After we had ordered our food, I asked, "Excuse me, Mireille, I've forgotten some of my French. Is it correct to say, 'Vic a épousé?' or 'Vic est marié?'"
"What?" she asked. "Oh! J'ai entendu."
Mireille is the daughter of my French teacher Mme. Ferrari and, like Christine, was crowned Ms. IS in her senior year. She's now happily married to Danny, a writer and former AP correspondent, and expecting her first child.
Whereas Christine is queen, I see Mireille as a modern-day Juliet: What's in a name? that which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.
We had lovely memories of high school, when things seemed simpler.
Every Valentine's Day, there would be a rose sale and boys and girls would buy flowers for friends, teachers, and of course people we liked. In my junior year, I liked one of Mireille's classmates, a new student named Geni Psinakis. As a professional model and entrepreneur, she has been gracing the pages of magazines these past couple of years, but back then she was just a new kid on the block.
Anyway, that year, I bought three pink roses, but I wasn't used to giving flowers to someone I liked. I tried the indirect approach: I went to Mireille's math class and gave two flowers to her; a couple of minutes later, I passed by their classroom again to give one pink rose with a note to Geni.
I thought that was the end of our tale, but that afternoon while hanging out outside the Media Center someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned around and it was Geni, her pink rose in hand and beaming a luminous smile.
"Thank you." That was all she said before walking away to her own constellation, but it was a most memorable Valentine's for me.
Thank you to Chin-chin Gutierrez for the song "Pagbabalik ng Mutyang Paraluman" ("The Lady Returns") from her Mater Vitae sampler CD in the podcast.
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