Goodbye, Miss Alice

On July 17, 2007, Miss Alicia Y. Chu died in Kabasalan, Zamboanga Sibugay province in the Zamboanga Peninsula region in Mindanao. Only a little over a month before she died, she had made her final trip home to the place where she was born and where the main branch of her family--brother, nephews and nieces, grandnephews and grandnieces--lived. In truth, they hardly knew her. She was laid to rest in the family plot, her gravestone engraved with the words "Alicia Y. Chu" and underneath, in parentheses (Formerly Sr. Mary Hyacinth, MM).

These two tributes--the first one, which I had written as president of the St. James Academy Alumni Association at the time of her death, was read at her funeral ceremony together with tributes from two other classes; the second, written and delivered at the alumni association's "In Memoriam," the annual remembrance of departed alumni, teachers, and admin staff of St. James Academy in Malabon City, gives us a brief glimpse into her poignant but triumphant story.

____________________

In my mind's eye, I still see her: a Filipina nun, the first Filipina nun of the order in the memory of my generation, in the traditional black veil and white habit, on the second-floor balcony above the school entrance after afternoon dismissal. Her perch gave her a perfect bird's-eye view of the main road of the town she had told me much later--when she was no longer in Maryknoll's black-and-white habit--she had liked so much the first time she saw it.

That was in 1958-1959, when the population of Malabon, then a town of Rizal province, was only a little over 60,000. The school where she was assigned--St. James Academy--had only two sections for each grade and year: one for boys, one for girls. Even then it was already the premier school, and the Maryknoll Sisters the most admired order of nuns, in our town.

Sr. Mary Hyacinth was, from the start, unusual in our experience of Maryknoll nuns: not only was she Filipina, she also taught a subject we didn't expect a Maryknoll nun to teach--Biology. The American nuns always taught Religion, or English and English Literature, or Speech. She also liked to spend hours every afternoon on the balcony, talking one by one to the members of our third year class to which she was adviser, trying to get to know the real us. I remember--from my house's own balcony across the street from St. James--looking at her and wondering whether she was making any headway with another member of my particularly reticent and close-mouthed class.

Later, there were other memories of her: a reassuring touch of her hand after I had just made a complete fool of myself in front of the student community; a consoling letter from Victorias Milling, where she worked as pharmacist; visits to her Marikina address when she was already Miss Alice; conversations with her on the phone while we reminisced about the old days; her failing eyesight; the magnifying glass from my classmate in the U.S.; her determination not to undergo surgery; her radiation therapy; her fear that her cancer was growing and sapping the life out of her.

Today, as you lay her to the final rest she so richly deserves and the heavenly life I know she so eagerly anticipates, I prefer to remember her in her prime, there on the same balcony, in the gentle light that precedes the setting of the sun--a nun who hung on steadily to prayer and her faith, her hands still making rosaries even as her eyes and her body started to fail her and each moment brought her painfully close to life's end. She is, to me, a gallant soul, loving and thankful for the little joys that crown a former teaching nun's often misunderstood service.

"For though from out our bourne of Time and Place

The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crossed the bar."

Goodbye, Sr. Mary Hyacinth. The St. James Academy Alumni Association extends its sympathies to the Chu family, and congratulates Sr. Mary Hyacinth on her glorious crossing of the bar.

Nila Barican Tupaz, Class ‘60

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

____________________

This tribute is supposed to be for Sr. Mary Hyacinth. But who is Sr. Mary Hyacinth? Call the Maryknoll Sisters' residence in Quezon City, and they will tell you they don't know a Sr. Mary Hyacinth. So let me introduce her to you. Those who were here from 1959 to the mid-Sixties remember Sr. Hyacinth. She was a slight, somber (“stern and cantankerous”) Filipino nun who taught Biology and was adviser to the third year girls' sections.

To put it mildly, Sr. Hyacinth was ... quite controversial. She liked to spend hours on the balcony above the old school entrance every day after afternoon dismissal. That perch gave her a bird's-eye view of the school surroundings.

It was only after I left St. James that I heard stories about the results of her afternoon surveillance. The complaints ranged from: “She told my mother I was boy-crazy,” to “She accused me of going out with boys to the movies just because we all walk home as a group together,” to “She remembers the students who stay at Nels-Ofel and Zeriba after school to play songs on the jukebox,” to “She brands girls who talk to boys 'boy-crazy.'”

