By
Rolo B. Cena
Hushed
Poppies
Dumaguete
Star Informer
09
September 2012
Cebu City,
Philippines
– A festive dinner has been agreed by Roxanne and I just to push with our plan
to personally meet. She is a colleague
in the industry who happens to be the wife of my distant and
yet-to-be-acquainted-with cousin from Bantayan Island, Cebu. The plan to meet has been postponed several
times due to conflicts in my schedule.
At
exactly six in the evening, while I was wrapping up and preparing to depart
from the seemed-to-be eternity tiring office works, she phoned in to say that
she and her husband cannot proceed due to flash floods along the vicinity. She stays and works in Mandaue. The long and short of it is: the planned dinner date wouldn’t push through
courtesy of the plaguing monsoon rains, once again.
I
joined with my team and dropped by Colon, the oldest street in the Country nestling
central to all thoroughfares in downtown Cebu with the hope of finding a cab
for me. Upon sight, I recall Manila
streets drowned in commercially infected flashfloods, motorists banging their
horns in the hope of getting out of the traffic, pedestrians running after
passenger jeepneys and taxi cabs for a seat.
Everybody is wet; everybody is pressed to get home. And so must I!
Frustrated
for almost one hour, I took another jeepney ride to the nearby mall as my
perceived fear of the risks associated with the area of Colon was
mounting. In the mall, a long queue at
the taxi stand added fuel to the fire. I
had to hire a street kid to fetch a cab for me for twenty pesos; it didn’t work
out, though.
Thinking
that a place of worship can be a safer place for me, I hurriedly scurried
towards Sto. Rosario Church nearby unmindful of the downpours that soaked my
physique; everyone in the street immersed in the fortuitous torrents: kids paddling through the high floods;
annoyed and irritant citizens wading towards all directions for protection and
ride. For almost two hours I reluctantly
stood at the church door posting like a sentinel trying to protect the Holy One. It would have been a good idea to do my
rituals inside but the nuisances of the freaky night consumed my passion and
reverence.
It
would have been a night for me: a
sumptuous dinner with a couple whom I had wanted to meet to establish my
genealogical connection to the past fast forward to the present. For decades, we are detached from my paternal
family although recently the phenomenal trends of Facebook and Twitter, emails,
Skype and yahoo chats pave the way for our terrestrial and virtual 24/7 trysts.
But
it was a night planned to be good that went sour: sumptuous dinner ticked out, flash floods
ticked in; dry and comfortable atmosphere marked off, wet and inconvenient
night marked in; easy and opportune travel checked out, difficult and ill-timed
search for a ride checked in. It was
such a very messy four-hour Tuesday night that turned out to be my first milestone
in Cebu.
Soaked,
shivered, and starving, from the church I decided to walk to the area of Ramos
with the end in mind of finding one decent ride back home. At least in this area, only a few would have
chosen to stay to seek for fast and comfortable ride, I thought. Lo and behold, the area is also flooded, this
time with people, not by torrential rain waters. Fortunately, I found one taxi cab but with an
American challenger. The good thing was,
the cab driver chose and not the tourist.
And I wondered why.
Most
often, personal plans do not really find favors with the Almighty; rushed activities
do. Like the torrents that paralyzed the
city last Tuesday, things do not happen by chance. Not everyone get the premium overnight! .
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