Last Days

The Day Before

I was at the bakery on Guam, my last full day there, when I heard a toddler laughing somewhere nearby. Something about a child laughing, that particular kind of innocence, made me think about the distance between now and late 1998, when I first started.

Somewhere in almost thirty years I lost my innocence about life, about promises, about hanging on to something I thought would eventually materialize. It didn't. I'm not holding my breath anymore. For once, I'm making my own life and taking care of me.

That's where my head was that morning. Then I watched one of those Thai commercials, the kind that always gets me. A guy who's just nice. He puts a dying plant under a rain spout. Helps an elderly woman with her food cart. Helps an unhoused woman and her child. Gives a dog a chicken leg while he eats at an outdoor restaurant, people around him watching and shaking their heads like they can't quite figure him out. The captions say something like, this man will never be famous, never be rich, but he's richer for the kindness he gives away. And I cried, because it made me think of Dad.

It's been several months since he passed, and I still get pulled back into memories of his kindness, what he was like when I was a kid. And then, my last full day working, and everything Dad used to say is no longer, it's just gone, and I'm okay with it. Whether I'm actually okay or just telling myself that, I'm glad it happened this way. I get to take what I learned from him and run a bakery the way I've always said I would, take care of people the way I think actually makes sense.

I once told Dad that if you take care of your people, your people will take care of you, and the business takes care of itself. He called it a theory. Not cruel about it, just skeptical, the way you'd talk about an idea that sounded nice but hadn't been tested. Now I get to find out. Daly City is the experiment. I don't know if I'm too blind to see how it'll actually go, or if I'm finally right about something Dad never got to see proven. Either way, I'm going to give it a try.

I didn't have time to sit with any of that for too long. There was still a day to get through, and Lyn and I had somewhere to be.

I drove home to get Lyn so we could go shopping, keeping up a Filipino tradition called pasalubong, the idea that you don't show up somewhere empty-handed. It doesn't have to be elaborate, just something small enough to say I was thinking of you, I thought enough of you to bring you this.

Maybe it's fitting that the weather that day was overcast, a slight rain falling, like the island somehow knew what was coming.

I was happy that day too, happy to be heading back to where I'm comfortable, my own environment. But I never imagined leaving would look like this. When I first left California in the 90s, and then for good in the early 2000s, I always figured I'd come back eventually. I just never pictured it happening this way.

Departure Day

We said goodbye to Dad before we left the island. It was all I could do to stop the tears, and I think that's probably part of why I didn't visit more often, because once they started, they wouldn't stop. The photo they chose for the tombstone was from maybe fifteen years back, a much healthier, happier Dad, the one I remember from earlier on, and seeing that face again started the tears all over.

We drove home in silence, both of us caught in our own thoughts. Mine kept circling back to the same question. Am I doing the right thing.