If the tales of what Sr. Hyacinth gathered from the balcony were alleged to be products of her overactive imagination, the numbers she inked into many report cards were very real. In junior year, with only one more year before graduation, those who failed had to face their parents' wrath, scrounge for alternate schools, and, influenced by the heat of the moment, vow to hate her for the rest of their lives.

After graduation, many of us gave no further thought to Sr. Hyacinth--that is, until our silver jubilee dinner in 1985. According to a classmate, one of the boys who had worked as detail man for a pharmaceutical firm told him a story about her. According to the story, the detail man had gone to the clinic at Victorias Milling in Negros Occidental in the mid-'70s to sell his firm's medicines. And who did he see at the clinic but Sr. Hyacinth—in civilian clothes and working as pharmacist. The story was that he and his group invited Sr. Hyacinth and her group at the clinic to dinner and drinks. Sr. Hyacinth, he said, downed her alcohol as if it were water. Would you believe? he asked us. I was not ready to believe. It sounded apocryphal to me or, at the very least, heavily embellished.

* * * * *

In October 1965, Pope Paul VI released a document of the Second Vatican Council. The “Decree on the Adaptation and Renewal of Religious Life” proclaimed that religious communities, or orders, must use the next 25 years to adapt their way of life to the environment and circumstances in which they minister. The Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, like some other communities of religious women, gave up their schools, went into alternate housing arrangements, and moved out of their convents, except the motherhouse in New York. To many Maryknoll sisters, the new life meant the flowering of their leadership talents and skills. To other Maryknoll sisters, however, it was a sad ending to the community life they thought they would live until death.

Sr. Hyacinth belonged to this second group. In the 1970s, she realized that nothing was the same anymore. She decided to leave the order. The name “Sr. Mary Hyacinth” was expunged from the official list of Maryknoll Sisters.

In 2003, I visited Miss Alicia Y. Chu for the first time after our graduation. Her hair was white and quite fashionably cut. She always wore a blouse and skirt, with sandals on her feet. She smiled easily and loved to talk about St. James and her students, mentioning them by name. Instead of appearing stern and cantankerous, she looked gentle and at peace.

She told me that one of the reasons why she left the order was because she did not want to give up the black-and-white Maryknoll habit. Then she chuckled quietly at the irony of the fact that she was not wearing the Maryknoll habit anymore, after all. Whenever we talked about a gathering of our class on somebody's birthday or for a visiting classmate, she wanted to hear all the news. She never asked why she was not invited; she knew why.

Her life was not tragic, but it must have been very lonely. Upon her retirement from Victorias Milling, she gave a younger brother half of her pension to buy a house in Marikina. It was designed as a duplex. She thought he would outlive her, but he did not. After his death and as her nephew's family grew, the duplex transformed into a bungalow and her half of the house became just a hot little room near the kitchen.

When her nephew asked for financial help for his business, she gave him a little more from what was left of her pension. When I first visited her, she was already half-blind from glaucoma, but she was still making rosaries for the parish priest to give away. For her visits to an ophthalmologist, she would ask her sister-in-law's permission so that the maid could accompany her as they took public transport all the way to the hospital. In 2005, she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. She went through radiation therapy alone in a public hospital in Pasig.

In June 2007, her doctor at the Philippine General Hospital told her she needed further treatment. That was when she decided the time had come to stop. She turned over boxes full of Readers' Digest copies in large print, a prayer book, and another box with four good blouses and four good skirts, all that were left of her earthly possessions, to Ellen Rubio of Class '62. She requested Ellen to bring them to the School for the Blind in Marikina.

She then packed a bag containing a couple of house dresses and personal wear and, with the money for her fare sent by her older brother, she boarded a plane and traveled alone, back home to Kabasalan, Zamboanga Sibugay province. This was where she was born and where her older brother, former mayor of Kabasalan Alfredo Chu, and his family live. They were very kind to her, although they really hardly knew her. Her nieces did not even know that she had been a Maryknoll nun until Ellen told them.

A few weeks after that day in June 2007 when Ellen saw her off at the NAIA 2, she sent a text message to Ellen: "I'm dying." On July 17, 2007, she passed away. She was 84 years old.

* * * * *

In August of this year, a son delivered a touching tribute to an all-too-human father both celebrated and reviled by the rest of the world. "My father," he said, "was not perfect. But he believed in redemption."

