By Monday it will be back to work for him! He promised himself. He misses it. Work. The holiday season seemed alternately longer and shorter than just two weeks. This season particularly; visited as it was with a typhoon which got in the way of the regular parties and get-togethers he would not otherwise have missed.
These weeks were for him an extended period of rest and relaxation capped finally by a day of helping ABS-CBN’s Leo Lastimosa and Maribago Blue Water Resorts distribute relief goods in Tapon, Dumanjug, his home-barangay, badly hit by Typhoon Seniang. He went with his brothers Bimbo and Vicente “Londong” Fernandez, barrio captain of Tapon. It seems ominous how a typhoon like that could seem so minor and yet wreak so much damage in some parts. It seemed for him the complete summation of the emotional mix of the past year.
The season should have left him all the healthier. If only he did not catch a virus from his youngest child. He is down with cough and colds and the seasonal thought of quitting smoking. The sun is not yet out. Saturday started out a grey day and threatened to stay that way till evening. This led him to think how the season may have been as close to a cold winter as we could ever get in the tropics.
He is half-depressed with that sort of post-yuletide half-depression which should ideally follow after a night of crazy partying. Except there was no such big party. He missed all of them this year. He spent too much time in bed. He swore, as soon as this virus passes, he will exercise. He will walk, even jog. Anything to break a sweat.
He does not like it. This sort of depression always leads to an assessment of the previous year, which was not by any means a bad year for him. But from experience, he knows how pointless that can be. Better to be more forward looking.
From all indications, this year should be even more productive than the previous one. The world economies are up. The price of oil is going down. Perhaps Vladimir Putin may now be more circumspect. What with the prospects of economic collapse for Russia. One needs only to remember how the price of oil also plummeted this way when the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics collapsed decades ago. Putin will not miss this significance. He will make concessions over the Ukraine issue.
Even Kim Jong Un, the supreme leader of North Korea, seemed ready to negotiate with South Korea. So the prospects for world development are quite good, notwithstanding how the analysts seem to be keeping their fingers crossed. There will be no world peace. The ISIS will still be there. There will be the usual little wars. But hopefully, no big one.
Pope Francis will be visiting the country in just a few days. The Christmas season should segue into a Sinulog more festive than ever before. The signs are up everywhere, along with small traffic tie ups resulting from delegations already practicing their steps on the streets.
These things reflect well in the home-court. Estela, to whom he is married, spent the better part of the holiday season redesigning the home interiors. This always means he will be missing a few things, a manuscript here and there now moved to another location he has yet to discover in the course of things. But he is not inclined to complain. The house does seem now a bit less crowded and well ordered in a particular way of order he still needs to determine. But from the look of things, he must admit, she did quite an excellent job. He can actually see the television screen from the dinner table which doubles as his writing desk.
But he is more inclined when writing to look elsewhere. From where he sits now he also gets a good view through the window into the hills, from which hills he hears the song of birds hiding under bushes. This terrain climbs all the way to the skyline, his view not yet impeded by urban development. They will come. But not today.
Grey day, song of birds, cold wind, no sun, these things leave him emotionally confused. And so he wonders how he truly feels. Perhaps this confusion is all very well. It is only an ordinary day. For now, he continues resting from 2014, looking forward to the coming the year.