I WOULD like to learn pebble-crunching.
The other night, while waiting for Juan to return and finish his Math practice problems, I missed what my husband was asking me.
On its third or fourth repetition, his question sounded like: what's my life's goal?
The image of a dirty soccer ball rolling away from my feet, locked at the ankles by a sea of papers, occupied me as I tried to do two things at once: check, comment and diminish the height of the pile of manuscripts from my students while counting in my head the number of steps my son needed to reach the kitchen, drink a glass of water, and come back to finish his assignment.
When my husband, thinking perhaps that the TV news had drowned him out again, repeated his question, he got an answer that was unexpectedly deviating in context and violence of tone: “Marika, maghuman ta (let's finish this once and for all)!”
If my home is still intact, the implicit threat unrealized, it is because I interviewed days before two diverse professionals: a psychologist schooled in logic and observable behavior and a healer, operating with phenomena and people's ethereal shields or aura.
Interviewed separately, they say the secret to life is found in the pebbles.
The man of science said we are each born with a glass that's half-full.
Trials drop into our glass like pebbles. Each pebble makes the level of water go a little higher.
When we fail to clean out the glass, that mini-mountain of pebbles will make the waters slosh out.
That, according to science, is the explanation why volcanoes erupt, parents go amok or silently implode during homework time when their children think there is a correlation between the number of glasses of water drunk and the time spent to correctly solve each assigned item.
Dragging my feet from the awful self-awareness that, at 41, I am unable to deal maturely with Grade 2 fractions and simple and complex machines, I looked forward to absorbing some positive vibes from a psychic and healer.
Alas, she took one look at me and read whole black holes in my ethera, the electro-magnetic field surrounding each person.
When happy and balanced, a person radiates an aura of pulsating, rainbow radiance.
Never really feeling I had recovered yet from the snowballing of assignments and school projects that every school feels is required to justify today's tuition fees, I no longer felt I had to rummage around in my akashic records to see the dull greenish glow I must be radiating.
In the alternate view of wellness, a person's electro-magnetic field gets bruised into a pulpy pus-like shade of green when you attract, not deflect, meteor-like showers of toxins.
Taking pity on me, the medium told me I could still save the present by looking at my past lives.
By some remarkable coincidence, this was what we did, Juan and I.
A tightly balled wad of paper, fished out from the nameless sticky debris that boys culture in the multiple pockets of their school bags, turned out to be a Chinese seatwork.
I observed to my son that it was remarkable how a zero needs absolutely no translation or training in writing characters.
Juan looked at the score in the paper. And then he fixed me in the all-seeing stare of one intimate with reincarnations and karmic destinies.
“Why,” my son the Medium intoned, “did you not tell me that we would be having an unannounced seatwork?”
He who is not without flaw, throw the first pebble.
mayette.tabada@gmail,com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu's Feb. 4, 2007 issue
No comments:
Post a Comment