’Mid pleasures and palaces

Now that I am fast approaching my 85th birthday, my children have been tantalizing me with all kinds of offers. Good dutiful children are like that. They feel impelled to figuratively lay all the pleasures of the world at their aging parents’ old aching feet!

So it is "Mama, what do you want for your 85th birthday–do you want to go on an Alaskan tour?" (Too cold.) "Don’t you want to go to the Mediterranean?" (Too hot.) "Don’t you want to go back to Spain?" (If only one could go back in Time!) "New York?" (I would like to see some Broadway plays but New York is too hectic.) "Okay. How about Hong Kong? Surely kaya mo ’yon!" (Kaya kung sa kaya–but shopping is now better and cheaper in the Ayala malls, and my feet hurt).

And so it goes. I always feel a glow of maternal pride and joy whenever the generous offers are made, but as I always say, my traveling days are over.

Now, if I could travel in the old leisurely way, it would be a different story. To go to the old Pier 7 in a tailored suit and high heeled shoes, a corsage from some friend or admirer, and perhaps even with hat and gloves, to sip cocktails in the ship’s lounge to say goodbye to a host of friends. And then when the ship’s horns and the ship stewards’ bells announce "All aboard", to say goodbye to every body in a flurry of kisses and "bon voyages" and gifts and flowers. That’s the way I would like to travel.

But nobody travels that way anymore.

So now I do my traveling from the comfort of my bed. I let my mind wander all over the world, seeing myself at different stages of my life on all the times I have been in foreign places, seeing again all the things I saw, the people I met, and feeling again the "feel" of it all.

I see myself just turned 20 on my first trip abroad, all excited at my first view of a foreign land–the green islets on the approach to Hong Kong seen through a porthole of the SS President Coolidge.

There were many other "firsts" on that 21-day trip to the United States. I saw my first apple "actually growing on a tree" in the backyard of a family friend in Seattle. I saw my first gorgeous display of autumn leaves in the Appalachians. I saw my first snow fall in Missouri.

And who can forget how it is to be young in an American Spring? Seeing the bare trees of winter turn green overnight and the blue crocuses and yellow daffodils springing out (no wonder it is called spring) all of a sudden everywhere and always the faint scent of blossoms in the cool air.

I remember a first day of Spring in New York: riding on the top deck of a Fifth Avenue bus with a group of other exhilarated young people, riding back and forth from the International House on Riverside Drive to Washington Square and back again–for no sensible reason at all but just because we were young and it was the first day of Spring.

I think of the first time I saw Paris and see myself sitting in a nightclub called The Sherazade. The place was crowded with people; the orchestra was playing full blast. A drunken American kept coming around saying, "Why don’t you two dance?" "C’mon dance! dance!" The man I was with told him, "Go away, can’t you see we are busy!" The man said something to me but I could hardly hear him above the din; we had to shout to be heard. "What did you say?" "I said, Will you marry me?" "How can I marry you, I do not even know you." "You will get to know me"–all said at the top of our voices.

He was right; I got to know him quite well for 38 years! In those 38 years I went to so many magic places with that very same man.

One time it was to Indonesia as guests of the Indonesian army. It was a simpler Indonesia then. Before we went we had to be given all kinds of shots–anti-cholera, anti-dysentery, anti-typhoid and a "survival kit" complete with water purifying tablets because the drinking water in Indonesia was supposed to be lethal!

But once there, we were installed in a Sultan’s Palace in Jogjakarta, eating on gold plates and sleeping under a swath of white mosquito netting falling in generous folds from the high ceiling chandelier down to the black marble floor. Every dawn and twilight we could hear the call to prayer from a nearby mosque and the temple bells ringing.

One time we were taken to see the site of an ancient temple. There we were shown a stone image that was surrounded by a carved stone enclosure. If you reached in and could touch the statue, you were supposed to be guaranteed good fortune all your life. I reached in as far as I could, stretching out ’til my arm ached until finally I touched the statue. Everybody clapped and laughed and congratulated me. "You have touched the magic stone! You will have a fortunate life," they said.

We had an audience with the legendary President Sukarno and the 15 minutes allotted to us turned out to be a whole hour with him telling us all his great plans for Indonesia. The only time he stopped talking was to wave away a whispering aide who was telling him that the President of Switzerland had just arrived by helicopter. "Tell him to wait," Sukarno said. Then came a knocking at the door, and a group of giggling children came in. "Meet my children," Sukarno said. Could one of those giggling little children have been Megawati, Sukarno’s daughter now also President of Indonesia?

At a dinner I had for a dinner partner a newly promoted Brigadier General, a simple soft-spoken man somewhat uncomfortable in an unaccustomed civilian suit. He invited us for lunch at his house the next day. It was a small unpainted bungalow and his wife was a typical housewife, bustling about, scolding the servants, fussing over the food, explaining to us in hesitant English that the reason they had candles on the table at high noon was to "keep away the flies"–and there were many flies.

Nothing notable about that lunch except the Indonesian general’s name was Suharto and his simple little housewife was years later to be known as Madame Suharto, the wife of the dictator President, and said to have been one of the richest women in the world then with so many ill-gotten millions!

Then we were flown to Bali–a real unspoiled island paradise in those days. I remember the pristine beaches. There were no hotels there then, only small cottages with just the barest essentials. The water for our baths had to be scooped up with coconut shell ladles from a rough cement container. We slept by candle light, but we woke up to golden dawns and we would walk barefooted on the open beach in front of our cottage and watch the bare breasted Bali women go about their day’s chores, carrying baskets on their heads, placing fruit and fragrant flowers on stone altars to appease their Hindu gods.

One night we rode through the darkness through coconut groves to a clearing where a hundred men were chanting, making the eerie sounds of the traditional monkey dance, their sweaty brown bodies glistening with the light of bamboo torches and bonfires.

And then back to our little cottage by the sea, to wake up to another golden dawn. Alone except for some discreet army sentries quietly patrolling the area, alone together on an island untouched by modern progress– "Twere Paradise enow".

Now, lying in my comfortable old bed, traveling in my mind to all the hallowed places of my memory, I see the world as I saw it then, a world waiting to be discovered, and I think to myself: truly I have been most fortunate–I had touched the magic stone!