Gratefulness is the memory of a thankful heart.

ORDINARY CITIZEN'S NOTES. 5 JAN 2015. MON. N4.
Gratefulness is the memory of a thankful heart. 

SOMEONE HAS said that gratefulness is the memory of a thankful heart. 

I am thankful, my heart is.

This is the reason why I am grateful to a writer-poet colleague who has served his adoptive homeland as a navy person for decades and now enjoying his walks while Virginia's leaves and landscape become a portrait of the prismatic, the still life in his part of the country not still at all but alive, kicking, ever-changing, ever-surprising us with its pastels of grace and beauty and rainbow.

I am referring to my good friend Cris, Fernando Quilpa.

As soon as my books were out, he wrote to me expressing interest in having his own copy, and having me sign each copy. 

I am always nervous, unsteady, feeling insecure and feeling inferior before good and dedicated and brilliant writers. That is the truth. How can you carry a conversation with people who have sensitivity to human language, who have that incessant ability to make the words magical, surprising, delightful, those who can make words turn into worlds, words that tell us, yes, that life is worth living?

It took me sometime to be able to fulfill his request to send him the books. So many thing stood in the way, like that brief sojourn as visiting professor at UP Baguio, and other things that came in between.

And then the end-of-semester affairs came, and then the holidays, and then the temptations of the mind to simply read books and imagine one can write a poem. 

I did all those, until I was able to muster enough energy to go to the post office and send him the books. 

He waited patiently, my dear friend. But between us is the Pacific Ocean, and from there, thousands of miles of land transit going to his East Coast. It is not enough that I am from the islands in the middle of that ocean. It is also worth nothing that he is somewhere where the Atlantic Ocean is just a spitting distance away.

But my friend Cris the poet waiting, and I can only thank him profusely for having the enduring power of Job. 

To you, Cris, mahalo nui loa. Agyamanak unay-unay.

HON/