What do I do? I wake up every morning at around 7:30 and turn on the TV set to watch Today, an American news-magazine program with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer as primary hosts. I have become addicted to this show and have rescheduled my life around it. It best reflects the minds of Americans today. It has some political news but also it has news for almost every market segment, from 21 years upwards, and for every psychographic group. So it will have news about Mr. Alito on the verge of being named Supreme Court justice and a forensic expert noncommittal about his findings on a possible honeymoon murder on a cruise ship. The weatherman, Al, is on a diet, wants to lose 20 pounds. He has lost 12. We follow him to restaurants to see how he eats.
It has research figures on what women want, how they feel about fidelity and cheating, and you see the discrepancy between fairly new brides and fairly old ones. American women are fierce about infidelity. That’s because that country has divorce and they can sue their husbands and get alimony and live without them. Not so in the Philippines where there is no divorce and a woman must accept her husband’s infidelity to keep her and her children alive. The Americans have it good. We don’t, but nobody here wants to listen. I have given up preaching on the values of divorce.
Then they have interviews with book authors, sometimes movie stars, chefs and cooks – I mean, they have everything squeezed into two hours. It ends at around 9:30 and that has successfully reversed my day’s schedule. Where once I got up and wrote in my journal first thing, I now do that ritual in the evening. I also now water my garden in the afternoon.
That’s how I noticed that my little potted fern was out of place. It used to sit grandly on the piece of old wood I inherited from my daughter and put on the terrace outside my room. Suddenly it was upright on the floor and the wooden pedestal was empty. That’s funny, I thought, I did not hear it crash. I remembered it was there yesterday. Now it stood so tidily on the floor between two plants, a perfect fit, no sign of dirt or leaves that would have happened had it fallen. It was just so neatly there. I shrugged. Maybe I put it there and forgot . . . but I really don’t remember. I picked it up and returned it to its perch.
Finished with my plants, I began my journal, which involves drawing a rune. What are runes? They are flattish chips made of some hardly breakable material and they hold Viking characters. Runes are intuitive instruments. Writing about them now would take up space, so I’ll save that for another time. Anyway, they are part of my daily ritual. I draw a rune from a velvet bag, look up its meaning from an accompanying book and meditate a little. I put my hand mindlessly in the bag and suddenly felt something sharp. Was one of the runes broken? I scattered all the runes on the table and found that four of the 25 had been broken, almost like someone wearing cowboy boots had stamped heavily on the rune bag or, holding the bag tightly, had taken a knife and slammed it down. If either of these had been done on my desk where my runes are always, then my desk would have shown some serious damage. My desktop is thick glass. There is no damage. I have accidentally dropped this rune bag many, many times and none of the runes ever broke. Why are four of them shattered now by something so forceful that there are many little shards?
This is indeed a mystery for a person who lives alone, who is present when someone else cleans, who knows what happens in her house. Of course, I have the answer clearly: I don’t know! I just know no other person was here to "drop" the fern or to break the runes. Also, I think this happened on the same night, because I got runes the night before and everything was all right.
As my reader, do you know who it might be and why? There was nobody here but me. My home is unapproachable to intruders. Now nearing the second month of the year, I know things are beginning for me and this strange mystery must mean something. What? I wonder who did it? Deepest of all, I wonder why. Any answers?