OUR people love fi estas and nobody can stop them, not event he lack of money to spend. Years back, when there was a move to abolish the fiestas, countless had voiced out vehement protests.
The fiestas should stay, they chorused.
What is there in fiestas that people can not give up so easily? Unrivaled merriment? The chance to honor the patron saint, the chance to meet old friends and relatives from distant places?
The reasons are varied.
It was the Spaniards who taught us to celebrate fi estas. But even before the white even came, early Filipinos were honoring their anitos and other spirits, thanking them for a bountiful harvest or a rich catch.
The early Filipinos loved the pomp and color of fiestas. It was their way of showing gratitude for favors given them. It was also to lighten their drab lives.
Fiestas, however, are a bane than a boon today because of economic hardship. The poorest family does not mind spending their last peso to feed guests family members do not even know.
But ask them if they are happy and they will tell you they are.
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When nearing the sunset years, what one fears most is not sudden death but loneliness that comes when the children are away, the spouse gone and no one looks after you.
Take the case of Domingo Tapales, 84, of Catanduanes. For year, he and his wife lived with his in-laws. But when his wife died and his ties with his in-laws soured, he left to wander.
One day, he met a road mishap. His left leg was amputated. Miserable, a couple came and brought him to the Home for Abandoned People put up by Dr. Mercedes Oliver.
Another resident, Remedios Lopez, 86, a former school teacher was a destitute. Married with a son who died early, Remedios found herself alone after her husband died.
If not for the Home for Abandoned People, she would be spending her days in the streets.
My late Aunt, Felicidad Rubia, was luckier. Her youngest daughter, Sonia, stayed with her after she retired from teaching until her death years ago. She lived with her eldest daughter, a school principal, in Kalayaan, Laguna before Sonia invited her to live with her family in Naga City.
It was Aunt Felicidad who helped me finished high school in Caramoan, Camarines Sur.
I remember the day we brought her to her final resting place. There were about 10 people in our group, Sonia, her children, Uncle Pablo, a trader in Goa, some friends and myself, walking with heads bowed in prayer for her soul’s repose. No one spoke a word until we reached the cemetery.
There, a worker pushed her coffin into the tomb and closed it with cement. But I was thinking about the fate of a teacher-retiree, almost alone in her fi nal journey.
My once very popular aunt in her younger days as a schoolmarm in Garchitorena, Camarines Sur was without friends in death.
Old age is not, however, all sickness and loneliness. Some have accomplished important tasks in their late years. Call them the late bloomers.
Leo Tolstoy, a Russian novelist and religious philosopher, learned to ride a bike at 67. Thomas Edison invented the telephone at 84. George Bernard Shaw, famous American playwright, was writing plays at 91.
The world-renown MichaelAngelo painted the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel in Italy at 70 and was designing churches at 88. Titian, an Italian painter, painted the Battle of Lepanto at 98.
The article about the famous personages, written by Dr. Gil Fernandez, professor emeritus at the Adventist International Institute of Advance Studies in Cavite, said the older people get, the more they acquire the strong tang of mellowed wine.
He compared such people to the Stradivarius violence. They produce heavenly sounds when they sing moonlight sonatas at midnight.
