Thanks To You

When was the last time you’ve felt that somebody was really thankful for something that you’ve done or said? What I mean is that when the word “Thank you” was uttered, you felt in your heart that the person was really sincere in saying that and is truly grateful to you. Well, I haven’t in years. Since this word has been so habitually spoken, sad to say that the essence and true meaning of this word is lost. Let’s admit it sometimes we just say it because it seems to be just appropriate to say ‘Thank you” every time somebody does us a favor but not because we truly mean it. I never thought that someone like JR, one of our food servers in the canteen, will show me what a real “Thank you” really is.

JR has been in our office canteen for some months already. He cheerfully does his job by taking our food orders and delivering it to our cubicles. JR is an actual depiction of service with a smile because he never fails to give us one of his radiant ones whenever he brings the food to us. You see, we suddenly became so lazy to go up a few flights of stairs to personally order the food and since they just opened their delivery service just recently we took advantage of it. We suddenly became so sedentary already that’s why we are getting plumper and plumper everyday. That’s the price that we have to pay for being almost lethargic. Serves us right, huh?

One fateful time, as I was talking to JR on the phone and going on our usual routine of taking note of our orders for lunch, I heard a voice of a very angry woman shouting invectives and insults to someone. I stopped talking for awhile but since I thought that it might just be a part of the crew’s friendly banter, I went on with our order taking. After a couple of minutes, JR went down with our food in hand but this time there was no smile on his face. He looked haggard and quite sad. He left without saying anything. I thought maybe he’s just a little too tired that’s why he was so quiet. An hour has passed when he came back and decided to talk to me. He said that when we were on the phone and I heard a lot of shouting, it was him that was being shouted at. He said that his superior was shouting at him for the petty mistake of exchanging the P500 bill to P1.00 at the bank instead of P5.00 as instructed to him. He even admitted his error and promised to rectify it by going back to the bank but his superior did not accept his humble apology and even made it worse by shouting profanities at him and threatened to slap him with the coins in front of many people and while we were conversing on the phone. Can you just imagine how JR would have felt to be humiliated and degraded like that in the presence of all the people in the canteen? He was near to tears when he was telling me what happened. He can’t even look me in the eye because of so much embarrassment. But I admired him for being brave enough in mustering all his guts to come to me and ask me if I could help him put a stop to the maltreatment he has been experiencing from his cruel supervisor.

I wrote a letter to their manager telling her what I’ve heard and how JR was treated by his heartless supervisor. JR asked for the help of others who were there too when this untoward incident occurred but they did not even try to lift a finger to help him. Maybe they thought he’s just a food server and this matter can just be easily laughed off and forgotten. Shame on these people! If they think highly of themselves just because they’ve got better jobs and are more educated than JR then they maybe right but JR is a lot more human than them. He’s got the humblest of hearts and sincerest of souls and it makes him a hundred times more honorable than any of them.

I wasn’t around when he got the letter; I ate my ordered lunch in the pantry. I just left it to one of my close friends in the office so I did not have the chance to see his reaction. Late in the afternoon the next day, he went back to my cubicle and he’s already wearing a happy smile on his face bringing with him a white plastic bag. I didn’t know what’s inside it. He wasn’t saying any thing; he just kept on smiling and pushing the plastic bag in my hands. When I finally opened it, there inside the bag was my favorite pasta…spaghetti!

Now, I was the one on the verge of tears because I was so touched! I was not expecting anything in return for the little help that I’ve done for him but he made me feel as if it meant the whole world to him that someone stepped up and defended his plight. I felt different. I felt like I suddenly mattered to the world too, like I’m bigger than my body. I was so happy that I actually experienced a happy rush all over! I was even happier when JR came back the next day along with one of the crews and was thanking me profusely for what I’ve done for them. That in behalf of the rest of the crews, they are thanking me from the bottom of their hearts because not only JR is being treated this way but each and everyone of them. I nearly cried! I didn’t know that I made such a big impact on their lives. I didn’t know that in my own little way I was able to stop one injustice in this world. I’ve learned that there are no small or big injustices; they are all the same, ugly, wrong and wicked. And nobody should ever allow it to happen to anyone whether it’s someone close to you or someone that you’re just acquainted with. Because we are all created equally maybe not in the eyes of men but in the eyes of God we are.

I’m ending this with a heartfelt thanks to people like JR who made a big difference in my life. 

Magical Rain

I’m really happy when it rains. I love the smell of earth when it’s just starting to drizzle, the feel of wet grass on my bare feet and the sound of the pitter-pattering of water on the roof. I even composed a song with just the tapping of the rain as my accompaniment. I don’t remember how the song goes but it was mostly filled with la, la, las and dum dee dums. I was just 6 when I composed that, I know not too many words then.

