Briefly, wondrously

Sat my butt down at a coffeeshop. Turned off my auto-guilt mode and put my mombligations on standby. Brought a book on editing fiction and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Laptop, ready. Coffee, hot. Soul, squashed by a run-in. I was glad for Hubby, who had reached out for my hand and told me to write, to not let a bad afternoon get in the way of writing.

I love you, Hubby.

You too, Oscar Wao. Because the story I had been agonizing over sounds a little better for my having read about you. You see, there’s this story I’ve been wanting to write. It has an incredible premise and a kickass first paragraph. Even I want to read it. But the story just doesn’t fly. The characters are cardboard. This story is in its third iteration, and it’s still as dry as day-old pizza. I haven’t touched it in years. But you make me want to finish it. You–made on paper and of a writer’s dreams–are alive, the way the heart of a book is. Yours is a story that makes me want to create another. To me that’s the best kind.

My withness

With his helter-skelter sched, The Coach hardly has time for TV, but these days he'd gladly lose sleep over Commander in Chief. Tonight, after the segment where Mac Allen's mother still mourned for a husband long gone, The Coach hugged me and asked, "Will you miss me if I die?" I would, definitely, infinitely, and sprung on him the same question, almost flippantly, wanting to see if he'd give me a proper eulogy.

But now as he sleeps and the night is moonless, I am unnerved. What is life without this beautiful man, one who is—to borrow from Kate Knapp Johnson's Meadow—"my withness, my here"?

In the first years of our marriage, I would sometimes wake in the darkness, and not hearing The Coach's breathing above the hum of the air conditioner—he is not one to snore unless exhausted—I would slide my head down from my pillow to catch the silhouette of his chest against the muted light that filters through the curtains. I would monitor the rise and fall of his breathing, and only when so assured could I go back to sleep.

Many years of everydays calmed me, lulled me to thinking that together is a forever word. Until tonight.


Otherwise
Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.



from Otherwise, 1996
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota

Perfect love

Off to the hospital in a few hours for tests to prep me for Friday's surgery, this time to have four holes bored into me in a laparoscopic cholicystectomy—terribly expensive medico-babble to remove my ailing gall bladder.

Dreading yet another round of needles and stitches, fasting, and sleep deprivation (the nurses' specialty, oh how they excel at it). It's the second in this year's medical drama, and, please God, the last.

The Coach has of late been working 18-hour days, juggling his job and my hospital preps and funding, but—bless him—he still takes time to soothe my fears. When we got wind this morning of the staggering costs that would again dent our budget, he was, in his words, "not worried, but..." And he paused, the mobile phone connection clear enough to relay his sigh, "...I am shaken." Then he gathered himself, becoming the tender warrior that he is, and said, "This is not a problem, Jan. As long as we're together, we're okay."

He sleeps now, bone-tired, and perhaps will only be a bit refreshed when he rises in just a few hours to put in some work before he brings me to the hospital.

Poor dear. How can I tell him I am not prepared for tomorrow when he himself has gone through as much emotional turmoil as I have? He will quote to me one of his favorite psalms, "Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me." He will remind me of the Lord's faithfulness in all the good and bad years we've been together—twenty-one!—and tick off the many things we are grateful for, and then he will hug me, make me laugh and think of all the junk food and trans fats I can finally have in my post-op diet.

Tonight I choose to meditate on Paul's words to young Timothy, "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind." The argument is easy to follow: The Lord loves me more than I can ever comprehend, He who knitted me carefully in my mother's womb; His Will for me is perfect, acceptable and pleasing; He is mighty to save; how He desires me to fare on Friday is all part of His purpose for me. There is no room for fear for perfect love—His, and what He shows through The Coach—casts out fear.

Thank you, Coach, for being the Lord's strongest tangible reminder of His love.

Play by Play

The Coach is child-mischievous. In church today, while everybody else applauded an all-male ensemble who had sang a cappella In That Great Getting Up Morning—in a delightful fusion of barbershop music and black gospel—The Coach leaned over and whispered, “I’m going to clap like Paula Abdul.” And he bent his hands back, fingers splayed, and slapped his palms together—Paula Abdul style.

That kind of playfulness serves him well on radio. For some time now The Coach moonlights as commentator at Radyo PBA (918 on the AM frequency).

Radio suits him more. When he was commentating on TV for the Metropolitan Basketball Association (MBA), he had to mind too many things: wear a tie, follow the camera, and mind his facial expressions. Radio, however, allows him to banter about, say, the players’ hair, or poke fun even at himself. “Whew!” he whistled, when Olsen Racela sank in a shot after The Coach had pronounced Olsen one of the league’s best free-throw players. “Buti na lang. Otherwise, mawawalan ako ng credibility.”

In another game, after The Coach had kept insisting the Welcoat players should pass the ball to Alex Compton, Alex delivered the fifth of his seven 3-point shots that game, and The Coach cheered, “Naku, gumwapo ako dun ah.”

Of the few games I've listened in on, my favorite would be the Air 21-Welcoat game last April. Air 21 was miles ahead in scoring, and Welcoat struggled to make a shot, as if—according to The Coach—there was a wall blocking their shots. “Eh, ano pang dapat gawin ng Welcoat kung may wall, eh 'di pinturahan,” he joshed.

Fishing

Maybe I don’t pay The Coach enough compliments or maybe he feels guilty for only recently picking up on the chores he abandoned, or why else would he dance around me whenever I approach our bathroom, chortling, “Look how white the tiles are” or “Hmmm, ang bango ng banyo.”

