I woke up Thursday morning last week with a runny nose and a heavy head. I recognized the symptoms: the common cold has again set in, and its commonness, to mean regularity in visit, has shown cracks in my imagined invincible shield.
In Baguio, this minor discomfort is easily licked by an old family "recipe" shared by Padma Perez: a healing foot bath that calls for lots of lemon juice squeezed into a pail and mixed with pounded ginger. Pour hot water. Add drops of lavender oil (optional). Then soak your feet until water cools (depends on how hot you can stand it). While soaking, wrap yourself with a blanket. After the soak (or when the water cools), dry your feet, and go to sleep.
Simple but hard to duplicate in Manila where I step out of the shower, towel my body dry, then quickly begin to feel the beads of sweat forming on my forehead and around my neck.
A cold is inconvenient because it has become expensive to treat, and my doctor is perplexed why it has become a regular visitor in my life. She has ruled out dengue or a viral cause. She listens to my lungs, pronounces them clear so pneumonia is ruled out,too,but she's not taking chances so yesterday, she sent me down the lab for my second x-ray this year.Ohh, all that radiation, and it doesn't show on my face.
A cold is inconvenient because I wind up breaking appointments due to body malaise and weakness. Worse part is when I cancel plans in my cultural calendar of sorts. I like sharing in my friends' triumphs, watching them get acknowledged as another book is published or a life's career recognized.
Wednesday I watched an emotional Mario Miclat go up before the mike at the Shang to thank his family and circle of friends who saw him through the writing of his novel, Secret of the Eighteen Mansions. Although classified as historical fiction, it raises the curtain on the weaknesses and mistakes of the Maoist underground movement and reveals the top Party members' frailties. Many characters are thinly disguised, including the Chairman who goes by the initials AG (short for his nom de guerre Amado Guerrero, no doubt). Many friends feared for Mario's safety and the Chaiman's capacity to exact vengeance as they read pages of his draft but cheered him to go on as the time was ripe for these revelations. Now if AG makes patol to a work of fiction, he's even more deluded than we think.
Thursday was Edna Zapanta Manlapaz's turn to be feted. A beloved teacher at the Ateneo, she is one of two professors (the other being Soledad Reyes) who had the vision to see the need for and value of archival space for women writers' documents(expanded to include visual artists later) through the university's Library of Women's Writings.
Tuesday before that, Edna had hosted our bi-monthly First Draft dinner meeting at her La Vista Home. I was uncharacteristically late as I had just motored from Makati where another batch of girlfriends parted after a long, gossipy lunch. Gilda Fernando threatened in her text to finish all the sugar-free desserts if I didn't show up.
Edna always knows how to prepare an elegant table and a good spread from lemon coolers to just desserts. I missed Rita Ledesma's reading of her essay, accompanied by Lorna Kalaw Tirol's singing of song phrases from the manuscript. But Lorna was prepared for an encore to cap the evening. When she asked us what song we wanted to hear, Fe Arriola piped up, "Alfie."
And so the theme from the movie "Alfie" was in my head to console me on the afternoon I missed the festscrift for Edna. As sure as I believe, there's a heaven above, and this cold will be whipped before I miss out on any more vital cultural fare.
Photo by the blogger shows Lorna Kalaw Tirol (right) and other members of First Draft, Fe Arriola, Mariel Francisco and Karina Bolasco.
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