MEDIUM RARE 

I watched Korina Sanchez Roxas’ conversation with the Philippines’ most celebrated centenarian, Juan Ponce Enrile, and learned what could well be his secret of a lifetime.

“I don’t drink cold water,” he said on Korina’s Rated K last Sunday.

Doctors should have something to say about the connection between hot (or warm) water and longevity, but in our family, it’s not a secret. Grandmother Small Feet, as her grandchildren called her, never touched a drop of ice water or ice cream, she only ate warm food, congee or soup, and drank only hot tea and hot water. She lived to the ripe old age of 98.

At age 100, JPE has lived a much, much more stressful and exciting life than my grandmother, whose only exercise was going up to her roof garden to check on her flowering plants. One thing that she could not do was recite the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a 12th century Persian poet. The poem is 445 lines long, according to JPE, and going over the poem, stanza by stanza — or some stanzas at a time — every morning is how he keeps his memory sharp.

Lawyers like JPE are used to quoting chapter and verse of laws of the land and other countries, but obviously it’s easy to memorize something that you like or love. The following concluding lines are from a translation of the Rubaiyat by Edward Fitzgerald:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou

Beside me singing in the Wilderness –

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

After I heard JPE reciting these lines, I thought I could make him envious by sending him, through a mutual friend, pictures of a stained-glass rendering of the Rubaiyat, which I acquired years ago in Tehran, capital of Iran (formerly Persia).

The stained-glass occupies part of a wall in my house. Framed and backlit by tubes of fluorescent light, it’s taller than myself and provides a touch of whimsy to the living room. It shows the lover, garbed in Persian costume down to his soft shoes, sitting on a carpet with a jug of wine and a cup near his feet as he awaits the beloved beneath the bough.