Steady, steadily, we stepped out of the big auditorium under a spell. Not from the magic wand of sorcerer but the exhilarating challenge from attending two parties. A 12-hour non-stop emotional roller coaster ride. Everybody did have a wonderful night now forever recorded or etched in our memory. Our two balikbayans, Noemi and Susan, did have a rare opportunity and experience to talk about when they return to their loved ones. How it impacted each of us, I will never know. Surer than sure of this event was my realization that sharing happiness with friends and classmates multiplies our state of well-being and satisfaction. Happy moments are meant to be shared. When we grow older (like now), sad moments can be shared, too, to make it lighter. What a thought about life? As we start reconnecting with classmates after the HS years, we got closer to a different level. Could be the result of getting wiser thru experience and getting older. Making me remember lyrics from the theme song of the movie “The Fiddler on the Roof.”
“Sunrise, sunset
Sunrise, sunset
Swiftly fly the years
One season following another
Laden with happiness and tears.”
And a quote: ” When i was young, I was told: You’ll see, when you’re fifty. I am fifty, and i haven’t seen a thing”. -Erik Satie.
We went to our cars after saying good-byes. It was a happy parting of classmates that expected an encore few days from tonight. Before opening the car’s door, I glanced at the auditorium with a tender feeling of joy making my heart beat a bit wild and fast. My discerning power revealed, this place of much happiness I may never see again or revisit. Man of positive thoughts, I countered, be back many years from now.
Allow me to digress a little. Let me state an idea, belief, opinion from personal analysis. My idea arrived after reflection on many occasions whenever i am called upon to perform an act. As Socrates said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.”
In the many occasions I have attended, when requested to sing or deliver an impromptu speech, I feel something different while on stage. After the performance, I started making rationalizations on what transpired while singing or making the speech. Of course, I do my evaluation of the event only, when I performed more than what I expected. If it did, my rationalizations are the following:
1, Did someone get inside my body to take over the act?
2, Did my two Angels compete again, besting the right Angel? My Angel from the left, because I am a leftist and it gets the upper hand. Taking the center stage singing or speaking instead of me and I don’t know where I am at that moment.
3, Sometimes, before any performance, in case one I don’t know is coming, I start getting excited by an idea or song. Like what happened in many celebrations held at the Bureau of Immigration, I keep on practicing on a song while discharging my duties, developing sentences up to several paragraphs on the idea I was infatuated at the moment. Then on the occasion, viola, I sang the song “It’s Now or Never” while the good Commissioner, ex-Congressman Marcelino “Nonoy” Libanan, was in accompaniment. Did someone tell me to practice on it? Did somebody arrange it the way it will happen?
- God is the Answer. The Creator and the All Knowing Supreme One. Nothing happens without His blessing. Especially when you always ask help from HIM.
” God brings men into deep waters not to drown them, but to cleanse them”.
– Aughey.