Life, Day by Day

A friend posted on Facebook that they for the first time, will be spending Christmas in the hospital. It brought to mind our own hospital Christmas experience in 1976.   My brother Ted who survived a freak airgun shooting accident in July had been in the Iloilo Doctor's Hospital for the past 5 and a half months, slowly recovering from 6 major operations.  My brother and I who were both studying in Manila would be spending the holidays with him, our parents and Culing, my Lola's ever loyal cook cum helper. 

The year 2013 will soon end...and I suddenly think, where did all that time go?  In fact, it's more like...where did all those years go?  Like the song Sunrise, Sunset in the musical Fiddler on the Roof (with a little twist)..."I don't remember growing older...when did I? Wasn't it yesterday, When I was small?"

I just got home from a dinner date with high school classmates, one of whom is visiting from abroad.  Although there were just the three of us, we had a lot of fun reminiscing about our younger days and sharing stories about our lives now.  It dawned on me as I was driving home that although we have long been living separate lives, there will always be ties that bind us together, just as some of these also bring up ghosts of our past.

I love comics. In fact I used to have a huge collection in high school up until my first year in college, so that my mother eventually had them all bookbound and categorized from classics to action to comedy. Unfortunately, I have very little talent in drawing, so whatever ambition I had in that field never materialized. But when my nephew started drawing short comic strips in grade school, I thought, "hey this kid got talent". The illustrations were good and the stories were imaginative, but I did not pay much attention thinking it is hobby he would outgrow.  Then last year he started a comic blog which he calls, The Sharpiest . 

I am not a fan girl but when Greenwich invited the Negros Bloggers to a meet and greet with John Lloyd Cruz last October 18,  I decided to go.  The invitation was for 7 PM, but I was there early because I had everybody's VIP passes with me and so that we can get good seats, but to my chagrin the cordoned off fountain area was almost full.  It's a good thing that Ms. Charo, Marketing Head for Greenwich Vis-Min area was there and she brought me to our reserved seats.

The whole province of Bohol has been devastated by the 7.2 magnitude earthquake last October 15, 2013 . Centuries old churches have been totally destroyed or damaged and 200 people have lost their lives. Damage to infrastructure, property and agriculture is estimated to be P900 M.  Aftershocks continue to this day.

In the aftermath of the devastating earthquake today , October 15, 2013, I  remembered I had this draft post on Bohol which I started writing last month.  I was going to write about my first visit to this province in 1997 but somehow I got sidetracked by so many other concerns that it remained unfinished.  But now, many of the things I was going to write about has disappeared.  I am devastated, angry, inconsolable, sad and a million other emotions as I look at the pictures of the destruction of the century-old churches, part of our national heritage and culture.  I am at a loss for words, but I feel I have to get the heavy feeling off my chest by writing about this tragedy.