I should have been in Luang Prabang last week with some college classmates to celebrate the golden jubilee of our graduation from St. Scholastica’s College. The trip had been planned months in advance. I was a late-joiner, but the group welcomed me and I looked forward to visiting that heritage city and partaking of traditional Laotian cuisine with some of my closest friends.
However, in the run-up to the homecoming, I caught a bad cold and cough that had me barking and sleepless for several nights. But I had to attend the homecoming and join the dancers on stage, even if I was one of those who merely swayed in the back row as our well-practiced classmates did the complicated dance steps to Seventies OPM.
I’ve never been much of a joiner and I’ve actually had enough of homecomings. But my class is a sucker for anniversaries. We’ve danced and sang on stage for practically every five-year milestone of our high school and college graduations. Much of the time I have joined half-hearted, but I would invariably get into the thick of things. Once I even attempted to choreograph our dance number when everyone was too excited to be together and no one seemed to be in charge. With other classmates, I’ve helped re-work pop songs, writing new lyrics about our teachers and our life as Scholasticans, that we sang on stage during the homecoming program.
As I’ve gotten older, the call of the school to come home has become louder and clearer, and the need to be with women I grew up with, more urgent and difficult to deny. This year, I resolved to be only a follower, to let others take care of the nitty gritty and just enjoy the event as a participant. And what a great time I had. Except for this heavy cold and annoying cough.
Fifty years out of college, my classmates and I are much older than we would like to admit. Even if, in our eyes, we all still look as we did when we were students, we have gotten slower, feeling more aches and pains than in years past, and needing more rest. And our conversations are mostly about our grandchildren and our illnesses — brittle bones, diabetes, high blood pressure, memory loss, and other aggravations of advancing age.
It was in this context, with my throat raw and head heavy with colds, that I had to decide whether or not to take the trip to Laos with a dozen classmates on the morning after the grand homecoming. Fearing the worst case scenario — spreading my germs and annoying the members of the group, my roommate in particular, and the thought of catching pneumonia while on travel — I opted out of what has turned out to be a grand holiday in Luang Prabang.
A cold has never before stopped me from pursuing any activity. I’ve travelled congested, my head heavy, my nose clogged, my hand-carried luggage filled with meds, and have managed pretty well. And going to places with cleaner air than Manila, my cold and cough would dissipate. But this time, I didn’t want to take any chances.
I was in Sydney for seven weeks where the weather was alternately comfortably cool and very hot, and I came out of there with nary a sniffle. I even had to walk in the rain which would fall unexpected in the middle of a very hot day. But a few days back in Manila, walking the grimy streets and taking jeepney rides, I was quickly downed by a nasty cold.
I am reasonably healthy. The results of my annual blood tests are the envy of my doctors. I hadn’t had a cold in over a year, thanks to my regular morning brew of turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, lemon, and honey that kept infections at bay. Which was why I was blind-sided by this debilitating cough and cold that hit me two weeks ago.
I missed the trip to Luang Prabang, but I am happy I survived the homecoming. At this age, it is reasonable to expect that there will not be too many reunions left where the class is more or less complete. Which is why I resolve to survive until the next reunion, that the class has already begun planning a year in advance.