Redemption is the overriding narrative of our Christian faith. We may think Sr. Hyacinth made the wrong decision, and we may think nuns should not leave the nunnery, but I believe that Sr. Mary Hyacinth, lovely as her religious name was, only won her redemption after she made that fateful decision to return to her life as Alice Chu, after she accepted fully, without any complaints, what that life dealt her: the poverty, the loneliness, the lack of any warm familial or community love, the pain of knowing and sometimes seeing former students shun her. Through it all, she hung on to prayer, faith, and the little joys of occasional visits from kinder students.

And that story about her outdrinking the men in Victorias? When I was in Florida earlier this year, I heard the same story again, almost 25 years after it first circulated, this time from another classmate. At least within Class '60, the legend of the hard-driving, hard-drinking ex-Maryknoll nun is alive and well. Were she still around, Sr. Mary Hyacinth would have been livid, but Alice Chu would have chuckled softly and enjoyed the legend. It would have been a warm, bright light during the rough journey and dark night of her redemption.

Rest now in God's loving peace, Miss Alice. He is kinder and more forgiving than some in this world will ever be.

Nila Barican Tupaz '60

In Memoriam 4, Saturday, 7 November 2009, Malabon, Metro Manila

Saying goodbye

As far back as Malabon oldtimers can remember--that's 1926 for the short-lived Malabon Normal School and 1936 for the grade school that eventually grew to become the premier private high school in our town (now a city, ugh!)--St. James Academy always meant the Maryknoll Sisters. The whole town, not just the school, fell in love with the gentle, soft-spoken, mainly white American nuns.

But in 1980, in response to Pope John Paul II's call for Catholic religious orders to follow the strictures of Vatican II, the Maryknoll Sisters gave up the schools they owned and/or administered and moved into direct apostolic work in poor and deprived communities all over the world. Management of St. James Academy, as determined by the Archdiocese of Manila, was transferred to the Dominican Sisters of St. Catherine of Siena.

We were heartbroken--the students of St. James Academy who had known only the guiding hands and caring hearts of the Maryknoll Sisters. "The Main Event," a homecoming of all alumni in the school grounds, was our goodbye to the sisters. I was asked to write the epilogue for the homecoming's souvenir program.

But for the life of me, at that critical moment when I should have come up with a masterpiece everybody would remember, I somehow couldn't find the words. I am not proud of this obviously labored goodbye to the nuns who had shaped the writer that I am. Even Joseph Conrad must have turned in his grave again for my nth use of his words (that I love dearly). But here it is, anyway. Done.

_____________________

It is inevitable, and it happens all the time: leaving.

One day, we too will decide to leave the lifestyle, the mood, our space of the moment. And it will be another passage to the future.

Who knows what that future will be? Perhaps, for those leaving us, growth, experience, the testing of inner strengths, the searching for inner resources. Surely, the unknown--possibilities which are ever expanding as they touch the currents of social structures and mine the depths of the human psyche.

But what of us, the ones they leave behind? Events are arbitrary signposts. Rarely are they definitive touchstones for recording the growth of the human personality. We love marking times and lives with the dates of events and occurrences, but we often forget that an event is only a physical response to an inner vision, and is never measured by time.

When finally we remember "the year the Maryknoll Sisters left St. James ...," we shall not stop there. We shall move on to questions of true essence. Was it the year we began scouring underneath the rubble of tangibles piled up in a lifetime of achievement for the bedrock of intangibles? Was it the year we sized up our own personal system and, finding it sadly inadequate, started on a feverish search for a lost sense of self? Or was it the year we found out the inexhaustible limits of human growth?

There is, says Joseph Conrad, a solidarity that knits, that "binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn." Leaving is not death, it is rebirth. To be left behind is not to be abandoned; it is to be confronted with the true conditions of living:

as impassioned witnesses to the courage of the Maryknoll vision,
whatever form of courage our lives may demand;
as committed individuals, without emotional crutches,
independent and integral ...

--NBT

__________________________________________

Saturday, 19 April 1980, Malabon, Metro Manila

A tribute to Nanay

She was there again, on the same seat, in front of the same television set, deep in the night--one old woman who must hang on steadily to her faith although each moment brings her painfully close to her life's end. That scene will doubtless become one of the pervasive images of my own old age. But for now, to me, she is a gallant soul, thankful for the little joys that crown a hard, misunderstood existence.

