“Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of partner.” --- Amy Bloom
Love
Archimedes once said: “Give me a place to stand, and I can move the world.” His remark which explained the use of a lever was taken as an academic joke. But the romantic ones among the academia took it seriously and saw it in a different way using their hearts instead of their heads. Sometimes when we adjust our brain to hear what our heart already knows, we realize that many things are possible that are beyond our understanding. The head that doesn’t listen to the heart contains neither thought nor love, for one can’t find in things he cannot perceive at the moment. H. L. Mencken said: “Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” In Teaching Children to Love, Doc Childre wrote: “Harmonizing heart and brain through love is what can establish a complete intelligence, a complete self, where a child can look at life and realize there are no dead ends, there are always possibilities. The greatest gift a parent can give a child during all the ups and downs of life is love.”
Love does things to you that you have no hope of understanding. It changes you when you have no intention of being changed. Love makes sense out of the unexplainable. It carves order out of chaos, clarity out of confusion. But Jacques Benigne Bossuel tries to explain: “The heart has reasons that reason does not understand." Love communicates a passionate joy in the senses, a thrill of sensual appreciation for the world around. It coordinates, connects, completes and makes us whole. Henry Drummond said: “You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love.” Pearl S. Buck warned: “The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.”
We need leverage to make things happen, and love is the strongest lever of them all. Indeed there is nothing stronger than love to move the world. Love pounces on possibilities, sustains flexibility, dares the unforeseen, and thus makes everything .. well …maybe almost everything possible and achievable. Crystal Middlemas said: “Love, like a river, will cut a new path whenever it meets an obstacle.” Mae West said: “Love conquers all things except poverty and toothache.” Love is like an energy that flows through the synapses of our nervous system and the chambers of our hearts. In Hidden Power of the Heart, Sara Paddison wrote: “As you continue to send out love, the energy returns to you in a regenerating spiral... As love accumulates, it keeps your system in balance and harmony. Love is the tool, and more love is the end product.” Igor Stravinsky said: “In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love?” Love secures and stabilizes relationships. It invites an intimate response that closes the distance. If faith can move mountain, love can make the flowers bloom. Love can turn everything, absolutely everything in the world warm and fresh and enchanting, just like that.
George Sand said: “There is only one happiness in life, to love and be loved.” Victor Hugo wrote: “Love is the only ecstasy, everything else weeps.” Someone said: “To find riches is a beggar’s dream, but to find love is the dream of kings.” The dance Tango speaks of an infinite sadness, a deep longing for love, and the knowledge that all that makes life worth living is in the hands of another, to give or withhold – love. Mother Teresa said: “There is more hunger for love and appreciation in this world than for bread.” An Anonymous person wrote: “You will never know true happiness until you have truly loved, and you will never understand what pain really is until you have lost it.”
The wedding celebration
The wedding of Pompei’s daughter, Sherri Jubay, and Matt Couch on September 3, 2005 in Lubbock, Texas that many of us of Pompei’s friends attended was, without doubt, a celebration of love, joy and happiness. It’s a celebration that is hard to match where families of both sides were so proud, grateful and ecstatic, and the couple is so happy with each other that the father of the groom whom I had the opportunity to talk to in the restroom while we were relieving ourselves from the booze or beers we were drinking, was so confident to say to me: “This is a wonderful wedding. I’ve never seen a couple so happy with each other and love each other so much. They will grow old together on one bed.” That, I agreed and said: “I couldn’t agree with you more. Hopefully, they will.” But he didn’t seem to like the word hopefully and I wished I didn’t use it, because he is certain that Matt and Sherri will.
The wedding celebration was great indeed, and the place where it was held has a distinct beauty in it where its space makes you move freely and yet feel like you are closed to each other like a family. Except for a few moments of emotional flow between Pompei and Sherri when Pompei’s eyes were flooded with tears as though the levee that separates the tears from the eyes was broken, every one participated with so much joy and happiness. Believe me. They were not crocodile tears that flooded our friend’s eyes. They were tears of love and happiness.
There was plenty of food and a constant supply of booze, beers and all kinds of drinks that a little later into the night, those drinks must have driven the young and the restless American ladies to sway, dance, leap and gyrate like tomorrow is about to die. Some of their movements were smooth, graceful and erotic, and some were like the Thorazine toxic dance of a schizophrenic. But it’s the rubbing of their fronts and behinds against the fronts and behinds of the guys to their proximity that tantalized the ancient men of the class 1972 who were watching, the likes of which could have become the focus of these men’s fantasies. It made Benfer Aranton and Maning Juson swear and wish they were twenty or thirty years younger and bachelors.
