5:45 P.M. Sept. 26
Momsette:
I got your Sept. 13 & 18 letters today at 1:12 P.M. just after I had attended my STAT. at 11-1. I rushed my lunch; were it not necessary for this cold weather, I could have missed it just to read your letters. I ate unmindful of anyone around me. Imagine, first in eighteen days I got message from my Momsette and Fevi! I was beaming with expectation. Throughout lunch I kept feeling the letters in my coat pocket. What if I lost them? I sure would not.
The stationery you use is by all means pretty. I wish I had your resourcefulness in this respect.
I pity Boboy. I miss him. Every night before sleeping I look at Boboy’s and Fevi’s pictures. I can almost imagine them with their broken toys thrown everywhere at home; imagine Boboy with his mischievous smile, and Fevi with her trying stance and her touching thoughtfulness. How I wish they don’t yet outgrow their present selves so fast. They who most likely are my biological continuity and yours much more likely. So try to care for them as you have been doing of me and you.
[7:11. I had to interrupt writing this. Every day at 6:30 we take our dinner here at the G.C., at 1:00 our lunch and at 8:00 our breakfast. This routine lasts for 30 minutes, so if one fails to come on time he has to eat anywhere. I used to be tardy before to the point that I missed a number of meals. Now my habit has changed to catch up.]
I read your letters as fast and carefully after lunch, as I had to leave at 1:45 to be on time for my STAT. Lab at 2-4. [All classes here have Lab. My Physiol. Psych Lab is at 8-10:30 at night (!) on Wednesdays.]
Your letters cheered me up, although they also saddened me. The first effect I thought was greater since with it I found my STAT Quiz easy.
After my lab. I met on the hallway Dr. Gonzalez who introduced me to a fellow who I imagined to be a grad. student. The fellow turned out to be Bitterman, young looking and meditatively conceited and confident. He has some name in Psych. in the U.S.A.
As regards your studies it is quite enough for me if you get educated in the finest sense even if you don’t earn good grades, i.e., if both don’t go together. Anyway as long as I can maintain your livelihood which is agreeable to you, then you don’t have to earn grades that can land you a job. Just bear this in mind. Also, make and maintain making yourself pretty for me. Clean in body and mind with the minimum material vanity but with the maximum intelligence. This, however, if you care to do. As it is you are already pretty for me. It is just bad for you that I had to hide my feelings behind a sneer when I was there and only express it now 12000 mi. away when I am in a state for affection. But things treasured are stored in museum or the mind. The public is a gossip or too careless with them. I can’t allow the public thrust its eye into my valued emotions. Yes as it is you are still as pretty as ever. This may, by the way, answer your question why it was not R___, C_____, B___, etc.. So you don’t have to enter your name to material rat race, if you ask me. Just be. You have given me enough already.
Also just look after my kids. Anyone may agree that my kids bear evidence to your being pretty for me. Try to know how to make them into persons whom you want us to become were we given choice to be children again. Remind them I am away doing something really for them and they are there to do something to deserve what I do.
May I also request you to be thoughtful of my mother. What she has given me materially is not much when looked at from people’s eye other than that of my family; but within my family it is the most. And yet I have not reciprocated in kind or I have only done so at the least. Anyway her needs are not luxury — emotionally or otherwise.
Extend my best regards to our relatives. To the young and growing: to grow big, independent, a little fearless. Tell them I wish they grow distinct enough from the fluid crowd: sensible a sensitive to routine life. Tell them people are quite unequal in size, complexion, physical strength and that this inequality is rigid; so that if one is short or black, science is yet not at a stage to turn him into tall or white dependent of his desire. But in mind — intelligence, sensibility and humanness, everyone has no limit other than his life span. This he cannot exhaust. So it is here that anyone is challenged to achieve the most with respect to his obsession, patience, industry and perseverance. Tell them in this domain I wish them best. Tell your sisters and brothers and my nephews and nieces and Ilang [Angela, fg’s youngest sibling]. And as for me, it is just in this manifold [it seems, fg meant this in the mathematical sense of ‘topological space or surface’ -epd] that I am throwing my dice or I am using and burning my salt. Here luck is even sooner exponentially related to the amount of salt one burns.
How I wish my small brown brothers thought of this and in thinking, act effectively.
Send me your, not my, photographs. Our kids’ photographs. Snap pictures of Buchucoy and do send me some. Tell me when he comes.
Yours,
fg
Regards to my mother.
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