And for the happiness of once again feeling one with grieving Catholics all over the world, and especially in the Rome she may never see--her eyes now fading--I must thank the wonder of satellite transmission ... Long ago, I gave up ... rituals that had become extraneous to my very own personal faith. But those rituals may be essential to other people. And when television serves the interests of the many as well as the few, those who need the comfort of the rituals as well as those who hold on only to the strength of faith, then television is performing what we believe should be its ideal role in contemporary society--as the foremost instant chronicler of the rituals and actions of our time.

-- NBT

____________________________________

"Impressions," TV Times, 15-21 October 1978

Dear Family and Friends,

It has now been a year since Nanay left us. For the family, that year has been truly eventful. It has been an eye-opener, a valuable learning experience.

Many times, we have had to draw on the strength that your presence during her last days lent us. As our family remembers her on Saturday, we also wish the occasion to be our way of saying "Thank you!" to you for holding our hand, offering prayers, bidding her goodbye, and simply being there.

A Mass will be said for her and for those we love who are now with her--Tatay and Ate--at 6 p.m. at our residence. Dinner will be at 7 p.m. Please join us in paying special tribute to her.

-- NBT
_____________
31 July 1991

"Who cares about Beatrice?"

Had she lived long enough, my sister would have been swept in the tremendous energies of this time. And she would have shared equally in the tremendous fun of our lives. Yes, FUN. It is great fun to be married, 33, and free! Unfortunately, my sister was schooled in the traditions of Dante's Beatrice (Oriana Fallaci: Who cares about Beatrice?) and died before she could be free. She was always married, age a deep deep secret, and chained.

I am constantly amazed, continuously delighted, at the seemingly inexhaustible limits of the human personality. One moment, and I am playing mother, enjoying the timeless tactics of my two-year-old girl, a plump little doll with the bitchy precocity her mother never showed until she was 26 and safely over her grand and irresistible passion.

The next moment, and I am woman alone, browsing through the favorite shops which never fail to touch, with a thousand precious little discoveries, my capacity for delight and wonder: an old stone jar blooming with sunny chrysanthemums to warm a cold morning, a lovely old basket filled with statice to last the seasons, soft ruffly dresses and white vampy sandals, a baroque love seat blending with spare director's chairs, yarns of all colors for my embroidery and rugs, and painting upon painting on walls and floors and the exciting prospect of a new frame with the next installment.

One time, and I am active member in the sisterhood of ageless women, lingering over coffee at Grandma's, surrounded by endless talk of improvement and involvement, sharing quiet afternoons with comfortable friends over crafts that busy the hands and please the hearts, laughing at Annie Hall and loving Julia but also feeling for Valentino, meeting free women at every stop and with every call, realizing that the community grows only when each individual, each person, grows, too.

Another time, and I am artist aspiring, caught in the true loneliness of the real ones: of women gliding through the desolate landscapes of an Ingmar Bergman autumn, of Saul Bellow descending the depths of his quiet zone and Hannah Arendt cutting through the political theory of revolution, of Louise Nevelson whose personal drama towers over her bold sculptures.

Perhaps it is being 33 and married that makes me feel so alive and so free. It is age that has cured me of the feeling of intense misery at the small inconsistencies of the human race. It is the support of a man, with a separate identity and a different expertise, that has given me a new comfort in my relationships and a newly discovered energy for my pursuits. Every man I meet now is no longer potential lover nor potential husband, but individual and human, with something essential to say, if not to me, then certainly to somebody else.

I have learned to enjoy the quiet beauty of moments and places--a convivial dinner, the beach overlooking the infinite, moonlight over silvery waters--without investing them with the frenzied intensity of the young, who feel compelled always to search desperately for the keys that will open the mystic passageways to existence and reality. Even my personal agony, when it comes, is less black, less brooding, less brutish, more like a warm and comfortable cloak to wrap around my shoulders on evenings drenched with rain.

There is satisfaction in being able to do the watching, instead of thinking the whole world watches me, on occasions when others prefer to provide blustering and self-conscious entertainment. There is even greater satisfaction in finally being able to tell the truth (Albert Camus: What counts is not poetry. What counts is truth. And I call truth anything that continues.), unconcerned at last with the judgment of the rest: yes, the house took one whole year to build because there were times when money was scarce; yes, I look at the price tag first, and never mind what the salesgirls think; yes, I wear local cottons because, aside from the fact that I love them, I really cannot afford very much else.

