The senior partner once mentioned that when he was a law student, these balmy acacia trees were just sapling. I was once told the expanse of the roots of a full-grown acacia tree is wider than a 200-sq.m.-house, its vast network even reaching farther than its canopy of branches and leaves. In one meeting I had to babysit years ago, there was a debate on what to do with the uprooted trees after a typhoon, and the botanists said there was a procedure to reconstruct them and bring them back to life, but it was a laborious and expensive procedure; the engineers said it was not cost-effective, and so, the chain saw workers and carpenters and utility prevailed and they were sawed. And sold, and there were profits. If you look closely at the stump, you could see the rings, each ring equivalent to a year or two, the ridges equivalent to generations. Once when I was the designated driver I took a street inside a residential area and a colleague at the backseat tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Hala, ba’t ka dito dumaan, magagalit si Sir” (“hey watch out why did you take this road, Sir will get angry.”) “Sir” being the senior partner, he was seated in front. And Sir of course said no, it was alright. I said it was a short cut, and asked about it. And my colleagues, impertinent as they were, said that when martial law was declared, Sir who then had a thriving law career in a prestigious law office and who had just been elected locally, was going to get arrested and had to go on self-exile abroad and had to sell his house where he and his family lived and where he had planned on raising his children here on the road that we were passing through. I asked if this was true, and Sir said, well, yes, but it was a long time ago and it was alright, and my impertinent colleagues said, see, you would soon find tears welling up his eyes, they were ribbing him, and he was of course alright and he just said that he was sad that he never got back that same house because he liked living here. Once I used to ride home with friends, and the designated driver, our boss, always made the mistake of making a right turn at a certain entrance when we were supposed to go in the opposite direction. Every time. So we had to maneuver a U-turn in the middle of that road every time. I asked why he was always making a right turn when we’ve taken this route many times and we had to go left, and my friends ribbed him that maybe it was an old habit, because to the right was the building where his ex-wife used to work a decade ago, they’ve been separated even before he was detained and they have children but they didn’t want to be with him. We take the people around us for granted, just because they don’t talk much about themselves, most people who are a little older than us have more interesting tales and far fuller lives. Everybody has a story to tell. Just like these trees.