Rain reminds me so much of my childhood when I still used to live in the province of La Union. Unlike other kids that thunder seems petrifying, I on the other hand will be dancing with joy upon hearing it. Because to me it only meant one thing, rain. And when it does start pouring down, I would hurriedly run outside and holler for my playmates to join me welcoming the rain. We had two kinds of ritual dances for the rain, one was if we were wishing for one to come and the other one was a thanksgiving dance. We just made it up of course. There were a lot of yelling “woohoos”, jumping up and down, turning around and yodeling. One of my playmates was very talented when it comes to that. He yodels the ABC and even the Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I wonder what happened to him though, I was quite sure that he’ll land a job in the music or entertainment industry. But I never heard from him ever since we left the place and transferred here in Manila. After getting quite asphyxiated for too much dancing and mild aneurysm for too much shouting we’ll all flop down to the ground and start a laugh trip. We’ll just laugh about anything that our eyes can see. We’ll laugh at a bird perched on a tree having a difficulty getting the worm inside her chick’s mouth, we’ll laugh at the dog under the car that shivers every time he hears the rumbling thunder and we’ll even laugh at a cat that was very soggy and fully drenched and does not resemble a cat anymore but more of a wet feather duster. And then we will all close our eyes and wish for the rain not to stop so we can all stay outside longer. We’ll be playing in the mud puddles and get a huge chunk of mud and begin throwing it playfully on each other’s faces. We don’t have snow here in the Philippines so we improvised. We called it “mud balls.” I remember that we’ll even try to build our own “forts”. We’ll gather whatever materials that we can get our hands into and build small “barracks” out of it. And if we get tired of hiding, we’ll be going out of our forts armed with our mud balls and start throwing aimlessly at “enemy’s” camp. Whoever shouts “RETREAT” first loses. Our little army never lost a war. We were brave and feisty little soldiers. Then we’ll go to a nearby boggy marsh and find frogs and tadpoles. We had this game wherein whoever gets to catch the most number of tadpoles and keep it in your hand wins but it almost always seemed futile because they swim so fast making it very hard to catch them and very slimy as well. That even if we already caught them but if they started squirming in our hands, we’ll throw them back in the water screaming with nervous surprise. So we decided that all tadpoles caught but thrown back in the water were counted because it was impossible to let any of them stay in our hands for more than one second. Well, those who haven’t caught any, we’ll be hopping and leaping with us like frogs until we reach our next destination. We were a bunch of adventurous kids I should say. We’d try climbing trees even though we know that the barks were very wet and slippery. We’d think “Where’s the challenge in climbing a tree if it’s dry and our feet will stick easily to the trunk while ascending it?” So that explains the couple of scars on my legs because I fell not too many times while trying to climb it. But I didn’t mind the bruises, not at all. I was having so much fun that I was oblivious to the pain it was causing me. Sometimes I would even sprain my ankle or my elbow. And there was this one time that I went home with a black eye because we were playing tag and I was running so fast that I did not notice the protruding branch and BAM! goes my eye unto it. It hurt like crazy but I’d always tell myself that I’ll worry about mom’s scolding and the alcohol’s sting later but for now I’ll just enjoy this until the rain lasts. When the rain finally stops, we’ll get so bummed out because we need to go home already. We cannot let our wet clothes stick to us for long or else our mothers will be hunting us down.

I grew up thinking of the rain that way. Something that would bring me back to that enchanted time when all that I needed to worry about was what our next adventure would be like and not the bills to pay, problems to solve, past due promotions and all the nerve racking questions about life that your brain can come up to. It was a time when we let our imagination ran wild and think-up of things that were out of the ordinary. It was a time that we’ll laugh our hearty laughs not for anything else but just for the sake of laughing. It was our “pretend time” where in we could be anyone or anything that we would like to be. It did not matter whether who did well in school or did not. We were all equals. We can be kings and queens if we wanted to because it was our own private universe. We were holding time at the palm of our little hands. And it was solely up to us if we were going to speed it up or slow it down. The world was at our tiny teeny feet. Our own magical place where tears and sorrow never existed. A place built only on fun, happiness and laughter. So every time I get put out and feels like the weight of the world are on my shoulders or just simply getting stuck in the traffic because of flooded streets or gets stranded for a couple of hours because of the hard rain, some people would curse and shout expletives at the rain but not I. You know what I do? I just simply smile and start to sing la, la, la, dee, dee, dum, dee, dum and move to the beat of the thanksgiving rain dance in my head and I’m home again.