Thank God for dreams

My daughter Hannah came rushing in the other evening asking for a glass jar so she could catch fireflies.

I didn’t quite know what to do since I understood the thrill as a child of catching things and just watching things in glass jars or aquariums. But I chose to tell her that glass jars just wasn’t the place for fireflies since they’d die and they were so rare already. I don’t know how much of an effort other people really put into these thoughts, but I do.

I learned that from my Dutch wife Karen. She never liked things being tied up. Whether it was a dog, a chicken, or a bird. She firmly put her foot down specially on birds in cages. I’ve since learned that you can get birds to stay or just visit if you made your place inviting enough . . . FOR BIRDS.

That dogs on the loose was the way things were supposed to be, not tied, not caged… unless of course they were like my departed rottweiller who made no distinction between relatives and thieves. As for fish, well, the compromise is I keep four sharks in an 8,000 gallon salt water aquarium. Always good to have options for unwanted guests.

Rather than carry on raising fighting cocks as ancestors did, I collect plants and plant material from trips here and abroad. The payoff comes when I see butterflies all over the place, when I smell the fragrance of Ilang-Ilang or Dama de Noche or just like Hannah, it’s a real thrill to see fireflies in Lipa, Batangas.

Tonight a firefly flew by and directed my sight towards the fiberglass hull of a Porsche 911 I’d been putting together. It has no engine, no interior, no chassis. It’s literally just a fiberglass hull that Dino Juan of Pier One and Mike Potenciano the car racer gave to me. Once upon a time it was part of a grand big plan: to make an all fiberglass Porsche 911 rally car assembled by Filipinos and driven by Filipino rally drivers.

Unfortunately the only claim to fame the hull has is that it survived the great big fire that turned the BLTB bus terminal into ashes. More than 20 race cars and God knows how many buses burned back then including a very special Ferrari. Strange that I remember the number of cars and almost forget how many squatter families lost their homes that night. Another sensitivity issue we all need to deal with.

The 911 hull was for most part of its life an orphan forgotten in the rush of more pressing needs or more interesting projects. I have a handful of those distractions running interference. I wonder what would happen if we actually stuck to our list of priorities? Would life be boringly efficient or would we get to more enjoyable things.

I never knew of the project car. All I had in mind after the fire was to call Mike who’s family owned BLTB and the cars and try to encourage him, cheer him on, regardless of the fact that we weren’t really close. He was simply a nice and decent guy who deserved encouragement.

Little did I know that he owned the 911 hull that Dino Juan manufactured, the last unassembled dream that I would someday seek out just like the first car in the Philippines, the Marcos wedding car, the Mercedes 600 used by the late Pope John Paul II.

I set it up in the grass to take pictures and somehow inspire me to get started on it "whenever and if ever" the money comes in. They call it "visualizing", "projection", the farm hands call it fantasy! I call it relapse! Every six months I go through this exercise of assembling "The HULL". I don’t know why, I just do.

I guess it’s a form of reaffirming a commitment. Not just to Dino or Mike, or the Hull, but a commitment to our capacity to dream, to pursue, and perhaps if not surely, to make dreams come true.

Under a full moon, full of shadows, there stood my Porsche 911. You couldn’t tell that it had no engine, no interior, that it wasn’t really a car. But we all realized and became certain that someday it will be. I walked back to the house, satisfied, happy not because of my dream but because I could dream.

God Bless.