Egg

Before dinner on Sunday, I kept my son busy with drawing and spelling activities.  He was able to independently sketch and label apple, cat, (lady)bug, (sail)boat, mouse, house, and ball.  The next instruction was, "draw a face." He scribbled a circle before pausing to think of what to draw next.  I was waiting for him to add eyes, nose, mouth, ear, neck, eye brows, and hair when

Miracles

I grew up thanking saints at the bidding of my mother who claimed that those saints cured me.  I was sickly when I was young, and although my mother brought me to medical doctors, she also made deals with these saints to heal me in exchange of a yearly pilgrimage to the church dedicated to them during their feast day.   She brought me in these churches throughout my childhood, but she never explained exactly whose saint was involved in which disease.  In my early teens, I would go all by myself to honor my mother's pact with these saints and to have fun as well.  A feast day, after all, is also a time of merriment.  Eventually, my mother would have to remind me of her panata (promise), and I would tell her that she should be the one fulfilling

Overture

My son's pediatrician in the Philippines was obviously choosing her words.  In June to September 2008 my son and I stayed in the Philippines and during that time we were seeing her original pediatrician regularly for his vaccines and whenever he has health issues. In this particular visit, she was inquiring about my son's tendency to cry aloud while waiting for our turn in her clinic's crowded reception area.  It had been a month since we came back from Thailand and she was wondering if his behavior was occurring only in her small clinic or elsewhere.  She asked if my son had acquired new friends in our neighborhood.  She also asked if he already learned to talk.  We discussed during our previous visit my son's delayed speech, and she recommended to use only Tagalog or English when communicating with him, in case the reason for the delay was due to the confusion from hearing different languages.  Although she was smiling

Lost in the Spectrum

A dot of light for me to see/ is like a million rays of light/ for all my life I'm in the dark.


These are the opening lines of a poem I wrote for my high school paper.  I already forgot the title, the rest of the poem, and what made me wrote those lines more than a decade ago.  Lately, I found myself reciting these lines in my mind because they aptly