Of Mangoes and Metaphors

These days I’ve been practicing. I’ve been circling around, picking up and discarding metaphors, to see how much of it I can invent intuitively. Turns out somebody else was thinking about metaphors.

One morning, Clio and I were stepping out of the door for a stroll. I asked her if it was hot, because we just got the bungang araw around her neck cleared. She nodded and said, “The sun eats mangoes, that’s why it’s green…ai! yellow pala.”

A Funeral But Life

Better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of mirth.
- the Koheleth, son of David, king in Jerusalem

He’s got the little bitty babies in His hands.
- Traditional



More than a dozen students from Grades 3 and 4 were there. The earliest kid clung to his mother, for he had no big words for his classmate’s parents. As soon as another kid arrived, the two gravitated to each other, for the two share a world only they know, the same world they shared with Aaron.

And as kids one by one with their parents arrived, they gathered together like a flock of pigeons, in the front row of the chapel, near the dead. They are talking about Aaron not in hushed voices, because his body is just there; but not only about him, but animatedly about so many other things – like school; like new jokes; like things so far they’ve done with their own families, for it’s summer vacation after all, and they haven’t seen each other since April; like why Aaron is wearing makeup.

One boy’s arm is round the shoulders of another. The two will probably be friends ‘til senior year.

The parents, old-timers relative to most kids there not even 10 yet, offer sincere condolences to and silent prayers for the bereaved, because they know what it’s like to have lived for so long, and to have kids not even 10 yet, and what it should mean for a kid to have lived for so short.

The kids do not have handles for such sincerities, for they have no need for them yet. They are very much alive, precisely because they have not lived for so long; and life is what they offer to their elders – and the will to live.

The old, they sit and stare as if to think deep. They don’t move around too much, because they don’t want to be unruly in the face of death, and because they are too tall and too big to worm discretely through the narrow aisles of the chapel.

But the kids are peripatetic. They’re in a place, or a situation, they’ve never been in before. The chapel has a couple of doors leading to God knows where and the aisles are roads to these doors beckoning to be trodden upon. They are in an age when they must respond.

The old, they smile, because they are trying to be strong. The young, because they are innocent, and that is all they really know. Death is not as real to them as the candies served to condolers, over which they hover and which, if generously proffered to them, they would stuff in their fat cheeks and down their pockets; not as important as their classmates, gathered around the dead, alive and with sprightly memories; not as affecting as Aaron, their friend, when he was once awake and wide-eyed. For death is not as real to them as life.

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At the end of the service, after everyone had to sit and listen, the parents of Aaron spoke of the bittersweet longing and, finally, announce to friends and family that they are thankful for the Life of Aaron, all the nine years and forever.

And then the ceremony ended. Chocolate puffs with whip cream and rainbow sprinkles for children and pancit with onion-pan de sal for the puffy-eyed oldies were brought out. The children were ecstatic, as they ate and gathered round the photo of Aaron, with a beard and a moustache, so young and feigning so old. The parents are now children, too. The chapel is in merry disarray, and the funeral ended, as it should be when life ends - a children’s party.




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A digression:
I realized that night that there are three mysterious things that can never be had, and can never be understood, by those who merely look on or turn their heads:

Community,

Meaning,

Being known.


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Another:
The words the Koheleth are a fitting thought for me today: the day of death is better than the day of one's birth.