September in 1989

I found the DVD of 1989 when I was 33 and the mother of a baby girl. The video was shot by my sister and it covers ordinary days of a visit and the baptism of my baby. We are all so young and I looked at the stream of images unready for the effect. There was my sister Lizzie, standing as godmother to the child, there is my brother Johnny. My sister Mimi is holding the camera, only her baby is in the video looking like a doll. My oldest is four, and my son is two, and my husband looks like a movie star.

We were living in San Francisco, and my husband was a consultant with Deloitte and Touche. He was always on the road, mostly in Kansas City and Sacramento. Here we are with our three little children in a church called St. Anne of the Sunset in San Francisco. In one scene I am counting angels on a pew for my little son. We manage the candle held by our four year old. We are all so young and have no idea what is coming down the pike. No idea at all. In these images we are still a month away from the big earthquake.

When I look back on those days I remember being so busy with small children that I didn’t have time to brush my hair. I was so unconcerned about vanity and fashion. When I see my thirty-three year old self, I wonder what magic holds skin firmly to cheek and makes everything look so easy. Ah, youth.

There we are, halfway through with having babies. Three more coming in the future.

The future waits with losses so disconcerting, so bewildering, so final.

For a moment, on this brilliant, beautiful afternoon I can return to the images of my dear sister, my small children, my handsome husband. This is the stuff we don’t realize at the altar, that these busy every-days are the stuff of our legends. I always want to remember being together, being young. It was a marvelous time, it was. Life just goes by so fast.

Click here for the video

If I could..

http://mercybell.tumblr.com/post/752598665/fifty-people-one-question-brooklyn-my-brother

Watching this video made me think about where I would like to be on such a day. I think of two places. I’d like to wake up in my green room upstairs, with the fireplace and view of the maples on Maple Street. Bud would be next to me. There would be the daily sounds of animals, cats wanting to be fed, our dog wanting to go outside.

This time of year, there are birds singing outside. I’d go downstairs and bring my glass of iced coffee onto the porch and marvel at the canopy of leaves. I’d look at my humble geranium plant and admire the sturdy blossoms.

In my imaginary universe of perfection that is not of this world, I would wake up in our old family home in Baguio. A place which does not exist anymore. In that ideal imaginary world, all the dead would be alive, and my grandparents and sister and father would be alive. We’d sit down around a very big table and talk. They would know all my children and Bud. They would know about my life in Massachusetts, far from the mountains of the Philippines.

Because my grandparents would be alive, so many tragedies would never have happened. Which is the stuff of dreams, because we are all shaped by our life’s experiences and we cannot go back to the past. But still, in this imaginary world, everyone is together, and we are all admiring the view out the back window.

But when I really think about it, I don’t really want to go back, and I will see my grandparents and father and sister again one day. Perhaps in the hereafter we get to see what pleases us most.

When I was under sedation in 2005, when I had the stroke and was captive in my body, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be out of that state of crazy captivity. I did see the dead, and I learned things I wouldn’t otherwise know. But the only thing I wanted, the core of what I wanted was to be back at this house with my children and Bud.

That experience cured me of wanting anything else but this. Which is peculiar because of course I want to see more of the world and see old friends. Perhaps I am still close to having lost everything, that every day is still colored with this pervasive sense of gratitude.

I got the very thing I wanted. I was allowed to return home in one piece, scared, but not really the worse for the experience.

I love my life, I really do.