How People Respond To Them, Yet Know Them Not¹

 

—for Bino Realuyo

 

A different reality, indeed,²
when some of us just surrender
to the transitions, the evolutions—
windsurfing as business management
acquired as the Tao of service.

The reshaping of nations is best
seen inside foodshops and restos.
Or car washes, new yacht resorts,
the hairdressers’, taxi cabs,
even the industry of a church.

There’s wisdom in waiting, not
reacting to motion, to blurs’
indecisions and risky captures.
"Let things settle on their own,"
that’s just business, nothing forced.

Finesse can come later, ethics
follow communities and employees;
otherwise business ads would
seek to change a stubborn world.
Remember the hamburger in Manila?

Soon people changed lunch habits!
But on their own, without edicts—
in a slow burn to sure acculturation.

 

 

---¹a line from Walt Whitman’s "Beginners".

---²from a sentence in Filipino-American novelist Bino Realuyo’s essay "Life At McDonald’s" ("Letter from New York" column, Flip Magazine, November 2002): " . . . In McDonald’s, I enter La Casa of a Latino family. They live in their own Babel. What they don’t know is that I understand perfectly what they say, the little snide commentaries they make in Spanish about customers who annoy them. I probably annoy them. I also feel sorry for them. Like I felt so sorry for the simians in Planet of the Apes. What a different reality, I say. / One beautiful summer day, I went back to find that the most annoying counter-person of them all had just been promoted Manager of the damn jungle. Oh, what a different reality."

.

 

 

Copyright © 2004 Vicente-Ignacio Soria de Veyra. All rights reserved. Readers are welcome to view, save, file and print out single copies of this webpage for their personal use. No reproduction, display, performance, multiple copy, transmission, or distribution of the work herein, or any excerpt, adaptation, abridgment or translation of same, may be made without written permission from the author. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this work will be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

CLOSE WINDOW