The day of my planned interview . . . I overslept. The clock next to my bed beamed 12:00 in the afternoon. My heart began to palpitate. That can’t be right! I thought, before jumping up in a panic. The couple I’d traveled to the Philippines to meet was expecting me at 11:00 a.m. and I had an hour-long, traffic-filled drive ahead of me to their home in Quezon City. I had traveled thousands of miles to botch the very reason I came.
I threw around papers and notes on the hotel desk, looking for their telephone number. When I found it, I picked up the phone and dialed furiously. I hope they don’t cancel! I thought.
“Hello?” a friendly voice rang.
“Yes, hi. This is Fawn Weaver.” I was nearly panting with urgency.
“Oh, hello, Fawn. This is Gloria.”
“Gloria, I am so sorry. I don’t know what happened! I just woke up later than I’ve ever slept in my whole life. I’m an hour late, and it will still take me an hour just to get to where you are.”
Maybe it was compassion or just another facet of the Filipino disposition, but Gloria didn’t seem rattled at all. I tried to follow that lead.
“Can I still come?” I asked with an apologetic, pleading tone.
“Oh, yes,” she replied. “If it’s all right with you, we’ll start eating lunch and make sure your plate is ready when you get here.”
They had expected to eat at eleven in the morning, which means they probably didn’t have much of a breakfast, if any, so they were probably ravenous. This gracious woman let me off the hook completely—no shame, no guilt was being shoved my way.
“Absolutely. I will leave in the next few minutes and be there as quickly as I can.”
Just minutes later, I raced downstairs, hopped in a car, and asked the driver to go quickly. City traffic is the worst when you’re late. It’s not that it’s measurably more congested; it’s just that you’re all antsy in the seat, willing others to move with your mind. After about fifteen minutes of mumbling, “Hurry up!” under my breath to the cars around us, I realized the driver thought I was crazy. I talked myself down and accepted the fact that I wasn’t in control for the next forty-five minutes. I used the time instead to get my mind right for Ben and Gloria.
This sweet older couple are the aunt and uncle of my friend Jocelyn. The interview had been arranged months before, and Gloria had invited me to stay in their home. A couple of weeks prior to my arrival, I tried to reach them and learned Gloria had been taken to the hospital for pneumonia. She was discharged just days before I arrived and was still incredibly gracious. When I arrived at Ben and Gloria’s home, a woman in a nurse uniform opened the door. After she got me settled, she went to retrieve Gloria.
A few minutes later, a young lady escorted Gloria out, holding her hand. Gloria, with a face mask covering her nose and mouth, gave me a big hug.
“I’m so sorry for being late. I don’t know what happened,” I repeated.
It clearly did not matter to them. They led me over to the lunch table, where a glorious spread waited for all of us.
“You haven’t eaten yet. I’m sorry! I thought you were going to start without me.”
“Oh, dear, we did have a nibble. But we wanted to wait for you to have the good stuff.”
Aleli, their youngest daughter, who has dedicated her adult life to caring for her mom and dad, helped Gloria to her seat. Ben would join us shortly.
They were a lovely couple, despite the toll their health challenges had taken in recent years. Gloria had endured a cocktail of surgeries and post-operation pills. She told me she was getting kidney dialysis twice a week. Ben suffered from glaucoma and had barely escaped a life of blindness. He takes it in stride, he said, explaining that he could only see my silhouette, though I sat directly across from him at the dining room table. He could not make out the details, so I reassured him I looked exactly like Halle Berry.
At every interview I conducted across the globe, I always pulled out my trusty digital recorder. That day was no different. I set it on the table. “What’s that?” Ben asked as the light on the recorder issued a discreet, steady glow.
“Oh, this is the recorder I’ll use today to make sure I get every word you two want to share.”
“How long can it record?” he asked.
“Twenty hours. Almost a full day.”
He stared at it in fascination. You would think that when people realize they’re going to be recorded, they’d take on a different tone. Like they’d want to be sure their commentary was ready for a press release. But I haven’t found that to be the case. Maybe it is an offshoot of a strong marriage, but the women and couples I met defined the phrase “what you see is what you get.” Ben and Gloria just are who they are. Without another word about the recorder, they started off by telling me about their fiftieth wedding anniversary just months before.
