REX C. CATUBIG
Renewscast on my mind
I was in bed watching the 6 o’clock Eyewitness News when the phone rang. I reached for it and limply said,“ Hello”. “It’s Millette!”, exclaimed the voice on the other end.
I was woozy and could not recall an image to match the voice. But my heart throbbed when a face flashed on my mind: Millette! My college friend: the tall, leggy girl with the raspy voice. The college actress whose fierce yet poignant delivery of her heart rending line in our theater guild’s Six Characters in Search of an Author resonated across the years in memory: ” Cry out, mother, cry out!”
Having been together in stage productions had bound us in a deep friendship. Her call that night was the best news bulletin and signaled an almost daily renewscast between us.
Sadly, we didn’t know it was going to be the last two remaining years of her life.
We had lost touch after graduation, having gone our separate ways. The odds were stacked against getting connected again. But happenstance had its way.
There was much to catch up on but too little time left. Millette intimated she had been pulled out of an experimental treatment–the last defense to combat her end-stage cancer twinned with diabetes. Nonetheless, she was obstinate to fight it out; even if she knew defeat was only a gasp away.
Because time was mercilessly stealing her life away, we conspired to hold time captive—stopping it if only for a brief period to make lasting moments.
After thirty some years, we agreed to meet in San Francisco for her birthday weekend. She’d be bringing along her husband and it was going to be a romantic rendezvous in the most romantic US city. I was confident that the top floor corner suite I booked at the Hilton on Union Square with its panoramic view of the Bay Bridge, would elicit that certain smile and her heart would be left in San Francisco.
For that unforgettable dramatic surprise, I arranged for a room amenity. At the stroke of midnight, right on cue, the room service captain waiter, knocked on the door. Who could be calling at that hour she thought aloud. I opened the door and a white linen draped cart pulled into view, bearing a Coffee Crunch cake and a bottle of Moet & Chandon. Her jaw dropped. She and her husband Dan couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Milette’s heart burst with life.
It was a birthday like no other, yet there really wouldn’t be more.
And since her birthday falls on a leap year, we celebrated missed birthdays past as well as birthdays future.
The next day, we caught the matinee of Mamma Mia. It transported us back into our college years. The rousing finale got us jumping up from our seats with unabashed joy as we lustily sang and danced along with the cast. For a chimeric instant, Millette was on top of the world: she was the “Dancing Queen”.
How I wished there would be more of that magic moment. But there would be no more intercalary days. The clock could no longer keep still and would tick on wantonly. The death knell that sounded from afar would toll closer and louder.
Then time would stop forever and the newscast would be silenced by the sighs of the heart.