And there is true intoxication in being able to do things at 33 that I would have considered atrocious when I was 20, my father's favorite daughter, and convent-school graduate: eating out alone, buying second best, telling my real age, riding in jeeps and buses, wearing costume jewelry (funky, punky, whatever, but I do choose with still old-fashioned taste), waiting for a friend at a basement food center with my needlepoint or a good book.

Life scares, of course. Self-confidence does not mean immortality, and I am afraid: a great many times. The human race will be here for generations more, but I shall be gone some day, who really knows when. I am afraid of having to leave before my children can learn to groove with the rest of the world, as their parents have learned to do. My energies may seem indefatigable today, but for how long? At 33, when I have the time to look over the edge, I suddenly feel afraid that I may not be around to see the people I love through their vulnerable years.

But life, to be trite about it, is a continuing process. And today's anguish is soon washed away in tomorrow's bliss. I console myself, easily. There is, says Joseph Conrad, a solidarity that knits, that "binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn."

It is not death that matters now, but life. And life, at 33, is happy comfort and comfortable fulfillment.

My sister would not have wanted to die early had she foreseen
the fulfillment she could have known as a woman, self-confident and free.

--NBT


_____________________________

Fina, a local magazine for women, 1978

a final goodbye

we knew each other so briefly
more than a handshake, less than a lifetime
three years.

i looked at everything quite simply
just the parts, not the whole
three years.

you left me very suddenly
never alone, forever lonely
three years.

__________

11.14.73

3.53 a.m.

to him

(who now signs at 1571,
wears suits by pierre cardin,
has a private line)

~~~~~

how thriftily the words pass between us now
as if, searching somewhere for meaning
we had lost our claim to life
as if, in depths i dare not fathom
i dare not accept a failing
my pride rejects.

you say you must be fair and just
i insist i must be self-possessed
while between us slowly rises
this chasm i leave unnamed,
while joy and beauty we shared
oh so sweetly before
now pass unmentioned, untold.

if i say it's all my fault
shall things be easier between us
none of the sorrow that was before
none of the pain?
shall the loveliness that used to be
be ours once more
and all the love?

how thriftily the words pass between us now
how prosaic the days have become
how is the office, how are you?
hello, regards, goodbye
is it the end?

__________

18.9.70

8.10 p.m.

after two

there must be something wrong
somewhere
when i no longer hear
the church bells peal

when he no longer smiles
when i come in
or looks up to nod grandly:
"hello."

perhaps it's only that he's
tired
but suddenly my heart
cries.

did i displease him
the other day,
or is it simply that he
has ceased to care?

because
he no longer stays
after two.

___________

9.12.70

5:45 p.m.

to one

(who can never divine
this pain i feel)

~~~~~


i wait for some newscast
today is thursday the 23rd
and you?

your receptionist trembles
did you ring once or twice
and must she go in?

i wish to shout:
forget it
let him die!

but we are friends
or so i insist
despite everything.

so let it be
some friend says,
forget him.

i will,
if only i can.

___________

7.23.70

5.30 p.m.

