A lady opens her book. She is clear-skinned, white but not pale, glossy, maintained and moisturized. Her sleeveless beige dress runs straight from a flat chest, uninterrupted by a flat stomach on to her ankles, the fabric soft enough to ripple with the hot, noon breeze. Her hair is in a sensible bun. Her eyes were wide and animated.
We were in an out-of-office meeting that we had offsite, in a popular coffee shop. The meeting has been running for over two hours: tedious, loud, and repetitive. The lady’s book was a best seller, and she’s been reading for all the two hours we were having our meeting.
More minutes roll into the meeting’s mind-numbing babble, and I spot the lady spontaneously and unembarrassedly weeping. She held the book between her thumb and the rest of her fingers, and kept crying. She does not pause. She does not take time to recover. She turns the page, and keeps reading.
***
I must have been seven or eight years old. We were in class, and I remember the white light coming through the huge windows dousing itself from the corridors into our classroom. It must have been a pretty boring class, and one of my classmates must have been sowing the seeds of what perhaps is, independent thinking.
My classmate was A.A. - big-bellied and sloppy but way smarter than anyone would have thought he looked.
During class, he was reading a non-school book he borrowed from the library. He hid it on between the textbook for our Grade 2 or Grade 3 class. He held the ends of the textbook with his left and right hand, but the library book was tucked in between. I wish I could remember what that other book was – I would have read it, if only for the risk he took.
The teacher eventually noticed. The teacher removed the decoy textbook and revealed, to both the surprise and delight of the entire class, that A.A. was reading was something else and deliberately hiding it. He looked interrupted, but did not look embarrassed.
He got caught. I remember my classmate and think of him proudly.
***
The College kids of my time must have read and conversed more often. Therefore, we must have lived more. We must have been among the last few who didn’t completely rely on the internet. It was still SMS over social media, journals or print instead of blogs, network games over online games, libraries over search engines. It existed then and we adopted it, but we must not have been as reliant. When we become reliant on technology, a necessary persistence towards knowledge is lost.
Whenever you are looking for your next book to buy nowadays, you go to amazon.com for the reviews or look at the commentary from virtual libraries.
Back in College, you found out what to read next in reviews written in newspapers, campus publications and through actual conversations.
I remember how I heard about Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses. It was through a review published in the Philippine Collegian. A college student wrote about how he chose to end the last chapter of the excellent book. He read that part in the loo, standing up in the toilet bowl. I remember how I admired it then, and thought, how intellectual, how bohemian . In these times, someone else would have thought, how poser or how hipster.
We let ourselves be young.
***
24 and 25 summers old, lovers for less than a year. Even with beautiful novelty of being in our first year as lovers, our careers bored us to tears. So we juggled work with Graduate School if only for the nostalgia of learning again, with subliminal wishes of ending up with a more fulfilling occupation. And we often drank, we often went to the movies or the theater. We often travelled out of town. We were often starved and we found ways to make ourselves satisfied. We've had our highs.
In afternoons after Saturday classes, we lie in bed with a poetry volume we borrowed from the university library. We read poetry together.
A line from a poem hits the mark:
Through separate evenings, when
only you can take the stars
or give me the moon, while I assemble
all the reasons why I love
you, this way, still.
(From Rita B. Gadi’s Kidapawan in my Heart)
I love you this way, my D. On our separate evenings, only you can take the stars, or give me the moon.
***
The Shape of Me and Other Stuff; Dr Seuss. It was before he learned to recognize, form words, mumble or comprehend. He was not even a year old when I started reading it to him. I must have done it to him a thousand times, as I could now recite it from memory. But I didn't how how we took it, I had no clue if there was anything he understood, or how the spirit was forming in him. I knew my mind was as blank as his.
I just kept reading it to him.
He was already walking then, so he must have been over 12 months. He walks to his shelf, picks out this book, walks on his still-wobbly knees and hands it to me. The look was instinctive, pure and moving. I acknowledged the request, and with this gesture - I unmistakably felt that he was loving me back.
We turn a page and read.
