At my book launch last month, relatives and friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen for some time, came out to fulfill their bounden duty. In fact, they actually bought copies and even joined the line for my autograph.
But there was one face I couldn’t quite place, and it made me feel anxious—remiss. She was yet way down the line: Better remember when her turn comes, I admonished myself. Well, I didn’t.
She introduced herself as Evelyn from Malabon, my husband’s hometown. Now, do I call her ate or ditse, as the tradition of seniority in their parts demands? As it turned out, she was unrelated and completely unknown to either my husband or me.
Evelyn came to ask about haircare, and she was not joking: She was a serious reader. But she also didn’t look like she was in any hair emergency, so my husband led her out of the line and gave her my phone number after I had autographed her book. And I was thinking that readers were looking to me as a solver of our common hair problems. In any case, I feel heartened that they do care.
Only last Saturday, at the Art in the Park show in Makati’s Salcedo Village, readers felt free to take sympathetic liberties with my hair.
“It’s not that bad naman,” one said, obviously imagining something worse.
Another reader sounded let down: “You’re not bald!”
Another seemed happy to have me as new company in “minoxidil,” a hair-growing solution one sticks with for life, or an inexorable reversal ensues. She asked, “Did you really start on it already?”
Quite a few came forth to compliment my purple hair, a happy accident of dyeing, as it turned out.
The frequent shampooing that my treatment requires makes my hair take on different shades as the first intended color—medium brown—fades, depending, I guess, on the light that falls on it. At sunset it’s purplish, at dawn pinkish-yellow, and at noon greenish.
Although Evelyn and I, as I have learned, have the same condition—hair loss and changing colors—we may have both looked hair-trouble-free during the launch. And I’m guessing she also came coiffed, as I, by some parlor’s master of illusion.
Hair, to be sure, is not all I get called or enlisted for.
The latest strangest call came from a high-school classmate. A jokester, she has me always waiting for a punch line.
Consumerist complaint
She began by telling me she had just bought a pair of expensive sunglasses. I wondered where she was going with this—I don’t remember writing at all about sunglasses. Well, hers was a consumerist complaint. Barely a month after the purchase, she noticed one of the earpieces gone, the earpiece she had hooked on her blouse, as is her habit.
She demanded a replacement, a new earpiece or, if no spare was available, a new pair of glasses, and got none. In her frustration, she said, she threatened to bring her case to the press.
“Is that me?” I asked, trying to suppress convulsions. Now mildly convulsed herself, she protested, “Pambihira ka naman, I’m asking for help, tawa ka nang tawa. So, what do I do, forget it na lang? I paid a fortune, you know.”
“Puede ba, just buy a new one, and this time ask for a warranty that covers a lost earpiece.”
At this point, my husband joined in, “Tell her where the earpieces are supposed to go—over the ears, not hooked on a blouse.”
The most serious call came from overseas yet, from a newly widowed friend, a hardy traditionalist who refuses to look at the Inquirer online and gets to read me only when a son who works in an airline comes with its paper edition. She called about her husband’s posthumous infidelities, and sounded like she was hurting badly.
At another turn, she seemed to console herself with recollections of his thoughtfulness, triggered by a column in which I referred to my husband as my own sugar police, and she identified with that. The next moment she was at his adultery again.
Deservedly or not, most spouses are canonized upon death, but here she was testifying against him—and torturing herself yet in the process. She was hoping, she said, that I’d have “the right words” that would help her understand, help her demystify her pain, and thus help her manage her anger and grief.
“Please,” she begged, “help me express what I feel, so I can begin to heal.”
I was careful to not even try as she asked. I simply listened with a sympathetic heart. The last time she called she said she planned to return to her first love—music, which she studied as a specialist discipline, performed truly well on the piano, and in turn taught professionally. I thought that if anything has healing magic, it’s music.
We all tend, it seems to me, to magnify our own problems, giving them more gravity than they deserve. Things could be worse. We should have by now developed the philosophy of life that can help us summon our own inner strengths in the face of the fragilities of age.
With me, what always works is taking things with a sack of salt—and as much humor.