I can’t blame him. I do my own share of fishing as well.

“Honey,” I asked one day when I felt bloated. “Am I beautiful?”

“Maganda ka naman,” he said. Stoutly.

“Naman?!?” I shrieked, piqued at the qualifier. “Why is there a naman?!?” The good man, never knowing what hit him, had to stop what he was doing to explain the ramifications of “naman.” Being Cebuana to the core, I didn’t believe him entirely. It would’ve been simpler if he had used the term “quite”—all I would’ve done was ask whether he was using the word in the American sense (somewhat) or the British sense (entirely).

But I never learn. Last night before we slept, I snuggled up to him and asked, “Honey, am I a good wife?”

“Of course you are, sweetie,” he said, readily but not too hastily or else I’d suspect it was a stock answer (I am impossible, am I not?).

“But I want to be a better wife,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, quick to the draw. “Then you wash the dishes.”

Remind me never to go fishing again.

Getting along

A while ago The Coach asked me to pray with him. He prayed for our friend M, whose marriage is a step-yes, step-no non-union; for her little son, A, who at six thinks that by hating his father he is loving his mother; for grace in fulfilling our calling—that is his term for his coaching and my writing, bless him; and for the child/children we desire (whenever he starts praying for twins, I silently add a little caveat: Lord, when in Your most gracious will, You answer his prayer, please grant the resources and the strength to raise—gulp—twins).

Then he prayed for us, for our relationship. “Panginoong Diyos,” he said, “we don’t have a perfect marriage. But…” and then he semi-laughed, so faint I could discern it only from the way his voice rose and fell in slight singsong, “…we get along.”

A few hours before, while he was trying to earn brownie points by washing the dishes he should’ve done waaaaaay earlier, he had mentioned how many of our laugh-out-loud times are fun only to us and don’t elicit as much amusement from others, when shared. I thought maybe he was referring to those fun times when he was praying, but now I think he was truly, honestly grateful, and perhaps a little surprised, that we get along—in spite of.

Getting along 24/7 is incredibly difficult, even when you love the other. The very things that you used to consider cute in the other could be the very same things that exasperate you no end. It takes enormous strength not to nag a spouse (The Coach) to please put the dirty clothes in the hamper, as well as enormous grace to forgive an erring but unrepentant partner (me) who still doesn’t know how to say sorry. Little things—like not jiggling the flush handle a couple of times to stop the water closet from continuously flushing water (me) or forgetting to water the plants (The Coach; his classic line: What? We have a plant?)—could start a war. It is unbelievably easy to fan a spark of irritation into an inferno simply by hurling grand generalizations that start with, “You never…” or “You always…” Dangerous ipse dixits that attack the person instead of the fault or omission can escalate, and before you know it, one will end up sleeping on the couch, while the other tosses and turns in bed, pretending she (all right, me) is justified in locking the door. (That’s why you gotta believe them truisms printed onto mugs. For a time I sported a drink holder that read: Marriage is the only war where you sleep with the enemy.)

Getting along takes the right combination of and timing for blindness and deafness, perhaps more so for The Coach, since I can be quite crabby, PMS or no, and veer annoyingly to the dramatic. If, say, he were to ask me where the key to our inadvertently locked bedroom is kept, I simply wouldn’t tell him where it is: I have to lean my head to my left, tap my fingers on my cheek, one after the other, look up to the ceiling and say not so nicely, “Hmmm. If I were to die, say, right now, then you’d have to break down the door to get your pants so you won’t be in your boxers when the guys from the morgue arrive to pick me up.” Oh, I can be so annoying, even to me.

But The Coach has learned to just snort at my affectations (as well as know what items are stored in the utility room), even before I learned not to carry over into our home any dramatizations that should remain in my writing. I just zip my lip. And somehow we get along.

In his eyes

Twenty years ago last January 9, The Coach and I started dating: he was 19, I was 18, and the rest of the world in our eyes was fresh and wonderful and passionate and carefree.

The Coach, now 40, surprised me with an enormous bouquet of flowers, so many they filled three vases and took me an hour to fix (plus another half-hour to clean up after my mess). Silly me, I couldn’t help asking if they were expensive. (We are, after all, penny-pinching. Actually, he does the pinching; I do the inordinate buying of books which will take me, if I were to read a book a week, about, oh, ten years to finish.) His rebuke was so gentle I almost missed it until I thought about it afterwards. He just said, “A bit, but not for twenty years,” and smiled. Hours later he asked me if it was true that I was surprised by his present, since he always buys me flowers anyway, special occasion or no, like when he atones for sins imagined or real. And I said yes because I thought we were cost-cutting (D’oh! There I go again). And he harrumphed, properly, like an old gentleman aggrieved by the indignity of money: “Cost-cutting, cost-cutting. What's cost-cutting to twenty years?” And I just had to hug this man, this one whose masculine eyes and heart could not see that some of the flowers he bought in the huge bunch had probably withered earlier but were artfully hidden by the flower peddler to make a quick buck, the same eyes and heart who tell me day after day, truthfully, wonderingly, that I am more beautiful today than yesterday. I love eyes like those, because they know when to skip over unwashed faces and past flabby thighs, and even the occasional PMS that furrows the forehead. And it is true, what he said over a year ago, looking up at me while we were rummaging the fridge for leftovers: “Jan, would you agree with me? That we are happier now than we have ever been?”

Yes, honey, we truly are.