I just had a senior moment.

I didn’t forget . . .

I remembered something.

Indeed, more and more, I’m becoming aware of senior moments of remembrance, as something catches my attention in the present and transports me to the past, allowing me a second, more detached look. And I feel amused—and wiser for the experience.

I am waiting in the grocery line when in front of me passes a young mom at her wit’s end trying to manage three boys. One hand pinching a grocery list, she has barely succeeded in lifting her toddler into the cart and seating him when he’s back on his feet, outstretched arms reaching at her, screaming, “Out!”

The middle boy, probably 4, meanwhile, begins pushing the cart, so intent to get going that nobody better get in his way, not even mom. The eldest is feigning mortal pain, tugging at her sleeve like a beggar from Biafra, pointing at the hotdog stand.

I can almost feel her desperation, having been there myself and done it—well, with an assistant, a girl prematurely promoted to the job of helping police her own three younger brothers. Now, at a safe senior distance, I can see it all as a passing moment in the procession of family life captured, happily, in its proper perspective.

I have the urge to tell the young mom that she’s going through the trials of parenting, that more are coming, that she’s made to beat them all, and that one day she’ll look back on them with a happy and proud understanding.

Last month my eldest boy turned 50, only a year and two months younger than my firstborn, herself now with three teenaged children of her own to police. He may yet marry—he has a steady girlfriend. And from where I am now, even the grimy sweat that soaked his grade-school uniform could now smell poignantly sweet.

Trials

If I had only known—but then one could never have—I’d have smiled through all the trials of my own young motherhood. And if only I could tell this present victim and make her understand and keep her faith…

But thanks to her, I am inspired in this senior moment to savor my own memories of such times. And I seem to see far more than the obvious in them, read more meaning. As I’ve somehow suspected all along, life, in its every aspect, is best lived with compassion and humor, and I’m dead convinced it is in one’s senior years that one really gets to live life exactly, consciously, that way.

Indeed, I see my past merging with my present, informing, clarifying, validating each other, so that it feels as if I were living past and present at the same time. I find myself more welcoming, more accepting, of the past, however wrong some aspects of it may have seemed at the time. I feel compassion as much for myself as for all the other characters in my life. I have become increasingly predisposed to be open-minded and non-judgmental.

Senior moments can be comfortable, liberating and fun, indeed, like soaking in a bubble bath of ultimate contentment, when time is yours and everything you do is deliberate and voluntary. These moments often happen in the silence of remembrance, when images past, present, and future flash across the mental screen and provoke giggles, sometimes tears, both definitely of joy.

I realize I do smile a lot these days, which happens to be a good way to mask senior confusion, but, more and more in my case, I smile in genuine amusement at myself: am I twisting my vitamin C bottle open or close? The matter is always quickly resolved: “Lani, nainom ko na ba ang vitamin ko?” Invariably, Lani, the help, knows.

I don’t ask Vergel, who might well be in the same state with his bottle of fish oil. Anyway, he assures me two tablets of what we take do not an overdose make.

Trains of thought are easily cut. I dial a number and by the time my call is answered I have forgotten whom I’m calling and have to ask, “Who is this please?” Or if a maid answers, “Kaninong bahay ito?”

I’m told I send text messages twice, but doesn’t everybody? Well, you can say I’m taking no   chances.

Indeed, I can’t seem to keep track of senior moments anymore. But who’s counting, anyway? At this stage of my life, I’m happily resigned to live from senior moment to senior moment.