No Me Quitte Pas

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I’m sitting on my rattan chair, feet up on the edge.  The room is spotlit, mostly dark.  The TV in my bedroom is on PBS, where Barbra Streisand just finished a private concert for a privileged 120 guests. I have posted enough on facebook to calm my nerves.  I have listened to the theme song of Umbrellas of Cherbourgh on You Tube about ten times already, after hearing Streisand sing No Me Quitte Pas.  I don’t know the connection between the two–but I instantly googled the former as soon as I heard the song.   Then there’s the laundry which I glided through with robotlike precision.  Three hours earlier, I left my job half an hour after five when I would normally stay much later.   Times Square was a glare.   In the heat of the subway, I didn’t see the point of overworking.   The economic and political world seems to be falling apart again.  I am holding my breath, wondering what else will sneak out of the dark.  I am thinking of my World War 2 father, how he felt in 1941 as the war inched in.

No Me Quitte Pas

A familiar song from my childhood, it is one of those melodramatic songs carried through the generation by a host of Filipino voices.  I don’t remember who sang it originally, or when; or how much the accompanying memory matters.  But I was suddenly thinking of post-WW2 blues, the time of my father when the world was reconstructing dreams from rubble.  A shattered world seemed young again. There was much to look forward to, a gentle walk from the ruins and the ashes of war.  Since my father left, I know less and less people from that era.  The oldest is a 91 year old friend from Montclair, with whom I have kept in touch over the years through penned letters and cards.  From her, I recreate a world that is lost now, one full of trust and self sacrifice.  There is much decency to that period, and to the people who created the greatest generation.  Their world, exposed to the volatility of human life, was thick with values and respect.  In their place are generations of lackadaisical people.   A few search for meaning.  Many just live.  Just.

The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

I always thought I was born in the wrong era, too much poetry for a world of greed and ego.  I listen to the same music my mother grew up in, a strange appreciation for Connie Francies, Frank Sinatra and their kins.  I love, love too much, and often end up stabbed on the back.  All my favorite movies have love plot lines of cataclismic tragedy (Think: The Way We Were).  When I see a movie like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, I smell of hope for innocence, a prayer for this generation to love so gently again.  Yet, people give up too soon.  There is an air of distrust everywhere.  Self-preservation makes us lie, betray, risk our own self-worth.  Now, there is much talk about the economy spiraling downward again.  Confidence, on which the market depends, is lost in the rising fear.  More and more people in my life are losing their jobs.  Those without for years are still without jobs.  Communities are seeing mind shattering impact.  Without hope, there is no sense to love.

When I go back to work tomorrow, I will flow through time with the wakefulness of a machine.   People around me will speak of the economic situation with very little understanding of what’s about to come down.  I don’t know what their dreams are made of.  Whatever they are, they won’t be the same as my father’s or my mother’s or my 91 year old friend from Montclair.  What makes it truly sad in this age of housewives reality TV series is that there is such an absence of true passion in life.  The world is bereft of color.   We live now because tomorrow we will have to die.   We work because tomorrow is another day.  Just another day.

No me quitte pas.  If you go away, you just walk away.  It is dark where we are heading.  I think of my father’s restlessness in his youth when at nineteen, he was plunged in the darkness of war.  There was no preparation, no time to think.  These days, we have too many choices, too much time in our hands.  And yet, wrong choices are always made.  Greed and ego always rule.

Perhaps we are moving into another time similar to what my father had gone through in his youth.   I don’t know what it was like then, but from reading war texts, it feels so exactly the same:  falling economies, widespread hate, rise of fascismm, unemployment, and restlessness.  The rest of what follows will hopefully not be the same as what my father went through.  I hope this time we fix the roads before we fall in.

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