to you

(who did not mind fern leaves
on your cupful of late afternoon tea
on a rainy september day)

~~~~~

one brown-faced madonna in her room
filled with the comforts
of the damned
insists:
this is something stronger than both of us.

she calls the canteen
requests for lunch--delivered, please--purringly
flicks on a button
to watch an afternoon show
on television,
searches for a book
or a magazine
from the shelves to her left,
writes a memorandum:
to r (who dared one morning
to bawl her out
for an ad that did not come out)
not through any fault of mine, she whispers.

while i labor
insignificant
in a noisy bustling newsroom
filled with impersonal shadows
laughing, chatting, typing
i know not what they do
only what they affect to do.

mea culpa,
i strike my breast: thrice, i think

tell me:
shall i plant vegetables?

___________

24.6.70

9.35 p.m.

i never laid claim to the whole of you

i never laid claim to the whole of you
only to the part that bore
the promise
of a golden man.

through all the days,
my thoughts of you
i filled
with the promise and the dream.
i closed my eyes to what is you.
i closed my eyes to what is real.

and she
with the dimpled charm,
does she lay claim
to any tiny part of you
which does exist,
which i can never know?

then
to her, i must
in honor
give you up.

for after all,
was there ever a golden man?

_________

20.5.66

11.20 p.m.

when my heart died in august, at age 19

it is august and i am here

how i wish i were not.
the nights are cold.
the mornings are hot.
the days are painful.

there is a garden and a full moon
once in a while, and a sampaguita bush.
but the garden is not ours.
there is no full moon tonight.
the sampaguita bush never blooms.

it is raining now.
icy water pouring down closed windows,
down unlighted doors.
angry wind dashing my fern leaves
against concrete walls.

the streets are empty
there are no stars
only a transparent film of limitless rain.
i press my hands against my eyes.
i must stop thinking for a while.

everybody has been kind.
they left the room to me
since five o'clock.
they have not minded
nor bothered
nor fussed.

except ka julia
whose kind heart could only give me
blessed treasures from her kitchen
a warm glass of milk
a boiled ear of corn.

i buried them both with my heart when it died.

__________

16.8.64

10 p.m.

it hurts somewhere

it hurts somewhere
deeply
a scar out of a million scars
painfully
a searing madness

in the recesses of some forbidden memory
it curls and gnaws and beats
the passion of sin
the fire of hell
breaking

far off i hear some air
born of the midnight rain
changing voices
adding volumes
salvation?

no.
only some half-forgotten dream
teasing
some love in september
transient

tragic.

___________

20.6.70

10.30 p.m.

Why is life so troubled for us you left behind?

The struggle goes on, for me you left behind, sometimes light and carefree, more often than not, heavy and laden with weighty problems and secret griefs. Sometimes, I am tempted to cross the street without minding the traffic, or take an overdose of sleeping pills, or simply get lost somewhere far far away where I can start anew with no thought for the past or the present. But it takes courage and strength to do those, and perhaps for all my fancy words, I'm still too much of a coward, too weak, without your presence.

I am deeply convinced that I am loser forever. People sympathize over the fact that I was always in black--for Tatay, for you, for Ate. And I am probably fated to wear black for other loved ones, if not in fact, then certainly in the realization of emotional loss, in the understanding that no man is ever really just one woman's.

E., R., G., V.--they are not the same anymore. They have changed much. In some ways I think we have all grown up though we never talk about it specifically; and even that, I sincerely believe, is a sign of growth. Exposed to different surroundings, faced with different problems, learning the lessons peculiar to each one alone, fighting a general but unspoken loneliness, seeking the answers to our very own personal doubts and uncertainties--can we help but grow?

We wake up each morning to the knowledge that there are no guidelines to living, that we have to seek our own shields, our own weapons, and that the future even then may not be ours to conquer. Every morning we have to caution ourselves against getting our feelings too involved--because we never know when things will end. And we don't want to get too hurt. As if there were ever such a choice.

At times like these, we have to put on a condescending smile and close the door to our inner selves or else we shall bleed red blood. You know how gullible we always were! Or perhaps, as Andres Cristobal Cruz warned me once, I must never make a mountain of despair out of a molehill of anguish.

Oh yes, the group still goes out. We laugh, we listen to jazz in some dim smoky place, we talk about life and existentialism and Indochina and all the latest news items over glasses of bitter, colored liquid, consume packs of cigarettes in cocktail lounges. There is fun all around, laughter, even a little flirting. But these do not comprise happiness, and since you left happiness has been a stranger to me.

From day to day, we discuss the personal inanities that govern our world, lend our energies to all the personal conflicts that continue to spice the time between the rising of the sun and its setting. The days roll by, like indistinguishable clouds, each one similar to the other--a continual waking and retiring, and sometime between, the tears shed for one's ineffectuality--while we cling on to songs like "MacArthur Park" and "Didn't We, Girl?" and recite T.S. Eliot and Rod McKuen like reckless, restless fools, as if our whole lives depended on how tightly we clung, as if our lives were nothing but vestiges of the reality we so desired way back in college.

