THIS WRITER has turned 69 years young – or a younger 9 as senior citizen. No regrets because number 69 throbs with interesting interpretations, starting from the “naughty” one defining it as “slang” for oral sex through reversed sexual position.
An inverted 69 still reads 69, but an inverted 6 or 9 becomes the other number. Thus, the divinatory art of numerology equates 69 to “idealism, family, and balance.”
Normally, a “69-ner” is a grandfather. I am not one, however, because my one and only son, has remained single at 45, with no plan of turning “double”. That makes me a frustrated grandfather.
But why should I be troubled when not having a wife affords my son, a nurse in New York City, the freedom to enjoy spending his hard-earned money as he wishes?
I could not blame him for staying single. He could not forget how his mom and I had lived hard, foregoing leisure and pleasure, to see him through school. He would not want to replicate our past.
I was a young college student when the song “Father and Son” popularized the advice of a father to his son: “If you want, you can marry. Look at me, I am old but am happy.”
Since I wanted to be happy in 1972 at age 22, I withdrew my entire bank savings, married my fiancée – to whom I had been engaged for barely two years – and spent it for a lavish wedding party. I thought I had the means to build a happy family.
Little did I know that I would not be as happy as I had fantasized. A series of expensive events buried me deep in debt within the first three years of my married life: frequent hospitalizations of my wife due to epilepsy, a miscarriage of what could have been our first baby, the successful birth of our only son and her subsequent ectopic pregnancy that necessitated surgery.
After only nine years, we broke up. But that did not prevent me from footing the education of my son until he finished college.
If I were to live my life over again, I would not marry until I would have stashed away wealth. I dread to see the unemployed and underemployed living miserably in squatter areas.
No wonder, when the long-pending Reproductive Health Bill was still being debated in Congress, I wrote supportive columns, asking married readers to practice family planning.
I once had a beautiful cousin (now deceased) whom I could hardly recognize as a married woman because her once sparkling eyes had dulled; her pinky cheeks had paled and sunk; and her body curves had shrunk.
She came to the office together with at a thin boy whom I guessed to be her child.
“I now have six children,” she revealed.
“Why so many?” I asked.
“So that when my man and I grow old, they will be there to take good care of us.”
I could have disagreed but opted to nod. I thought to myself that their children would not even be around in their senior years, since they would have also married with another generation of kids to worry over.
The familiar vicious cycle merits serious attention: Parents work themselves to death to secure the future of their children, who likewise repeat the same fate. As the cycle goes on from one generation to the next, the “bright future” never comes.
My only son has broken the cycle, making me a happy, frustrated grandpa at 69. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
