MINIATURES

Breakfast And Remembrance. Pasig City. 24. December 2021   Last night, we found ourselves watching a pirated version of the latest Spider-Man movie, No Way Home (sorry, couldn't wait). As the movie wrapped up, the final scenes unfolded with the hero frolicking in the snow—Christmas had come. It struck me: how many unforgettable stories and movies have been set during this magical season? One of the first that comes to mind is Charles Dickens’ timeless tale of the rich yet miserly Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. There’s also E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, immortalized by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in his ballet The Nutcracker Suite. During high school, we read O. Henry’s short stories, and The Gift of the Magi always stood out as a favorite.  There are movies and stories we often would like to associate with this great time of the year. Jose Rizal has the last chapters of the Noli set in Christmastime, but what Rizal did was to make it quasi tragic, so

  Our lotto aficionado of 1892 bought a kind of lotto ticket similar to this -- the Spanish lottery in the Philippines. He won second prize. I just superimposed the real winning number combination 9736. Perhaps this was how it looks like. And yet I still feel one number is missing. The winner was actually not a freeman that time. He was exiled to a coastal barrio in Dapitan, Mindanao guarded by colonial authorities. The ticket actually won P20,000 (Quite a lot during that time). It is said, that Jose Rizal had to share it with his jailer Captain Ricardo Canicero who happened to own half of the ticket. With the P6,000 price money, he bought some hectares of land, enough to allow him to live a life of quiet and prosperous isolation. I wonder what numerologists would have come up with if the rest of the story says, the winner ended up losing everything. What is this ancient lore of numbers that "mystic" like him has a way of manipulating it for their advantage? Pasig City Decemb