COFFEE & BISCUITS

Brenda Lee shares the same name as the famous American singer and the last name of a famous American Civil War general, but she never had their fame.  But how she did long for fame.  When she was young, she wanted desperately to be a singer, to have all eyes centered on her.  And by all witnesses, how hard she had tried.  But the hopes and dreams of the youth quickly faded into just what they are as the reality of failures repeatedly pressed upon her.  Time went by, and she became just a regular Ms. Lee, a voice teacher in a community learning center. 

Her brush with love was as full of dashed hopes and dreams as her singing career.  She had wanted desperately to fall in love, and she did, but the object of her love somehow never returned her love.  This is not to say that Ms. Lee wasn’t attractive when she was young, for she did have a little beauty and a decent voice.  When she was in her twenties and held a temp job as a nightclub singer in the Peninsula Hotel, Ms. Lee noticed a man who was a regular to her performances.  She found out his name when one day she saw his face on the cover of the Asia Fortune magazine, and then decided that she just had to have him.  Exhausting whatever advantages she had with her looks and voice, she relentless pursued the tycoon until finally her efforts granted her a one night of tossing with him.  Just when she began to soak in the happiness of planning a glamorous future in the high society, the tycoon sent her a letter, typed by his lawyer, saying that he would sign over to her an apartment at a place called Sea Cove, as long as she would not bother him anymore.  Broken hearted, Ms. Lee wrote him back a letter, which read:  “A broken heart cannot be healed with money.”  She then placed the keys in a deposit box in her bank, vowing that she would never use his gift. 

Fifteen years later when she reached her forties, her little beauty faded, stage requests and money became elusive.  Monthly rent payments became a problem.  Then she remembered the deposit box.  Soon after she moved into the apartment that she had vowed not to set foot on.

On a nice summer day, as most people in Sea Cove went down to the beach to enjoy the sunshine, a rattle snake in the mountains also decided to take an excursion away from the mountain shades to find warmer grounds.  Leisurely, it weaseled down the unfootprinted mountain paths, and before long found itself at the gate of Mr. Robinson’s garden.  Go in, sizzled the snake’s animal instincts.  It snuggled under the white fenced gate.   Viola! How correct is the voice:  there it is, in the middle of the garden, a caged rabbit. 

It was over in a matter of seconds.  Blackness fell, and the poor thing didn’t even know what ate him.  The snake had adroitly slid its slim and slimy body passed the bars into the cage, and engulped the rabbit right the way.  Unfortunate for the greedy predator though, it did not do what every mom would tell their kids:  chew!  With a wholesome rabbit in its body now, the snake was too fat to get out.

When Mr Robinson’s daughter, Eliza, opened the garden gate, she found a snake trapped between the bars of her rabbit cage.  The shape of rabbit ears could still be made out from the hump in the torso of the reptile.  Authorities were promptly notified, and the snake’s summer vacation was over when it deservedly arrived at the exhumanator.

This story was recount over and over in Sea Cove.  How brave Eliza was!  Eliza would tell everybody excitedly about this encounter, while her father….

A young man was driving along a remote, narrow, winding mountain road, when he spotted an old man walking by the side of the road.

“Are you going to the Pandora Mouth?  I can give you a ride,”  offered the kind driver.  Since it is a one-way road, with a direction sign pointing to “Pandora Mouth”, the old man can only be heading to Pandora Mouth.

When the car paused next to the old man, the old man was wheeling a heavy cart (for groceries) and supporting his strides with an umbrella that was specially made to have a crutch handle. 

The lines on his forehead are deep and stretches from one side to another.

The driver helped lift the old man’s bags into the car; they were very heavy.

The driver asked whether he lived in the village.
He said yes, and added, “It’s not far off from here.”

The car continued on the winding road.  Nowhere is the village in sight several minutes into the ride.  It only got longer, with no houses on the way, which gave the opportunity to produce conversation.  The driver asked if he lived in the village for long.

The old man said he had lived there for more than twenty years and his kids all are living in the city.  He told us that about twenty people currently live in the village.  If one looks at the island from the plane, one can clearly see the road leading to it like a pandor a neck.  There is an marine observatory at the end of the road, he said.

The village is still nowhere to be seen.  The young man remarked on his surprise of the length of the road.

The old man said walking on this road is good for his health.  Also, driving on this road can improve one’s driving skills.

All the while, the young man was thinking this old man gives off an air of erudition in the way he talked.  Although the lines on his forehead are deep, his voice has a ring of energy to it.  Is it the years of walking that long and winding mountain road?

Finally they arrived to a roadside pointing left to the pandora mouth.

The car turned into another even narrower road, on both sides littered junks, ranging from piled up mountains of paper boxes, an abandoned car, dispersed parts of cars, and an abandoned school.

The old man said the school was abandoned because everybody had grown up and there are not enough of children in the village.

Before he closed the car door, he instructed the young man to make a U-turn to get out of the village.

Who is this gentle recluse living in squalor and waste?  Is he a professor?  A researcher at the marine observatory?

The encounter left the young man with more wonder about the random people one may meet in the world if one may just pause a moment to look.