APM

The title is not a misprint to denote your ATM, the automatic teller machine that gets the additional moolah when one scrapes the wallet’s bottom at the bar ‘cause the price for the lady’s drink is a bit hefty. And you want to down some more brew in disgust for letting the lady leave with the guy with the necktie!

The APM in our title is the atmospheric particle matter that is in the air naturally but has come to our medical profession’s attention because of the PM10-2.5 sized APMs threaten our metabolic functioning. Specifically, APMs get into the bloodstream and lodge to block small arterial and veiny passages, or deliver toxic chemicals. 

This comes to mind daily here in Dong Bei as I look up the skies that is seldom the color blue. Gray as the color of my true loves hair is cute in songs but the particle matters in the atmosphere measures perennially at the alarming level above the tolerable line, leaving the sky always gray. Now, we do not mind this in the six months of cold weather because it just comes with the territory but on spring and summer days, I expect to get a break. No such luck.

Makes me nostalgic for the taken-for-granted-ness of blue skies in the CNMI as APMs from exposed dry soil and vehicular carbon monoxide exhausts get blown off to the ocean quickly, rendering the view of the horizon, like the vaunted green flash at sunset from Oleai Bar a venerable Marianas treat.

I remember looking out my window at the Riviera Hotel by NMC in As Terlaje on my first month as an island resident and was surprised to see a plot of tobacco grown on the slopes toward lake Susupe. That was probably from an Ilocano Pinoy growing his dubla supply. That’s the rolled tobacco leaf that my paternal grandma in Ilocandia made for herself. She lived to be 95, hardly a poster girl for the surgeon general’s warning in cigarette packs but then, her tobacco was grown naturally without much of the chemicals that pesticides and insecticides used with the new Virginia tobacco then grown to feed the Marlboro man manufacturers in Manila’s environs.

I am not pushing for tobacco here. I cold turkey’d in ’84 and lapses since had been sporadic, though perhaps not minimal in its effect. My genetics both on my maternal and paternal sides are good for 95 years. I am only going for 86, both as an estimate of the state of my health, as well as a covenantal choice with reality. Either way, more or less of the 86, it shall be c’est la vie for j’aime la vie!

Some among my acquaintances shudder at the thought that I might be teasing fate and destiny. Non, mon ami. The choice is actually deeply rooted in my faith, derived from the witness of those who patterned their existence in the trials and trails of one Jesus of Nazareth who spilled his guts after he marched into Jerusalem. In my appropriation of the tradition, he was a god-killer. (Are you waiting for a messiah to get you out of your predicament? Got good news for you. No one is coming. Pick up your life and live.) We substituted his image into the idolatry that surrenders one’s existence to the external machinations of others, sometimes named pastors and priests in places! I know. I was in their number.

Since I am an evangelist of the good news I know to the core of my being, here it is. Jesus was a Jew, deeply honoring of the Levant’s YHWH, the mysterious affirmation of just the way life is! No magic here; nor does it require any hocus-pocus from some ecclesiastical structure that claims proprietary knowledge of profound secrets. “You want to know how to really live before the supreme reality,” he said in my hearing, “look no further. I am it! Reality and I are one.”

Then he took the 33 years of his existence (broken and spilled out, like those of the MH370 and MV Sewol passengers, the tornado-flood victims of the U.S. South, street parliamentarian Thais, Ukrainians, Syrians, Egyptians, Iraqis, Brazilians; me and you), and expended it to the hilt, all of it. In so doing, I make his example “good news” ’til the end of time.

But it is not eternity or absolute certainty that is my business. It is my one moment in time, all 86 years of it, that is the subject of my expenditure. Sure, we need to be aware of the APM in our surroundings, as well as the chemical inputs we put into our systems, but the ultimate question remains: “How will you live the one existence that you have?” I follow the answer echoed out of Galilee’s shores.

Now, there are many who know and live by the same story without genuflecting to the icon dubbed Jesus. That is fine. In the 21st century, those who attend their Mass and worship services but live their lives on the tags of appointed secret keepers of the way life is are driving the nail deeper on the outstretched arm of that carpenter in Golgotha, whose life is the real messiah, the living Christ!

Yes, APMs do threaten the health of our breath, but it is the health of our soul that is at stake. May you decide to live the one moment of life that is yours, however you’ve drawn the parameters of its covenant. To paraphrase Nike, Just BE You!

Thus spake the ex-reverend!