Good Things Happen Sometimes

About 4pm last Sunday, a young lady came to see me. We'd met a few days before, at Nine Bar, just down the road, where she told me she was looking so sad because the obnoxious, loud Australian making an egregious nuisance of himself at the other side of the room was her boyfriend. On Sunday, she came to me for some more some sympathy.

Well, what could I do, but invite her to take refuge? She's been here ever since. Her name is quite unique; Shedney; but then Filipino names are often a little eccentric. But she's a delight; a very modest young lady, who really can cook, and smiles continuously, with wonderfully large eyes. Yes, I'm sure she's got a bad side, somewhere, but I haven't seen it yet.

Yesterday I was driving, fairly carelessly, (a rented pick-up, for the first time in a year) when we hit a ramp between a newly-concreted stretch of road and the old rock/gravel/sand surface, just a little too fast. The poor girl was thrown up into the air, hit both the windscreen and ceiling, and came back down with a noticeable frown. Two minutes later, she was smiling again, and pointing out flowers and trees along the way.

Right now, she's making lambay (swimmer crab) pancakes. We got the crabs from her mother, in Union, a small town just down the coast; you have to get there by a roundabout route, because the bridge across the entrance to the mangroves has not been repaired for more than 20 years.

And the reason she's getting a corn-row hairdo from Eyeh the bayut? Well, I happened to come across a picture of one of those wonderful Benin bronze heads just the very same day, that reminded me of someone.