By Rex Catubig

 

TO prepare for a reluctant friend’s birthday dinner, I cruised around to scout for some down-home stuff to make into hors d’oeuvres and crudites as a prelude to dinner.

I found the “biggest oysters” in town. Not homegrown as I had wanted, but imported from neighboring coastal towns with bountiful oyster produce. I also bought some lusi-lusi–that phallus look-alike shellfish–for conversation piece. And seeing a wild bunch, I also picked a cluster of jicama–for intermezzo, I thought.

And with all these, I had hoped that everything would fall into place as if meant to be–like love on the sidelines.

But on the day of the party, the eastern sky began darkening at 2 p.m. Sometime later, threatening dark clouds and ominous bursts of thunder warned of a heavy downpour. Florenz messaged that it was raining hard in Sta Barbara; Mario was told of the same in Urdaneta. It was just a matter of time before the rain clouds hit Dagupan.

It always seemed to rain whenever I held a patio party. I was beyond comforting. The week of planning and preparation was about to be subverted by the last of the northeast monsoon wind.

But it was St Joseph’s feast day and perhaps the good father would not spoil a son’s birthday–and Ermin had been a good son by all measures. And of course, there’s St Expeditus to the rescue when things fall apart.

Just before 5 p.m., the sky began clearing up, without me having to strike a desperate Faustian deal. The party would go on—it was Ermin’s 70xth.

He had been a reluctant celebrator, uneasy about having a party in his honor. So we had to call it simply a dinner to appease him. But when the petite strawberry cake was brought in, and everyone around the table started singing Happy Birthday, a bright smile lit his face, it was evident he was, after all, well pleased.

Corona protocol precluded blowing his birthday candle, so he put out the flame by pinching the wick with his fingers. After which, Eli’s bottle of Asti was popped open, the blue goblets were filled and raised to toast another milestone of Dagupan’s fair-haired son.

The covid scare would die down over the years, and we would be celebrating one another’s birthday, of life well lived, of love cried over and survived. But it did not dawn on us that while we felt invulnerable and seemed to have sealed a pact for survival and longevity, we were just ordinary mortals like the rest of the world. Prey to age and ailment in whichever order. We realized that even Superman failed to strike a deal for invincibility, and as the song poignantly pointed out, “even heroes have a right to bleed”—we are fair game to life’s vagaries and vicissitudes.

So in between blowing the candle on birthday cakes and toasting life, we would also light candles that drip tears on someone else’s casket and bid farewell. The paradox of life is that as you blow out the flame of birthday candles, you inevitably light the flame of eternal life. Birthdays and deaths are inseparable.

But defiantly, we mark time. We mark milestones. We fill our hearts with copious memories. And though the “short span of life forbids us undertaking long hopes”, we never cease to dream and fly.

“They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes within a dream”.

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