“It was a big party,” Ben reflected, “big and absolutely perfect.” All their closest friends and family, dressed in evening gowns and suits, had looked on as Ben and Gloria toasted to a life well lived. A life shared together. Gloria had only been out of the hospital a few days following one of her many surgeries, so dancing proved difficult. But they’d walked around the room, arms linked, to say thank you to all those who had celebrated this journey with them.
Ben and Gloria shared this story for ten or fifteen minutes. All the while, a spread fit for royalty taunted us all. I figured that the need for sustenance would override the need for great conversation. Fortunately we got both. My hosts walked me through the courses before us. Pancit palabok (a rice noodle dish topped with shrimp sauce, scallions, garlic, and sliced boiled eggs), barbecued pork skewers, puto (little white rice muffins), a savory broccoli salad with onion, raisins, bacon in a white sauce, and Sans Rival cake (as in, “without rival”). This Filipino favorite was like biting directly into a slice of sweetened butter. The only dish missing for a traditional Filipino feast was lechón, and believe you me, I didn’t mind. Lechón is roasted suckling pig in which every bit of the animal (including the face) is eaten. After London, I was only willing to go so far. This omission from the table spared me the opportunity to be rude.
There are two subjects Ben seemed most fond to talk about: his love for his work (“I never would’ve retired if my sight hadn’t given up”) and marriage. This took us naturally back to the fiftieth anniversary.
“Want to see pictures?” Aleli piped up.
“Yes! That’d be great,” I enthusiastically responded, feeling lifted by getting something in my stomach.
As Aleli pointed out all the people in the pictures, telling me who each person was in relation to their family, Ben jumped in.
“At our celebration,” he started, “they said I had two minutes to make remarks and thank everyone. Two minutes! Ha! That would never be enough. With so much family gathered, especially the younger ones, I wanted to share with everyone the most important things I’ve learned that helped me have a happy life.
“I told them there is nothing permanent in this world but taxes and death. You’re not always in the up and you’re not always in the down. So it’s never permanent.” I took him to mean that during challenging times, you have to remember the experience is momentary and not treat it as though it will never get better. And the reverse is also true.
“He who lives beyond his means shall have no means to live,” he went on. I was amazed that he could recall his talking points from seven months ago—in chronological order, to boot. “He who does not economize shall agonize.”
It was sweet to watch Gloria as Ben recalled his speech from their anniversary. She sat next to him, with a satisfied smile, as if it had been a joy living with a man who’d chosen to move through life with wisdom instead of more fleeting things. She also showed him deep respect—she wasn’t jumping in or cutting him off at any time.
“You must keep God first in your lives and relationships.
“Work hard and do not let laziness set in. Remember, ‘Whatever a man soweth, that he shall also reap.’
“If you’re kind and loving to people, you will receive the same treatment.”
Considering how quickly he shared this with the table, maybe he had made it under the two-minute mark. The thing was, his insight wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking—I didn’t see him becoming a self-help guru in his latter years. But here’s the difference. Ben had lived it. As a woman who’s had to claw her way to some personal accomplishments in business and life, I have no qualms reiterating that walking the walk and talking the talk are about as different as a model airplane and an actual airplane. In all my travels and with Ben’s words as we ate, I felt stunned again by the utter simplicity of building a great marriage. It’s not rocket science; it’s just a challenge to accomplish and maintain over the long haul.
When I lifted my head from my bites, I looked around the tightly packed living room area, where an estate sale’s worth of mementos crowded the space. A sofa table covered with family pictures shared the story of lives steeped in rich history. There was no shortage of photo albums they wanted to show me, chronicling their life and love from the beginning. A picture from their wedding day nearly fifty-one years earlier showed a dapper young couple, a dashing bride and a groom that looked a little like Elvis Presley (something Aleli jokingly pointed out).
Gloria and Ben had written letters to each other for ten years before they were married. Ben had gone away to school in the States for five years, followed by an additional two years for his residency. After those ten years apart, they’d gotten married almost immediately following his return to the Philippines.
“We’ve been making up for lost time ever since,” Ben said.
Although Gloria had run their drugstore and managed all the employees, her family had come first. Even though Ben had become a successful anesthesiologist, his wife and family had always come first. He had never taken a business trip without her, and she’d have had it no other way. They were together when, at age seventy-five, he decided to climb Mount Sinai in Egypt.
