I always thought you were the best
I guess I always will
I always felt that we were blessed
And I feel that way still
Sometimes we took the hard road
But we always saw it through
If I had only one friend left
I’d want it to be you
Sometimes the world was on our side
Sometimes it wasn’t fair
Sometimes it gave a helping hand
Sometimes we didn’t care
‘Cause when we were together
It made the dream come true
If I had only one friend left
I’d want it to be you
Someone who understands me
And knows me inside out
And helps keep me together
And believes without a doubt
That I could move a mountain
Someone to tell it to
If I had only one friend left
I’d want it to be you
TODAY IS NOVEMBER 11. The mind is quick to relate the double digits to an American disaster in September many years ago. I chose to digress and divert the dire to positivize the negative in me. So I magnified my thanksgiving with a prayer to mark this milestone personally with a twin-tower token: atonement for my sins and transition from sinful to sorry. To challenge me, I rose from bed and, since it was already dawn, my favorite time of day, wasted no further time to post the prayer on fb.
I sensed it coming. Mary (and Jesus and Joseph) never fails to manifest her agreement in whatever decision I embark on. No sooner had I posted my Scripturals than I received the above song from a very dear friend, who answers perfectly to my mutual moniker for us, “Utol,” which had my waterworks gushing like a geyser, and I’d be damned if I cared whether Aesop was wondering what he said that made me shed.
Parsing the song later, I messengered her back that “I know this song, I like it, too, but never more than now that it came from you. I love you, Tol!” But I did not yet have the drive to articulate it further than while I was in another pet place, the toilet, where a germ of an idea crystallized. I have consecrated our toilets (one of three favorite dwelling places of evil spirits, the other two being trees and corners (go figure) that the white “lady” and “pssst” our Kasambahays used to imagine do not linger, nay, bother dropping by there, anymore.
Anyway, I did parse the friendship song and here goes:
“I always thought you were the best
I guess I always will
I always felt that we were blessed
And I feel that way still
Sometimes we took the hard road
But we always saw it through”
She was a schoolmate of my wife’s. I got to know her when I was “recruited” to join PREX, a history oft repeated in my old Talk Number 3 I had to close that book and wait for the new chapter to get approved.
She and my wife came from a Catholic school. My wife’s career zoomed up and ahead; she took after her Legionary mother and is now President of Senatus of Northern Philippines. She shuts me up when I start to enumerate her sterling Marian virtues so I’ll make a long story short with a recent anecdote. In our BEC last Tuesday, she made a posthaste bid to join our closing part, from her sickbed, just so she could pray with us. She was positive for Covid and, along with cancer-stricken husband Kuya Totoy, already in our petitions. She is one of the holy reasons I am constrained to walk the straight and narrow and I stop here before she shuts me up again. But let me add quickly that she blesses me abundantly.
“Sometimes the world was on our side
Sometimes it wasn’t fair
Sometimes it gave a helping hand
Sometimes we didn’t care
‘Cause when we were together
It made the dream come true”
We’d swap stories and laugh at the mutual crosses we carry. Laugh because talking about them lightens up the load. What isn’t fair is that she is always the helping hand but she didn’t care because, yes, together, no dream cannot come true for us.
“Someone who understands me
And knows me inside out
And helps keep me together
And believes without a doubt
That I could move a mountain
Someone to tell it to”
She is always a shoulder to cry on. Never judging, although admonishing, when my going goes awry. She believed, even when I seemed unbelievable and, because she did – and does – I moved mountains.
“If I had only one friend left
I’d want it to be you”
Funny she beat me into telling what I should’ve told her. Because of her, I will yet make good my twin-tower token now. And forever.
Amen.
