where good citizenship begins

i was riding in a jeepney again on my way home at about 10 am. i happened to get the seat behind the driver. he was a young man of about 23 but his face looks older and it tells me he'd gone through a lot. well, this country of ours, after a lot centuries, is i think still underdeveloped. or, perhaps it can be stated this way: the elite class, the oligarchs, is first-world, the rest of us still third-world class. but, we were born in this brave, resilient country, so we have to face the trials of being a filipino. i say we are still in the process of evolving one true, great, selfless leader who will herd us all to a better life. if you are a believer of karma and reincarnation, it is said that it is you who determine the country where you will be reborn so that you can have better opportunities to undo the wrongs you have done in the past.

beside the driver, by his left side, sat a kid, a boy of about 4 or 5 years old. he was busily munching on some biscuits and sipping orange juice from a tetra pak. he couldn't care less about his dad. he knew he should not bother him while he was at his "office". i glanced at the rear view mirror in front of the driver. his son's image is reflected there, so innocent looking, bright eyes showing the look of hope, of a great future, one normally sees in children's eyes. i know the driver and i have had that look before when we were young. now time might have obliterated that hopeful look in our eyes, but "hope springs eternal in men's hearts".

after a while i heard the driver speak, he noticed the child is just sipping air out of the juice pack, "son, that's empty, throw it away!" he commanded. the child looked at him pleadingly, seemingly unwilling to part with his orange juice. then he slowly stood up and tried to reach over the back of the front seat. overhanging the back of the front seat was an empty engine oil plastic container with the the top lid cut off. this serves as garbage bin where backseat passengers can dispose of small trash. the driver slowed the vehicle down and with his left arm pulled his son down on the seat.

"just throw it outside!" he told the boy.

"outside? there?" the child pointed to the road.

"yes, there!" his father answered as he maneuvered the jeepney to a stop to pick up a passenger.

as the vehicle picked up speed again the boy let go of the juice pack. he laughed aloud when he saw it hit the road and cartwheeled carelessly. i looked back, the empty juice pack lies there in the middle of the road, along with some other trash thrown mindlessly by others. i remembered what i always say to friends, that, to make this country better we have to invest in the new generation, we need to give them better values than we have now. and this is not a good way of doing it. where the father, the mother, and the child or the children are, HOME IS THERE, and HOME IS WHERE GOOD CITIZENSHIP BEGINS.

the way to a better future for this country is to invest even in the small acts of good citizenship like disposing of trash. even more, the way to save this Great Mother Earth is to be mindful of this irresponsible little acts that accumulate over time and hurt her in the end, and, eventually hurt us. karma, the law of cause and effect. what you give, so shall you receive.

i, myself, was not a good citizen in that instance on that jeepney. what i should have done was to offer my help to the kid, to take the trash and drop it in that garbage container. i could have been a good example to him. yet, i just let the situation complete itself, so that i could write down something on this blog. what a shame! how selfish of me ...

what's the end of this story?

well, after a couple of minutes more the kid finished the biscuits and smilingly threw the plastic wrapper out into the street.

*** jeepney night trip is by my daughter, neysa saguid, copyright 2010.

this empty chair will not tell..

i took this shot after my wife left to get something from the kitchen i think. we were video chatting over the internet. i'm here at home. she was far away in another country. this is just the backrest of the chair she was sitting on.

this empty chair will not tell it but it has heard all of the big and small things we talked about. current plans, future plans, problems we are encountering, solutions to these -- just the usual family stuff.

what i was excited about were the experiences she is having in that foreign land. and i'm as grateful to the Infinite as her for giving her this wonderful time. she was able to see their famous landmarks, their tall skyscrapers, their shops. she had had her first brush with snowfall early on. she was not much impressed. now she is seeing fall. she told me about the leaves turning orange or fiery red, then falling. she told me how odd the trees look with just their branches shooting out to the heavens. i told her to take pictures of them. it's rare to see bare-branched trees here. and the temperature, she said it's starting to get cold. i'm glad she's knowing all of these first hand. as for me, i don't know if i'll ever be given the chance to see and feel all of these. if ever i'll be given the chance, my first mission is to get acquainted with my first snowflake. i'm pretty sure, unlike my wife, i'll be impressed.

well, a picture of an empty chair should not always be associated with loneliness. no. it's just in the mind. emptiness is loneliness? it's just how you view things. in fact, the Old Sages say that "to be full, one at first must be empty". even the great Burt Bacharach had said, "a chair is still a chair, even if there's no one sitting there".

so,

this chair is empty, who cares?

this is a happy chair !

why you hate the rain ...

it's actually the persistent rain. the incessant rain. that's the one you hate. the rain that keeps on pouring for a day, or worse, for more than one day. you hate this kind of rain because it makes for a bleak day. it ruins your mood. it dampens your otherwise upbeat spirit.


you have had a good sleep and woke up feeling fresh and rejuvenated. invigorated. the struggles of the previous day forgotten. you look forward to meeting this new day's challenges head on again. confident that you will do better this time. so you get up early, take one long inspired inhalation and then do one long lazy exhalation, trying to visualize the life giving currents of air slowly exit your nostrils, much like that yoga practitioner you read in one of your exercise books. then you smile at the sunbeams piercing the distant clouds overhead. and you silently offer a prayer at this new lease of life.


and then, without any warning, the sunbeams retract, the clouds turn gray, and rain falls. just like that. immediately, looking at the raindrops, you intuitively know, this is not going to be that short-minute rain. and you brace yourself. this will be one of those times when the rainclouds do not seem to empty themselves up in one heavy outburst. this will be one of those times when the rains will fall leisurely, stretching towards the entire day, the entire night, then through the following day. drop by drop by drop, testing your patience, the heavens knowing that you are terribly aching to spend a good day outside, and teasingly it does not allow you that luxury, when you have primed yourself for one. oh, for heaven's sake! you heave a sigh in frustration.

this kind of rain is a revealer. after a good long while, you find the street outside your house had started to get flooded. water had accumulated. those garbage you disposed of haphazardly, irresponsibly, are now clogging the waterways to the canals. the unrelenting bombardment of the raindrops has found those small holes in your tin roof which you should have fixed when the weather was fine, but procrastinated from doing so, and thus inside your house you gazed at your wooden ceiling, disbelieving, as water seeped down in so many places. you scamper in all directions, trying to put catch basins, cups, small pails, rags, on the spots where water drops down from the ceiling.

and you curse the rain. this incessant rain.
and you hate this rain, this persistent, unrelenting rain.

yet, at the back of your mind, you know why you hate this rain. it is because it did not conceal the bad things you did. it revealed the irresponsible you.

and so you sit inside your house, looking with thinning patience as water dropped down from your ceiling, reciting this childhood poem reverently --

rain, rain, go away
come again another day,
little johnny wants to play
rain, rain, go to spain
never show your face again!