Monday, October 30, 2006

9:59 PM | Great Night

The truth of the matter is, sometimes the unplanned things take on the highest degree of pleasure. A long time ago, during the summer, a bunch of us friends -- Mark, Angeli, Goldy, Charlotte, and probably half of Dumaguete's party crowd -- just congregated into what was for once a cozy El Camino Blanco interior without any real plans from any of us to have a good time, and danced the night away to the intoxicating beat of Banda Manga, this percussion band that knows exactly how to lure people into the dancefloor. (And if there is one thing about Dumaguetenos one should know, it's that it is virtually a challenge to bring anyone to dance at all.) That night sticks in my memory as one of the best night-outs I've had for the longest time. It was all the more fun because we never expected the night to turn out the way it would. Afterwards, there were many other nights when we tried to replicate the sense of gaiety and abandon of that Banda Manga night, always ending in various forms of disappointment.

I guess, the same is true when they also talk about love: it finds you when you don't go around looking for it.

Tonight, while I was dusting off the pad, Mark came along to take me out. I hadn't seen him the whole day. I was off to work after the semi-vacation of the past three weeks. When he dropped by, he was wearing my old blue shirt and my old blue jeans. The guy looks great in my clothes.

"Hi," I said.

"Hey."

"What are you doing here?"

"I promised you a steak dinner some time ago," he said. "We're having filet maitre d'hotel in Le Chalet."

"Now?" I said. I was sweaty. I only had a shirt and skimpy shorts on.

"Now," he said.

So off we went. He had his steak well-done, and I had mine medium-rare. Just once, we wanted to veer away from our usual rare fare, carnivores that we are. It was a grand meal, the beef cut into three tender balls of oozing perfection, every bite of which was smothered with succulent herb butter. We missed the juicy bloodiness of rare steak, however, but no matter. Later, for our nightcap, we dropped by CocoAmigos. Mark had two glasses of martini bianco, and I had one, quickly followed by another glass of Bailey's on Kahlua.

It was a perfect, perfect night.

Unplanned, too. Like the best things in life.

Labels: life

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