But when one of those ladies started to dance and gyrate in front of us, wiggling and sensually rubbing her body against Pompei’s behind, challenging if not teasing every one of us to dance, gyrate and wiggle with her, the women started to throw a sharp lancing glance at their men. Del recommended me for the action knowing that I came alone and I’m in shape, but all I could do was wished it were jogging or cycling. We had to leave two hours early, for not only that we were way out of the league and we could not wiggle and gyrate with those ladies with our creaky joints and poor prostate control, the men saw danger warning as the lancing glance in their wives’ eyes had intensified and transformed into a laser-like look that made the men cringe, take cover and decide to take off before they get burned.
The 3-day feast
It was a great long weekend – three full days of feast, from breakfast to midnight snacks with wine, booze and beers. What makes events like this so enjoyable especially for those of us of the class 1972 who are always eager to get together is that it is happening when we now have gotten closer and are comfortable with each other as we have removed our sensitivity and replaced it with sense and sensibility. We no longer hesitate to tell all kinds of jokes and make fun of each other. Everyone is game and is willing to accept being the brunt of jokes just for laughs. We no longer pretend to have a sense of humor and yet get slighted by jokes. We laugh even if the joke is on us. I believe we have come to fully realize the value of friendship and understand what it should be - a relationship that is worth making little sacrifices and inconveniences for; a relationship that gives us an inner pride to be one among friends; and a relationship that provides something that attunes us to every quiver of id and ego, making us learn to value each other and to get excited looking forward to being together.
Who could have expected that when we arrived at past lunchtime Friday, September 2, hungry from a long plane ride that provided only a small pack of pretzel and a cup of tea, we were immediately picked up from our hotel and driven to Maning and Billy’s daughter’s apartment for lunch with dinugu-an, lingua, pork kabob, etc.? Then to the church for rehearsal and to a club that provided us with the biggest steak in Texas and keg beers for dinner. Back to the hotel in the night, we gathered in Dodong and Dita’s room. They came in late driving their van from Illinois, but they practically brought their kitchen with them to serve us more like another dinner than a night snack, San Miguel beers, and desserts of bod-bod, mango, poto, binka, binignit, etc. I would not be surprised if each of us was charged a little extra by the hotel for the increase use of electricity in their room.
The day after the wedding, Pompei and Dita brought us to another club for a luncheon of Filipino food – 2 lechons that did not survive the onslaught of Maning and Hector who dislocated and pulled off every leg of the poor pigs and left its abdomen hollow while Dodong was like performing a delicate operation of cutting its ears and tails - and fish, pansit, dinugo-an, miswa, etc. The rest of us picked the lechons apart like crabs on a dead fish. Lechon seems to still be the favorite food for Filipinos, because except for the skull and bones, there was nothing left in both of them even before the luncheon was over. And in the night, Rey, Pompei’s nephew served us dinner in his house where we had more Filipino food like tinula, utan, kinilaw, etc., and crab claws that Benfer feasted on like they are not found in New Jersey. Benfer was so engrossed with breaking so many of those claws for his plate that he forgot to break and prepare some for his dear Isabel. Guys, remember to be thoughtful when it comes to your spouses. They could be as sweet as honey when you are being thoughtful, but they could also be a pain in the ass when you ignore or cross them. The chicken skin sitzaron is new to me and it’s good.
We came home a lot heavier despite the walking exercise for more than an hour many of us did early in the morning of Saturday and Sunday. At the Dallas Fort Worth airport, although I had no intention of eating at any of its restaurant, somehow I was drawn to eat at one of them because they are just across the terminal gate where I was waiting for my flight and it was past lunchtime. Just when I arrived in Richmond, I almost did not make it to the toilet. I had to go three times in thirty minutes and I felt like all the food I had eaten for the past three days were emptied in thirty minutes. It left me with a sore and angry hemorrhoid. I guess one of the E. coli did it.
As they say that good things must come to an end. But for those of us who are eager to look forward to being together, for life, for laugh and for love, the end of good things is just repose, for we know that as the song goes, “The best is yet to come!”
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