Sunshine on a Dreary Day

       It is one of those weekend days when you wake up to a gray morning light.  A little later when I stepped out to the lanai, I confirmed a sky overcast all over in gray save for occasional cottony patches where sunlight was trying to break through.  It does not look that it will rain but it is going to be a dreary day that will not at all encourage any activities for retired folks like me.  On the contrary, it is the kind of a day that engenders some of the aches and pains of ageing and concerns that these aches and pains are already pangs of mortality.  I dislike dreary days except when they are my golfing days because then I usually succeed in ignoring them.

  

      I see golf balls still scattered all over the backyard lawn.  I did not collect them around the coconut tree after I did some pitching practice yesterday.  I am hoping that my two post-prep grandsons will be brought over for awhile today and collecting those balls is something they also like to do.  I like watching them gambol and rumble in the area with their grandma periodically coming out in the lanai to shout to them to keep off her orchids and garden plants.  My mind would wander and it does not seem very long ago when it was my two sons I was watching running and scattering their energies all over the place.  But how can that be not long ago.  They and their sister have grown up, married, have their own families and all but gone now from the home that their Mom and Dad aspired to build.  Their rooms are all empty now, stockrooms for mementos they left behind of their growing up and single years and for us, repositories of many memories of those years.

      I sometimes tell my grandmother sweetheart now that we should have built just a small bungalow for a home then;  I would not have to look or call out all over the house to find her as I sometimes need to do now.  We would not feel too alone together.  But ultimately, we agree that it is better the way it was because there remains the spaces for anyone of the children or grandchildren to come back to when and if the situation becomes opportuned one day.

  

       We do not always take our breakfast together.  On days I play golf, I leave very early and eat at the club. Today is not my golfing day and we are having breakfast together.  This is one more sight and occasion that  bemuses me as an eloquent picture of our aloneness together: Our family dining table is rounded with a lazy susan at the center and 6 chairs around and our househelp-cook always places our plates close next to each other so that two-thirds of the table's circumference is a big vacant space.  This emphasizes even more that now there are only just the two of us.  But neither has thought of changing the setting which we seem to find comfortable and conducive to our morning conversations about many things, including the weather on a day like today.  But any discussion of what to do to pass the day was right off preempted by a text message she told me she got from Jonathan last night.  He would be going to the Philippine Science High School to play in an alumni basketball game.  His wife, Rhea, and their first-born daughter Sophia will be with him and they would like to come by after the game if we were not going anywhere today.

       

        Sophia is coming?!!

       There is probably a little bias in me as a her grandpa when I say she is the prettiest and cutest 2-year old little girl in the world today.  She with the big brown eyes that can melt you with a look of wide-eyed innocence or fix you with penetrating stare or just win you over with demure peck on the cheek.

        It was only 9:00 A.M. but I already had a picture of her coming in ahead through the front door, hesitating with her small steps as if wondering what or who she will find inside and seeing "gwampa" or "gwamma", slowly comes near and allows herself to be lifted and hugged.  "Tatel", she might say as I carry her, pointing outside to the small pond in the garden where the turtle she loves to feed is kept.

  

        Sophia is coming!  It seems sunshine has slowly burst through the rest of a dreary Sunday.