You would have preferred that I stayed on where you found me, I know. Somehow, wherever you are now, I know you are a little surprised that I chose and preferred the sordid lures of the dirty city. I do want to go back where we met. But perhaps the time has passed for attrition. Perhaps the beauty that was then is past being recaptured.

I want to get out there, close to the earth and nature, close to you. But I also have a commitment I cannot turn my back on, somehow. Every day of my life, I am being torn both ways. Shall it be, for me, alienation or immersion? So many questions, and so many things to look for. Why can't life be simple for me, as it is for so many women I see walking around, holding on to their husbands' arms, possibly with an awakening growth around their middles and an ecstatic look in their eyes?

Every now and then, I wish to say "Hell!" to the world. What right has it to thwart so much in me that seeks completion? The search for a kindred soul, the need to defy everything that is hypocritical and phony in our society, the desire for nothing more than peaceful and quiet communion with the rains and the winds and the sun and all the elemental things in life, the dream of someday finding not anymore the meaning and value of life but simply a meaning and value for my life--these are desires that conflict, that cause so much anguish and pain.

Why must I, whom you left behind, wish now to go through the best and the worst only to realize that life is not a book to read nor a movie to watch nor a scenario script to memorize but an experience to live through; to give myself fully to every moment of my life and feel the heights as well as the depths; to see and sense the uncertainty in every step and yet take that step without hesitation, without rancor, without regrets; to know the tangibles as well as the intangibles and realize the difference between the two; to, as we progress through the years, build, demolish, and rebuild my own principles in life; to dream impossibles, raise problematics, size up existing orders, open doors, forge paths, search for truth, lose worlds, forsake dreams, and find them again; to continue to seek, despite recurring setbacks, "an ultimate meaning to one's existence that would make life worthwhile"; to battle with uncertainty and fear and the unknown and finally evolve a vision of living, pulsating, vital reality; to find ourselves after the grim years of growing up, suddenly integral--to really live.

Aldous Huxley says there are a million ways of arriving at salvation. Surely, each pathway is valid. And what matters to others if I choose to do it my way--to go through each moment with a smile of triumph, giving my whole self and soul to the movement of the time but keeping that one particle of myself to myself, still attached to the things that soothe if not cure, like poetry and art and beauty and literature and dreams...yes, dreams. What business do others have to preach to me their own equations for salvation?

Sad, isn't it? To be pulled in so many directions. To find no place carved out for me. To see so much that needs changing, to want to change them, and yet to know that one is neither big enough nor influential enough to do so. Then again, to want to leave the problems of change and activism to other people. To want nothing more than to lie down on dew-wet grass, close one's eyes, drink in the heat of the sun, the agony of inevitable twilight, the caress of the tropical wind against cheeks and hair. To walk barefoot in the park, holding somebody's hands, under a merciful summer rain, deep in the night.

Which one shall it be? Which one shall I choose?

Still missing you, even now.

___________________

18 September 1972

"A million coincidences"

Contemplating the little eccentricities of life as he sat (was it at a park in Paris?) and gazed at the wasted features of his schoolteacher who had been his first lover in his youth, the middle-aged man could not but marvel at "a million coincidences" that, on that particular day, brought them together once more in a communion of minds, if no longer of bodies and senses.

"A million coincidences." Was it not Aldous Huxley, in one of his earlier novels, who invested the phrase with the power and pathos of personal revelation? Who dares question that, indeed, a million coincidences must have brought us all together at this time in our lives, in this place, in this temper?

How many of the same books must we have read, philosophies we must have imbibed, tragedies we must have experienced, losses we must have overcome, options we must have chosen, for us to be bound in just this way in our earthly journey?

And we are nowhere near the end, either. Every single day, a million more coincidences will occur to gradually move us closer, you and I, to that crossroad where once more or never again or at last we shall connect, fellow travelers finding a brief consolation, or a fevered embrace, or a lasting meaning, to our individual journeys.

Do not call anywhere, any point, home. Refuse any promise of a final shelter, a true love. As long as we breathe, there will await us an infinity of possibilities, probabilities. The secret is to keep on feeling, growing, learning from each coincidence that ties us, whether loosely or tightly, in temporary communion.

I believe in miracles, in that divine intelligence that directs every little movement in our universe. For at the end of the day, by whatever name we may wish to call the Almighty and whatever gender we may ascribe to God, it is still those million coincidences, each one transfiguring all the moments of our existence, that cannot but assure us that, yes, there awaits, however brief, an exhilarating tomorrow.

Even if it's only in our minds and our dreams.
--NBT

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"Nightcap," The Evening Paper, 27 June 1996