Walk on the Sun

"You know, this is the first time I've felt the sun in two months."

While every ounce of my being has been acutely aware that my father been in the hospital since before Halloween, his words caught me off guard. But the more I thought about it, the more it made so much damn sense. After all, this was the same sun that beat down on him as a boy, raised in Bailen and Manila. The same sun that he chased across the Pacific when he joined the US Navy. Even the same one that shone down on us on a Saturday morning, when I was about 9 years old, and my dad taught me how to shoot at bank shot.

So as my dad sat there, basking in the sun's golden rays in all their glory, I reflected. I had thought this was merely the first of many trips back to the hospital that we had gotten to know all too well. However, my father saw this as an opportunity to reunite with an old friend. His face expressed a sense of peace that I hadn't seen in too long. And so I sat there with him, in the sun, taking it all in and realizing the profundity of the simple moment.

It made so much sense. In literature, sun is a symbol of power, energy, and vitality. In high school biology, we learn the sun is literally responsible for nourishing the Earth and its creatures. It tells our society when to wake our ass up and get to work. It even adorns the Philippine flag (and Pilipino flags that date back to the Katipunan). I'd imagine that, when compared to the cold, florescent light of the hospital rooms my father stayed in, the sun might even remind my mostly non-religious father that there very well may be a God out there.

And yet, like many other simple pleasures of life, I had taken the sun for granted. I hadn't fully realized what being away from the sun for two months might mean for my  dad. Not until he asked me to push his wheelchair out in front of the hospital, and into the heat of an abnormally warm December day.

While we have quite a ways to go to recover my father's health, at least he can feel the warmth of an old friend, once again.