Life's Great Gifts

There's that strange but great glow in people's faces when they receive a gift unexpectedly from someone. However, with a fast and sometimes weary modern living, people have shown less and less excitement about gifts unless they are really expensive ones.

We have started to equate the value of gifts by its price tag, its gift-wrap and even the dangling tag that carries the store brand. Maybe I'm naive or maybe I have not received that much gifts in my lifetime to be even making comments about gift giving.

Some people like my father like giving gifts through "education".

My father, who was not a really likeable character, had a strange way of educating us. Every summer he finds many ways to get us to work on very odd jobs. He encouraged, okay, he coerced us to do really dirty jobs like working with automotive repairmen, construction workers, copra and corn farmers, fishermen, tuba gatherers, body-guarding, demolition, you name it. Me and my two brothers literally got our hands on almost anything that got us dirty, bruised, sprained, stabbed, shot, and in absolutely rare occasions applauded.

We never got any gifts doing this. We did get paid for doing it which never amounted to anything because we ended up spending it anyway helping a farmer with his sick son, a worker with his pregnant wife, a stranger in a car accident, half a dozen kittens "adopted" by my brother, medicine for an "orphaned" old lady, or gas expenses for taking a lost kid back to his parents.

All those years, we never got a gift for anything special we did. We earned a lot of really vicious enemies along the way, and it's pretty obvious that giving us gifts will be the last things in their minds. One actually shot my brother and almost killed him.

But then life has a really strange and pretty weird way of telling you how gifts are delivered. Believe me it never came in neat boxes or bright colored gift-wraps. Although for once you wish they did.

Right after college when I had to take on the world on my own, I get to meet characters, some a bit crazy, some ordinary, some honorable, some just lost. I get to mingle, talk, argue, fight, and whether I understand it enough or even admit it, I learned. Easy or hard, wholeheartedly or violently I got "mentored" about life.

Scenes of encounters, words, pictures, actions, and kaleidoscope of experiences have pieced together the bits and pieces of what I have become. I am stronger today more probably than I would care to admit because of the people that have hurt me, impressed me, betrayed me, taught me, denied me, loved me and more importantly those that made me happy by the mere fact of their existence.

And then it dawn on me the great gifts bestowed upon me, by a Greater Power. All those great and even fleeting instances of life's path crossing each other across my life and someone else’s are really my lifetime's greatest gifts. Looking back, I did need them at exactly the moment where it had the most impact to me in building the person I have become.

Today, I live and look at life like a gift waiting to be unwrap. Some gifts are called Nelia, William, Joseph, Judith, Lea, Marilyn, Marylou, Juan, Kristian, Adrian, Lotis, Yaya, and a whole vocabulary of gifts that wouldn't fit a dictionary in paper or in electronic form.

Some of these gifts may not want to be unwrapped in my lifetime. Like I said, they are life's gift to me and I'm glad they arrive for me even though I may not have the chance to open them up. They are colorful and interesting gifts.

Some look like they were born to be open. You see them and they smile. The world is better everyday because of that. Some are more like electronic boxes you may have to figure out how to unwrap them. They never come with the manual.

I sure would like to try opening some of them one of these days, the way my son Adrian and my daughter Kristian would, both having the single-mindedness to find the best way to open gifts before the great celebration. I envy their innocence.

Like a child, you can bet I'll try.

Wouldn't you?

P.S.: Susan Denham this one's for you!