In the home of my childhood friend Dr. Tweety Quintero Olivares is a beautiful plate, bone china, made in the ‘30s in Czechoslovakia. Each plate is numbered. It has a special place on one wall, where it hangs alongside paintings and other precious objects.
It is a dinner plate that belonged to her late grandmother Paz Chanco Sy-Quia. But why is only one displayed?
Tweety told me that plate is the only one among a service for many that survived the bombings of World War II. Her Lola had saved those plates for a special occasion, and all but one were reduced to rubble after the war.
“Do not save your best things for special occasions,” she counseled Tweety after telling her the story of the plate.
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Last Friday (Thursday in the US), a madman plowed his car into a group of pedestrians in Times Square in New York, killing one and injuring 22 others. The teenager who succumbed to her injuries pushed a sister to safety and took the full brunt of the impact.
A few seconds before the maroon Honda of the madman hit the pedestrians, my classmate Ces Yupangco Delos Reyes, her husband Rudy and their four sons decided to cross the street from the exact same spot where the car mowed down the passersby. They had just crossed the street when the sound of steel against flesh pierced the air.
“What a horrific day!” Ces, who was on holiday with her family in the Big Apple, recalls. “We were just mere seconds away from the scene when the boys, Rudy and I witnessed the madman drive and plow into those pedestrians on 42nd St. We had just crossed the street and heard a loud crash, we looked back and saw the car swerve from the street and go up the sidewalk...and ram all those pedestrians. We saw the people being hit left and right and they were flying like pins in a bowling alley. Rudy and I and the boys walked the next block to safety and held hands, crying and hysterical. And we said a prayer of thanks to God and our guardian angels.” ?
It was a close shave with injury, and death. A split second can cost you a lifetime. A split second can have the consequences of an eternity. A split second can also usher you down the road to your second life.
We really are not in control of our destiny. What prods us to cross the street now and not a second later? Why are we spared?
We have no answers, because our answers will only lead to more questions. When chance overrules decision, we just have to acknowledge that we are not in control, and our life depends on God’s mercy.
So live each moment. Life is as fragile as bone china. This moment is the only one you’re sure of. Seize it, love it. Be grateful for it. Use your best china, your best silverware. You are your house’s most prized guest and waking up each morning is cause for a celebration.
Don’t postpone happiness.
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A holy man once wrote, “Don’t just believe in miracles. Depend on them.”
In my column last Tuesday “Stories from Fatima,” I quoted from a memoir of the late President Cory Aquino, wherein she enumerated some of those she had lent a rosary given to her by Sister Lucia of Fatima. Sister Lucia was one of three children who claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in the town of Fatima exactly 100 years ago. The two other children, Francisco and Jacinta were canonized last May 13 by Pope Francis.
The former President mentioned that she once lent Sister Lucia’s rosary to then senatorial candidate Ed Angara, who had suffered chest pains while playing tennis in March 1987. After tests were conducted by top Philippine doctors, he was diagnosed to have suffered a heart attack and was confined in the ICU of the Makati Medical Center. This was shortly before the May legislative polls, where Angara ranked fifth among 24.
After the elections, Angara flew to San Francisco for a heart bypass procedure. Before he left, Cory lent him the rosary.
“On my third day in San Francisco,” Angara, the Duterte administration’s newly appointed envoy to the European Union, recalled in his biography In the Grand Manner, “before they wheeled me to the operating room, they took an angiogram, something that wasn’t available in the Philippines back then. Then Dr. (Richard) Myler told me, ‘There’s nothing wrong with your heart. There’s no block!’ My doctors had been unanimous about the bypass surgery, but now they had been told that all I had was a spasm, caused by lack of sleep, too much smoking and the fatigue of a month-long campaign. My heart had stopped for a while, but there was no blockage in there. The revelation was a miracle. I felt like I had been given a second life.”
Angara, now 83, celebrated by heading for the Barrio Fiesta branch in San Francisco where he treated himself to crispy pata.
Upon his return from his two-week US trip, Angara visited President Cory and returned the rosary to her. He gave up smoking and never had any more heart problems since then even if, until a few years ago, he drank over 10 cups of brewed coffee daily!
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The Aquino sisters lent Margie Juico, President Cory’s faithful Appointments Secretary, the rosary when she was diagnosed with a cancerous growth in her colon last March. (Mrs. Aquino died of colon cancer in 2009.) The first miracle here is that Margie, who had no symptoms of any ailment, agreed to her children’s prodding to undergo a routine executive checkup not a minute too soon. Her cardiologist Nick Cruz included a colonoscopy in the battery of tests she was to undergo. During the procedure, they found a malignant growth that necessitated surgery to remove 11 inches off her colon. But when they biopsied the 15 lymph nodes around the growth, all tested negative for cancer. The cancer had been excised and had not spread.
When Margie asked her oncologist for a course of action, she told Margie, “You don’t need me! Just go on with your life.” No chemo, no radiation. Margie just avoids red meat, especially charbroiled meat. A miracle she attributes to prayers and the intercession of Mary through the miraculous rosary, for she was told that there was quite a chance that the cancer could have spread to the lymph nodes.
Miracles happen. We don’t know of all of them, but they’re happening to us. Every day.
Oops...
In my column last May 18 titled “This Czech is a Phl war hero,” the number of POWs at the Bataan Death March was inaccurate. It should have been written as: “According to accounts of the horrific march wherein some 60,000 to 70,000 prisoners of war (POWs) were forced to walk from Bataan to Tarlac, 18,000 Filipinos and about 650 Americans perished.”
(You may e-mail me at joanneraeramirez@yahoo.com.)