THE WONDER OF A WOMAN

Thursday night, October 6, I was about to go home after our ragtag basketball team bagged the second runner-up trophy when the host of the tournament, the Iloilo IBP, requested the pleasure of our company at dinner right there in the YMCA.  Of course, the IBP brought home the bacon, figuratively and literally, as no one can reckon against superior strength, size, and talent, and nobody can argue with a referee or can judge a judgment call except the IBP, but that’s another story.

Despite playing there twice a week, it was my first time to know there was a function room now in YMCA, wow, they built it so fast.  I headed our group marching in and saw IBP’s food stuff, then I approached the entrance slowly, like a door opening into the past.  As I anticipated, food and drinks overflowed like a river, not necessarily in that order.  A voluptuous all-girls band came to entertain us all while we devoured our dinner.

I looked at their preparation like an eagle to its prey:  full of excitement, yeah, eating with the IBP for the very first time is like sailing on a ship in her maiden voyage:  continuously in wonderment.  True to form, and considering the way they humbled every opposition in every game the way a rat is swallowed in one gulp by a giant serpent, IBP Iloilo members believe not in understatement.  Okay, you can ascribe to them the word acrimonious, but no way can you describe them as parsimonious.

Had I met these jolly nice people earlier in life, I then murmured to myself, I would have downed my first five bottles in twenty-five minutes and grabbed the mic when the program host Atty. Billena declared the singing was now open to the public.  I would have approached one of the girls to do anything as I pleased, regale her with my antics, and totally unmindful of prim people saying it was vulgar while concealing their envy beneath a pretense of distaste of what I perceived to be aesthetic.

After my stomach was filled to the rafters, so to speak, I hitched a ride with Atty. Monserate’s brand-new SUV, he being a member of methyphobic lawyers in the name of healthy lifestyle and most of all, his waiting family.  And we left the rest of his teammates, friends, and friends’ friends of the top four teams and non-playing members of IBP, who were all then starting to have the time of their lives once again, in the girls’ company.

Spontaneously, more blasts from the past filled in my memory:  how I wallowed myself too in wine and ‘good time’ yesterday.

On our way home, I remembered the four things the prophet Agur did not know, which I almost never knew too during those days, that he thus said:  “The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid” (Prov.30:19 KJV).