I once heard a story that hit me with the jolting force of a slapping deserved by someone feigning sleep. It’s about a man and his milestone headache.

“You’ve never had a headache—for 30 years. Now you have a headache for only two days and you go around showing off your pain,” a sage tells him. “You are wearing a bandage of ungratefulness. Tell me, all these years, have you ever worn a bandage of gratitude?”

The story still hits me every time it revisits, although it now inspires mostly self-validation, instead of self-rebuke. After all, having lived through more than two generations, I’m expected to know better. Well, I don’t really know that I know any better, but, as for going about one’s life unconditionally grateful for it, I think I have more or less gotten that down. And if the lesson seems to settle rather easily with me, that must have to do as much with the temper of my time as with my own good fortune.

I was born just after the last global cleansing by war, and grew up and became a young man in what my generation considers the summertime of the 20th century—the ’50s and ’60s, when life was much better than merely decently livable and hopes were achievable within one’s lifetime.

Anyone who wished to learn had a place in school, anyone who wished to work found a job. Only 18 and a dropout, I quickly landed one myself, as a junior journalist at an international news service. But like all seasons, my summertime was only a part of a cycle and itself had to end, and did end on Sept. 21, 1972, as I completed my sixth year on my second job, as a newspaper copyeditor, and my eighth year in the profession: Ferdinand Marcos imposed martial law.

Haunting instance

I lost my newspaper and my job, but bounced quickly back into gainful employment as a copyeditor-for-hire and as a freelance writer, confining myself to safe subjects like music, art and sport. I accepted tricky and more serious assignments from foreign publications now and then, but wrote anonymously, except in one haunting instance.

The British journal of journalism UK Press Gazette led on my piece owned and untouched as contracted, but gave it a new title, “Martial law by any other name,” a far cry from the purposely wooden original (“The Philippine press: counting the costs”)—in fact, the cry carried across the globe, increasing my personal potential peril. Moreover, as a “teaser” (exactly the newspaper term for it) the Gazette reproduced above the new title a passage I had found too cute to pass up myself, but thought forgivable, if noticed at all—it was well-buried in the text:

“About the only types of news published in Manila these days are positive news, meaning, news that makes everybody happy, and passive news, meaning, news that makes nobody unhappy.”

That sentence qualified me for an overnight detention for censorial scolding. For that I could have worn a bandage of honor; but, apart from being freed unscratched, I’ve needed no cautionary tale to dissuade me from showing off my puny accident of patriotism: two cousins of mine, brothers about my own age at the time, 20s, were killed in action as rebel regulars.

Marcos’ regime did not last half a generation. He lived three years and seven months himself after his fall, but, disgraced spectacularly and dying painfully in exile, he must have felt no sense of reprieve or redemption at all. In any case, he never wore—and neither has his family worn—any bandage of contrition.

Great pride

Me—I’ve gone on to age gratefully, knowing in my heart, where everything feels absolutely certain and right, that nature can never be licked, only joined, and that if I were sincere and sensitive enough I would catch nature’s subtle bestowals upon the grateful aged.

Indeed, because it shows, age can be a matter of great pride. In my younger tennis days, no drop shots dropped in my court without a challenge, and few beat me. Slowed now by a full step, I decline some of those challenges in qualm-free surrender to age and out of special kindness to one bad knee and ankle.

At my age, defeat has become all but irrelevant, and victory has taken an entirely new meaning. It can be that single shot I hit with a full swing and catch with a crack in the sweet spot of my racket and send past the netter down the alley for a point. It may be my only decent shot of the day, indeed my only earned point, but it is my victory.

I will preserve its sound, its picture, and its empowering sensation so that it may sustain me until the next worthy shot comes along. In the meantime, it will join in similar waiting the last felicitous sentence I have constructed for publication.

I mean no lowering of standards—nothing about life is cheap; I mean, rather, a reordering of life in partnership with nature as I live through my third generation.

Actually, by the strict numerical reckoning of 30 years to a generation, I made my crossing nearly seven years ago, on Feb. 18, 2007, when I turned 61 (or if you like to quibble, a year earlier, at the very first moment after I turned 60). At any rate, my inaugurator, my initiator, my flesh-and-blood connection to that generation, did not arrive until 11 months later: Mavis Celine, born Jan. 25, 2008, my first grandchild, my special toast to life.