Life actually

At this large terminal we call life, someone is always arriving or departing. Others are on the way. Some of us are in transit, with an eye on VIP departures.

When Leslie departed (you know which Leslie), I made many calls to many friends just to wail, “Leslie died!”

When Christopher Reeve died, I SMSed Mr T. He was so shaken by the news, he took more than an hour to reply.

On Tuesday night, he called me to tell me, “Dana Reeve died.”

Poor Dana. She died of lung cancer, less than two years after Christopher died. I had happy news for Mr T though. Ms C’s baby boy has arrived, I said.

+ + +

Fortnights ago, we were tasked to pick the nicest picture of my mother from a pile my uncle had taken of her at his studio, which he would then enlarge. That’s about 20 photos of the same woman in the same I-got-it-at-OG-for-less-than-$40 blue kimono-style blouse. But to me, they were all different.

“You don’t look like you,” I said of one picture – and about 10 others.

“Why’s your smile so weird? All your grandkids will say, ‘Why’s Ah Mah’s mouth so weird?’” I said of another. (Ah Mah means paternal grandmother. Even in my hypothetical mentions of my mother’s hypothetical grandkids, I make them my brothers’ kids, not mine.)

She protested, “Your uncle and aunt kept telling me to smile wider.”

Okay okay.

My uncle had numbered the photos. So my picks were No.7 and No.11; my uncle and aunt’s picks were No.18, then No.7; my father’s pick was No.6.

In No.7, she has a soft smile, the smile I like, and is facing my left. In No.11, she has a similar smile and is facing my right. Her smile is even softer in No.6 (my father and I were on the same page, after all), except the picture is somewhat shadowy. In No.18, her beam is wide. She looks nothing like the woman we know.

As for my mother, her pick was No.13. I didn’t get it at first. But then I saw what she saw. Her half-smile here was the same as that in her old photos, when she was young, half-smiling and looking keenly ahead at someone or something off-camera – was it the future?

“You looked like this when you were 19, too,” I said.

“I’ve looked like this all of my life,” she said.

Many ah soh her age prepare nice pictures of themselves. Just in case. I might not have known what she was up to, had I not studied No.13.

+ + +

On Wednesday morning, I picked a nice Washington Post obituary of Dana for publication: the only one that told of the night she swam with Christopher at a pond, after a 10-day flirtation, and gave him their first kiss.

That afternoon, a good girl friend told me that she was pregnant.

That evening, in an old tradition of welcoming new arrivals to this world, Ms H and I went shopping for kid-sized stuff for Ms C’s boy.