In the end, I got home totally exhausted once more, and will crawl into bed virtually dead after I email this. So sorry, but such is life.

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