The Main Gate

It is 1:12 PM and I am sitting at my work station, which looks out onto the compound driveway. This is about the time when the tenants' children walk into the main gate from school in their uniforms. Some of them look exhausted and relieved to be home. It brings me back to the days when I myself was in grade school, in the mid-1950s. I trudged home with my heavy school bag through that very same main gate, past my mother's daisy garden and the swimming pool where apartments now stand, into the main house at the back of the compound where my nephew's tenement building now stands. How easy it is to delete all of those buildings in my mind and go back to the garden and the swimming pool and the old, main house. My bedroom is on the second floor. It has windows all around. The walls are blue. There is a plaster statuette of Saint Aloysius Gonzaga on my altar, a gift from my eldest aunt.

I look into the mirror. Who is this boy with crew-cut hair? He knows that he will be 65 in 2016, but he has no idea what thoughts and memories will cross his mind when he is actually 65, looking out of his future bedroom window at the same, main gate, a gate that has not changed.

That gate will outlive us all.