MEDIUM RARE

“I’m 96 and I don’t have wrinkles. Kasi, hindi ako nagagalit” – because she doesn’t get mad.

Sitting across her at an event dubbed “Merienda with Mama Meldy” last Tuesday, I wanted to kick myself for forgetting to bring with me an IRM souvenir notebook filled with blank pages and a pictorial record of some of the unforgettable projects that she initiated, most of them  built on funds donated with some gentle arm-twisting by her friends. Before this merienda, the last time I saw Imelda R. Marcos, it was not actually her in the flesh but her car, parked two slots away from mine at 168 Mall in Divisoria, just before the Covid lockdown. She was there to buy 100 umbrellas, according to the tindera.

Now here she was in the flesh, seated across the table at Goldenberg Mansion, presiding over a party of 40 ladies with music and songs sung by Imelda Papin and John Nite. Dressed in a pink pantsuit with touches of green, she was the one interviewing me, about my work and grandchildren, and letting us in on how she turns on the TV every night to catch the news about BBM. Of her three grandsons she is inordinately proud, that “they each have their own house and work, completely self-reliant!”

When I felt it was my turn to contribute to the table talk, I told Rose Lazaro, Chichi Laperal, Cristina Caedo Galang, and Mr. and Mrs. Joey Leviste that when Mrs. Marcos was into her third day in Malacañang as first lady in 1965, she guided this nosey journalist into her private quarters, whispering how the newly inducted President Ferdinand E. Marcos called her “Probinsiyana,” before showing me her collection of rosaries. (And what a collection.)

Now, nearly 60 years later, listening to my story, she fished out a rosary, its beads looking like seeds, from a secret pocket in her pink pantsuit.

Through the years, Imelda R. Marcos has not lost her uncanny ability to remember names and faces, but to keep her in touch with her legion of friends and fans, Malacañang’s office of the social secretary has scheduled a series of those meriendas well into December, when as the song reminds one and all, it will be time to remember.