Keep going
Published Apr 10, 2021 12:12 am
Medium Rare
Jullie Y. Daza
Sunny is going the extra mile. Her house looks like a showroom for anti-COVID gadgets and equipment. The air is misted by a disinfectant, besides which purifiers and ionizers are on the job at all hours. Everyone at home – all eight adults – is mandated to wear masks even when indoors. No visitors allowed. All deliveries left by the gate, and once brought indoors, subjected to spray-and-wash, whether the items are paper or plastic, or food. For the meantime, the family driver and his understudy are on vacation.
“I’m not taking chances,” Sunny declared. Her son calls her OA but she’s OK with that.
Rowena’s out-of-town factory makes leisure gear for export, 100 percent. More than 1,000 people work for her, thankful that their boss keeps tabs on them with a computer-aided rollcall every day. Not content with having them tested regularly, Ro has told her employees, over and over again, “The moment you’re sick please don’t report for work; otherwise I will keep you out forever. Get well first.” Busy as she is – orphaned and widowed, she lives alone with four staffers, using the last 14 months of the pandemic to brush up on her Pilipino, telenovela style. Finally, she has added words like praning to her vocabulary. Her reward was to come from whom else but Ian Veneracion, for as soon as he found out about her conversion, he sent her a gift, the tapes of his A Love to Last.
Arleen wears her signature on her hands. Her fingers are crowned with the most elegantly manicured, polished nails that are longer than RSA’s Skyway 3. As dedicated as she is to keeping them looking like a handy, living art form, she had to let her manicurista go when the NCR went back to ECQ. “I miss her,” she wailed. I’m sure the feeling is mutual. Some people watch how their plants grow, Arleen counts the hours waiting for her nails to grow back.
Spectacular sunsets, a cocktail of colors made of air and light, sky and clouds. A magnificent moon hanging overhead like a lighted pendant without a chain. God is in His heaven, the planets are whirling in space, where they’re supposed to. Lord, what’s going on down here?
Jullie Y. Daza
Sunny is going the extra mile. Her house looks like a showroom for anti-COVID gadgets and equipment. The air is misted by a disinfectant, besides which purifiers and ionizers are on the job at all hours. Everyone at home – all eight adults – is mandated to wear masks even when indoors. No visitors allowed. All deliveries left by the gate, and once brought indoors, subjected to spray-and-wash, whether the items are paper or plastic, or food. For the meantime, the family driver and his understudy are on vacation.
“I’m not taking chances,” Sunny declared. Her son calls her OA but she’s OK with that.
Rowena’s out-of-town factory makes leisure gear for export, 100 percent. More than 1,000 people work for her, thankful that their boss keeps tabs on them with a computer-aided rollcall every day. Not content with having them tested regularly, Ro has told her employees, over and over again, “The moment you’re sick please don’t report for work; otherwise I will keep you out forever. Get well first.” Busy as she is – orphaned and widowed, she lives alone with four staffers, using the last 14 months of the pandemic to brush up on her Pilipino, telenovela style. Finally, she has added words like praning to her vocabulary. Her reward was to come from whom else but Ian Veneracion, for as soon as he found out about her conversion, he sent her a gift, the tapes of his A Love to Last.
Arleen wears her signature on her hands. Her fingers are crowned with the most elegantly manicured, polished nails that are longer than RSA’s Skyway 3. As dedicated as she is to keeping them looking like a handy, living art form, she had to let her manicurista go when the NCR went back to ECQ. “I miss her,” she wailed. I’m sure the feeling is mutual. Some people watch how their plants grow, Arleen counts the hours waiting for her nails to grow back.
Spectacular sunsets, a cocktail of colors made of air and light, sky and clouds. A magnificent moon hanging overhead like a lighted pendant without a chain. God is in His heaven, the planets are whirling in space, where they’re supposed to. Lord, what’s going on down here?