My turn at 70

Aug. 1 is the first day of my 71st year. I am on to my eighth decade, but the Gregorian calendar count on age is only 70 at the end of my 70th year. To the Greco-Romans I am only 70, so in there I shall remain.

Actually, the mind got stuck at 50, the mid-’90s mindset when autism started to haunt our daily living, and I surrendered my marriage to the turbulent rocks of domestic tranquility. The mind resigned to the meditative ways of the Apple MacBook and had never recovered from the chore to wordsmith ever since. 

The heart was set to habit much earlier in the wide ethnic field of Pinoylandia, so my discourse now claims that I am but a 20-year sapling bamboo with 50-year experience in global connecting and networking. Diversity is my heritage in a Sino-Indo-Malay historical tradition; I am a mobile antenna of ethnic and mental variety.

The soul was charred April 4, 1968, afternoon when a Pinoy sailor paid us a visit at the SMU campus in Dallas, Texas, bearing a PX gift of whiskey, drank one jigger too many and drove back to his NAS station north of the city, giving not much attention to the traffic. He plowed into the back of a stopped car at a traffic light going 75 miles per hour downhill. I sat at the back without a seatbelt.

MLK Jr. was shot in Memphis at about the time I woke up from the crash and walked away from shattered glass, called my dorm roommate, and checked myself in at the SMU infirmary when it became obvious that my adrenaline flow had worn off. Just a month before, I marched with MLK to Arlington Cemetery protesting the War in Vietnam for siphoning resources slated for the War on Poverty. The man of small physical stature cast a long shadow.

The body refuses to cooperate with the soul, so I often nurse wrinkles with olive oil, and attend to the body aches with deft finger kneading. Youth after all is but a state of the mind and vitality is a matter of choice. Being profound is a chosen stature, not the natural state of one’s mind, body, heart, and soul! That’s until I fumble the keys in front of my apartment, and 70 conveniently flashes to remind me of my age.

In a trip to Maliwada (Aurangabad, Maharashtra) in the Deccan plateau of India in 1977, I became clear that the category of personal achievement was simply a blooming into total self-expenditure regardless of outcome. A lifestyle of choice became mine for the rest of my life.

The intellectual clarity came when Apollo 8 sent back the Earthrise image from the lunarscape that turned into an icon of hope. There were no immigrants to planet Earth. I knew the existential reality of winning at the gates when biology in high school showed that of the 200 million sperms my Dad shared with my Mom each time they got cozy, I was the one—the only one—that made it to the egg! And that was only half of the story.

The egg that received the sperm did not automatically allow the first arrival to fertilize it into an ovum, creating in nine months the wonder of wonder (WOW) that was I. It chose. Anyone still striving to prove one’s self through their worth from achievement needs to appropriate the undeniable reality that at the moment of conception, one is already conceived FREE and a WINNER!

After India, I took the four ancient Hindu phases to mark life’s journey, parceled out in increments of 20 years. It fitted my life; I was barely 20 when I got on an American President Line that took me for 20 days from Manila to Hong Kong, Yokohama, Honolulu, and San Francisco, formally starting my adulthood and a journey of self-expenditure.

I parceled out my chosen 86 years in increments of 17 years, five phases in all that made the completion of the fourth phase at 68, and year 2014 at 69 the start of the last phase of graciously dying toward a terminus on Dec. 15, 2031.

Meeting with resource management consultants in the Visayas and Mindanao, I was called “Dr.” Vergara on the assumption that I held a Ph.D. to my credit. A U.P. Los Baños colleague suggested that I came to campus so his wife who heads the sociology department could confer an honorary degree. 

WOW. What a head-trip.

On the first of August, auspicious on Tinian in 1945, I wailed my first when Little Boy was “born” to be flown over Japan six days later, exploding its uranium mushroom over Hiroshima that snuffed the breath of thousands in a flash! 

My father was steeped on the triune personae of reality, its trustworthiness (the Father), of total expenditure demonstrated in the messianic role of Jesus (the Christ), and the lifestyle of freedom willed by the wholesome spirit (Holy Spirit). In the context of the Earthrise that slayed all the inherited notions of loyalties to clan, race, and nation, I was liberated into immanent metaphor, though the spirit reality stayed the same.

After the ’60s slaying of the god-metaphor, of fanatics’ abuse of messianic roles, I nursed a solitary soul while I build the road I traveled into phases of existence. I did not feather the bed of pensions but its absence to rely on only makes a WOW on the journey! We are wished to journey on!