i don't know if i'll still be around when you come back...

Went to my grandmother's best friend's husband's 40th day today (meaning, he passed on 40 days ago). I always liked the Belos because we swam in their pool all the time and they were always telling us to feel most at home. And they're really wonderful people really, very interesting and smart. I really felt bad when he passed because I could not picture his wife without him, they seemed to be two halves of a whole and so cute all the time.

Tonight, though, she looked cute on her own as well. Her daughter opened the program by relating the story of how her parents met and it was this really cute anecdote about his chance of taking his Master's in Law at Harvard but when he asked his beau if she would wait for him, she said, "I don't know if I'll still be around when you come back..." So he turned down the scholarship to ask her father her hand in marriage and he gasped and commanded him to take back the scholarship and he will pay for his daughter's airfare and accomodations while he's at Harvard.

(At this point, I look over at her table and she smiles at me and says, "It's true!" So cute!)

I'm most amused at how similar she is to Mamia - my Mamia said to my grandfather, "Hey, I'm 25. If you're not going to marry me, I have to find someone who will because I'm not getting any younger." In effect, she proposed. You can tell why these cousins are best friends.

Their daughter is actually my godmother, but I'm not close to her in any way. I think more so now because she's still probably mad at me - I let her down when she offered me a chance to learn Pilates in the States and teach it at her clinic back when Pilates was about to become all the rage. I didn't accept the offer because I didn't want to teach Pilates - not then, while I was writing for PinoyCentral Music, not even now, that I'm a ballerina again.

Some blog-worthy news though. My mom had been the one who was forever on my case for turning her down - I could have gone to the States, I could be earning three times my salary, how embarassing to refuse my godmother, blah blah blah. Then, last year, I was angsting about ballet (my usual angst about ballet last year) and my mom told me, "You did not waste any time. You went out and lived your life the way you wanted to live it. You have all these memories of everything you did and everyone you met and all these achievements. You should be grateful that when you decided to go back to ballet, your body still allowed you to. Do you know what your peers are doing now? The people who went on dancing while you went and wasted your time with a life? They're so sick of ballet and all they can do now is teach Pilates."

Have I said before that the Universe knows what's due us? Such a crafty Universe, isn't it?