Torture and Tyranny

The rains have come. After all, it is June, the beginning of the wet season in the Philippines. 

There were those two months (April and May) when all days and nights were too hot in Las Pinas and in many parts of the country.  For two straight months, the daily temperature had ranged from 36°C to 37°C, which is a person’s normal body temperature! 

This torturous and tyrannical heat felt even hotter when I looked up the heat index—the combination of the actual temperature and humidity. In short, the heat that is felt and perceived by our body. 

In one of those wickedly warm days, I incessantly whined, "Hot, hot, hot! This is not only torture, it's tyranny!" 

"Weren't you born in this country?" Tony asked, laughing. "The Philippines is in the . . . read my lips, tropical zone!" 

I found out later that the heat index that day was 51°C! It was 54°C somewhere in my home province.  

It wasn't this bad before the pandemic—retired people like us could spend the whole day in the mall or take a dip in a resort swimming pool. The working crowd would be in their air-conditioned workplaces. But now?  

Electric fans and air-conditioners do help, but if your house is not centrally air-conditioned (which is 95% of homes, including ours) then you'd have to spend all hours in a bedroom.

What’s even worse is that the electricity during summer is unstable (intermittent brown-outs) due to insufficient power generation capacity amid soaring usage. All cooling appliances go pffft. 

My moping took a halt when I scrolled through FB and read a post by my former boss, Abaja, then always a fount of wisdom.      

It rebuked this writer on grace, who allowed the heat index to inflame her, instead of keeping cool and being grateful for the gift of a summer day. Now with a spirit of gratitude, I zigged to what the late author Charles Bowden, with whom I shared the same birthdate, wrote: 

“Summertime is always the best of what might be.” 

The hottest summer ever, for me, is gone now, but it left a stinging scolding. The gallons of sweat it inflicted upon me were nothing compared to my barrel of blessings, for which I must never fail to ernestly say, "Thank you."