Viral memories
I have been quite sick, afflicted with a virus fashionable these days and treatable with a most expensive antibiotic. You know, a dismal heavy cold that covers your brain with frost, a cough so deep it feels like it’s coming from the tips of your toes. I have been mostly in bed feeling wretched. Then one night I decided to watch TV, a local channel because dimly I remembered the EDSA anniversary and decided I should attempt to find out if we were going to have another such revolution — or what?
I turned on the TV, surfed, then saw this good-looking newscaster. He was tall, very fair, spiffily dressed, handsome, reminded me — though that is not the same as “looked like” — of Robert Redford or maybe Gregory Peck. What an attractive man, I thought, almost certain I knew him. He looked so familiar.
Suddenly a picture from my past hit me. There was a wild storm raging many decades ago. There were no lights. That’s how strong the typhoon was. There was a loud banging on the door. One of my daughters — I have three lovely daughters — ran to open it. In rushed the typhoon’s wind, banging of doors, rustling of blinds, tinkling of chimes, giggling and laughing and a male voice rising above the whooshing wind, “Wow, I didn’t know you locked the storm in your house.” His comment made me laugh. I never forgot him.
Now he has grown up and I am watching him, one of my daughter’s friends. Simply add around 26 years and maybe as many pounds. He has grown from a gangly awkward sort of crabby high school Atenean to a credible mature man. I watch him and only half listen. My daughters were in high school then. One of them was going to her first prom. We had shopped for her clothes for months. He was her date, arranged through her best friend, whose brother was his best friend — that sort of youthful complication enjoyed by all.
He picked her up and they left amid a lot of teasing and awkward talk. She came home, I was still up. I asked her if she had fun. She said he had gotten angry with her because he had saved up and given her a corsage and she accidentally sat on it and somehow mashed the flower getting into the car. We giggled ourselves silly.
But that was then when they were growing up. Look at him now, I wanted to say to my daughter, who seemed to be seated beside me, who has also put on roughly 26 years, not an ounce of weight, and who no longer lives with me. I just imagine her presence.
I sat at the TV set smiling, remembering, enjoying those memories again. Who would have known he would grow up so handsome? I felt so proud. I knew him. He lived in my memory. I felt almost like his proud mother.
The next morning my telephone rang. My mother was not well, the nurse said. After her bath she began to speak unintelligibly and then she got very weak and faint. They fed her cookies I had brought when I visited last, before I got sick. “Please take care of her,” I said. “I cannot come. I too am sick. I don’t want to spread germs there and give them pneumonia.”
But the news stunned me and forced me to face a few things. I contacted my children just in case we would need to go, then sat in mortal terror for the next three hours when I called to check on her and was told she had improved.
I called my children and told them to relax. “That’s good to know, even if we all need to be prepared for the inevitable anyway,” my daughter texted and I texted back, “Yes, I tell myself this is practice.”
So this is what I have been doing. Sneezing loudly. I don’t live with anyone so I am free to sneeze as loudly as I choose. Coughing, retching, whooping, ripping my lungs to fine ribbons. Downing drugs. Sleeping with my mouth open so I can breathe. Watching TV and remembering life’s good times to give me strength to practice for the inevitable.
I am sorry but I have been sick.
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