Silence

It has been a quiet day here at home. Our children are all off to their respective concerns – Pizza and Jay to work, Dana to her dentist, and Mae to school. Thelma has been busy with business and household matters while I am closeted here in our room with my computer and music, nursing an aging, aching leg.

Silence pervades the whole house. The kind of silence that is light and easy, the comfortable kind of silence. Not the kind of uneasy silence that I once gave Thelma many years ago as we were starting our married life.

“Your silence is deafening, please talk to me,” says the short note that Thelma sent me after I had stopped talking to her for sometime. I wanted to make her feel what I was feeling after she had ignored my pleas for us to talk about certain matters.

Today as I sit here enjoying the silence and quiet of what could be the beginning and initial taste of an empty nest, I start to think of the other kinds of silences.

There is the silence of the parent when a child comes home repentant after having left home to live on his own against the parents’ wishes. It is the silence that lets the child speak out what is in his heart. It is the silence of the Father who welcomes back the Prodigal Son in that famous parable of Jesus in the gospel of Luke. Note that the father said nothing to his son – he simply held his son in silent embrace (Luke 16:21), and in the process spoke a thousand words. It is the silence that loves, forgives, and heals.

And there is the silence of someone who shares the grief of a friend who has suffered a painful loss. It is the silence of just being there that allows a loved one to grieve and let go. It is the compassionate, consoling silence that allows another to just be for now.

How do you regard silence? Are you comfortable with silence and can you greet it like a “friend”?

Words

“It is my first anniversary!” That is what I told myself this morning (21 Sept) when I opened this site to check on the number of hits it has made so far. It has been a year of blogging for me this month without my noticing it.

I started this site at the suggestion of my children when I complained of not having enough things to keep me busy while I was beginning to recover from my open-heart surgery around this time last year. I hemmed and hawed at first, then decided to write the story about my heart by-pass surgery and that started it all.

As at end of last month, I have written some 39 posts on this blogsite. That is an average of three posts a month. And with an average of 500 words per post, I thought that that is a lot of words I have spawned for a year.

This got me reflecting on “words, words, words”, recalling the lines from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has been ages since I read Shakespeare in college and I do not remember now, but I think he followed that line about words with “all sound and fury, signifying nothing”. I started to wonder whether words are truly “all sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

I do not agree. And the old playground limerick that goes: “Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but your words cannot hurt me”, is not true either.

The power of words

It is true that words, even when spoken innocently, can oftentimes hurt feelings, provoke anger, and even start a war – in a household or even globally. How many times have we regretted what we had said in jest or even with the best of intentions?

But words can inspire a loved one like an “I love you” or “You are beautiful”; while a “Good job!” or even a simple “Good Morning” can make a lot of difference in the day of the security guard at the office.

We know too that words can instill hope and even faith in others as in “God loves you” and “God bless” to an acquaintance or to a stranger who has irritated us.

Words also become initiators of healing and peace among sworn enemies as in “I am sorry” and “I forgive you”.

Words unite minds and hearts forever as the words “I do” by husband and wife in marriage. I remember them as the two most important words that I have ever said in my life some thirty years ago that also changed the course of my life forever!

And words can be the sweetest sound you will ever hear when they come forth from your child or grandchild for the very first time. I was happy beyond words the first time I heard the word “Papa” from my eldest child Pizza some 29 years ago. And the first time I heard Nicole call me “Wowo” was just pure joy.

God’s Word

Lastly, and most beautiful of all, words can create as when God spoke in the first days of creation: “Let there be light…” God’s word also saves as when “The Word became flesh” to live among us and be one of us.

Nicole and Me

I woke up this morning to a text message from a friend that went: "A grandfather was walking through his yard when he heard his granddaughter reciting the alphabet in a tone of voice that sounded like a prayer. He asked her what she was doing. The little girl explained: ‘I am praying but can’t think of the exact and right words, so I am just reciting all the letters in the alphabet, and I know God will put them together for me. You see, grandpa, He knows what’s in my heart’. Have a blessed Sunday!”

I immediately thought of my only granddaughter Nicole in far-away California and a little story about her that Nico my son told us recently. The story goes that sometime ago, Nico caught Nicole during her bedtime mumbling names like she was calling them in a roll call. When Nico asked her what she was doing, Nicole simply folded her fingers and started reciting: “Mommy…, Dada…, Wowa..., Wowo….’ Nico realized then that she was praying after all and was reciting our names to God -- a nightly ritual she had learned from her grandmother Thelma while Thelma was visiting with them last March.

The text message also made me run to my computer and googled whether today is Grandparents’ Day. True enough, some parts of the world like the U.S.A. and Canada are observing Grandparents’ Day today, Sunday, 07 September 2008. Here in the Philippines, I am not aware of any observation of a day for grandparents. In any case, I like the feel of being a grandparent, even if I am doing grandparenting only from a distance.

I remember my days as a grandchild and my relationship with my maternal grandparents (the only grandparents I ever knew). In those days (60 years ago!), I was expected most of all to pay them respect and courtesy. And that was it. I stood in awe before my grandparents and I feared them. I was expected to behave at my best whenever they come visiting with us in our place or when we go visiting with them in their hometown.

Today things have changed. As a grandparent I do not expect to be shown courtesy and respect anymore simply by virtue of the fact that I reside on that particular branch of our family tree without some effort on my part to respect my grandchild, to earn her respect, and to look at things from her point of view. But I know that I am now in a position to receive genuine respect based on my grandchild's love for me, and not merely as an outward show of "manners" based on her fear of punishment from me or from her parents. Today too, I no longer need to take up the thankless role of the "feared elder" waiting passively for an empty show of respect. I am now free to play the more active role of a close, loving grandparent, with the emphasis on "grand"! Even if only from a distance!

Nicole is now in that stage that experts describe as the age of the“Terrible Twos”. According to her parents, she can be an imp at one moment and an angel the next moment.

I interact with her only through the computer but I also get to see her ever-changing moods. Sometimes I get a chance to play “hide and seek” with her and I also get to see her perform every new act she has just learned in school whether singing, dancing, counting, reciting the alphabet, and what not. But there are times too when she is in no mood at all to see me no matter how much cajoling she gets from me or her parents.

Recently I received a gift from Nicole. It is a white pillow case with her masterpiece of an art! Splattered all over the pillow case are her hands and feet patterns in different colors. On it are the words “To Lolo Danny, I love you! Nicole”. Of course, I know that Cecile, her mom, helped her do it. But just the same, the gift elated me.

Now I can sleep tight using Nicole’s pillow case and knowing too that she prays and cares for me, her grandfather!