The trip took 45 minutes from Diliman, Quezon City, to Manila Hotel, from the usual 60 minutes. Traffic was light, thinned out by the high prices of fuel or because people stayed indoors due to the heat.

Whichever it was, Manila Hotel was a great place to be at high noon: five-star airconditioning in a five-star hotel!

Our host, the bon vivant Benjie Yap, was in a red T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. Most of the ladies were in light colors. Baby Arenas breezed in, in a sky-blue dress that emphasized her long, very black hair. Edna Camcam wore a three-strand pearl necklace to go with her dress in a shade of deep pink. Janet Yap wore chartreuse. Olive Ang, one birthday and a day older, chose jade green. Nancy Dee Yang chose what she called a cool, loose, long dress. My colors were a very pale ash-gray shirt to go over bone-white jeans.

The food that I picked for my plate was designed to be weather-friendly, which meant Korean kimchi, Japanese sushi-sashimi, and a mixed green salad. Cool! Baby A’s plate of ebi tempura looked very tempting beside my greens, so I took the liberty of using my chopsticks to “borrow” a few prawns from her.

Later, moving eagerly to the dessert station, I picked out a big fat strawberry to lord it over my plain white plate, whose crowning glory would turn out to be a scoop of ice cream and a few cookies.

Food is measured in terms of calories, which are a unit of heat. The way I look at it, the more food you eat, the more “heat” you give your body. That’s why I eat very little – or, put another way, I consume less cooked food in summer, to leave space for fresh fruit like “pakwan,” watermelon, queen of the season. Remembering my mother’s perennial advice, I drink lots of water in summer, and that includes watermelon juice.

All that water, so refreshingly sweet, from a humble fruit growing in the soil, during the hottest time of the year... For all its simplicity, there’s nothing you need to do with watermelon except to enjoy it au naturel, with or without juice dripping down your chin.