As they shared their story, cathedral bells rang in the distance for the fifth time since I arrived. I knew it was probably time for me to begin heading back to the hotel. I asked one final question.
“Thinking back to your earlier years, is there anything about which you’d say, ‘If we had known then what we know now, we’d do it differently’?” (I always got something when I put that loaded question out there. Everyone has regrets, right?)
Both Gloria and Ben paused as they scanned the ceiling and looked at each other.
“Honestly, I can’t think of a single thing,” Gloria said. “Everything we’ve done from the beginning we’ve continued to do until now. Ben was very loving, thoughtful, and generous from the start. And he hasn’t changed,” she said as she reached for his hand.
“We always consult each other before we make important decisions,” Ben added. I could see the truth in that. The whole time I was there, I didn’t sense any sort of power struggle or passive aggressiveness. They were a partnership in every sense of the word, from business to child rearing to helping each other go to bed at night (“I can’t go to sleep before I give her a foot rub,” Ben said).
“When he was still working as an anesthesiologist in one of the hospitals downtown,” Gloria recalled wistfully, “he’d bring me flowers because he knows I like fresh flowers.”
Gestures like this, from one to the other, were not isolated events. From the stories told to me and what I witnessed myself throughout their home’s retelling of their long life together, it was clear that they’d expressed their love for each other consistently and without fail. Kind gestures for no reason: this was one of their keys to a happy and successful marriage.
As Ben and Gloria finished answering my questions, Mother Nature interrupted. The rain started to pour so hard it sounded like men in boots walking on the roof. Aleli opened the front door so I could see what “pouring like cats and dogs” looked like. It really was impressive. Monstrous drops of water were falling so fast and so densely I knew there was no way I’d make a dry exit. We said our good-byes as a driver rang the doorbell on the outside gate. I peered through the downpour and saw the wipers on hyperdrive, but the deluge was so unrelenting that they didn’t seem to be doing anything. I braced myself for the instant soak.
Just before I stepped out, Aleli handed me a package.
“Open it,” Gloria insisted, with pride.
Aleli nodded her head in a gesture that said, Well, go ahead, already!
It was a beautiful chiffon gift bag with something weighty inside, the kind of gift you get excited about on Christmas morning (if you’re into that kind of thing). Lo and behold, as I loosed the drawstrings of the gift bag, before me was a stunning pearl necklace. Short in length, with a silver clasp in the back, this was not a simple strand of pearls strung together. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen pearls that looked quite like those.
“It is a thank-you gift for coming to our country and our home,” Aleli said.
I was speechless. Not only had they shrugged off my lack of punctuality, and chose not to eat so they could honor their guest, but now they were giving me a lovely thing to have as a keepsake. I recalled the small gift Mai had given me the day before after our tea together. I wasn’t used to that kind of generosity.
I whimpered out a thank you, hoping the look on my face said more than my words could. I thought about placing the necklace in the gift bag but instead decided it was the perfect day to wear pearls. With Aleli’s help, I placed the pearls around my neck as we squeezed together in the living room to take a picture. Jocelyn hadn’t seen her aunt and uncle for many years, so I quickly sent the picture to her from my cell phone.
“Thank you again for coming,” Aleli said finally.
“No. Thank you.” Every “thank you” at this point was feeling insufficient.
The driver honked, and we both acknowledged that now it was truly time for me to go. I tossed my bag over my shoulder, faced the doorway, and with Gloria’s nurse holding a large umbrella over my head, we briskly walked to the taxi.
The drive home helped me understand what a clear drinking glass must feel like in a dishwasher. The rain was so relentless that I gripped my bag, white-knuckled, and spent most of the drive wondering how the man behind the wheel could even see. As a traveler must do, though, I chose to let the native instinct console my novice take on the situation.
By the time I reached the hotel, it was already dark. Because Keith and I had talked on the phone each day, almost always in the evenings wherever I happened to be, I was getting a homesick feeling for Keith.
When I’d sat across from the lovely Gloria and Ben, I was reminded of how fortunate I am to have married the man of my dreams. Not the perfect man, just the man who is perfect for me. Without any prompting, I began counting down the countries until I returned home to Keith.
“One more day to Australia,” I said aloud to the empty room. “Three more countries and then I’m home.”
I wouldn’t be late for that appointment.