Ja-Bo, Ja-Bo, Ja-Bobo

My then 9-year-old son Paul, my wife and I stayed at my brother's house in Portland, Oregon for my mother's 95th birthday celebrations last year. Each morning, while most of us in the household were having breakfast, my brother's dad-in-law would come down to join us.

He was always the last one down because he always went through a litany of prayers in his room before he would venture down.

Every time he came down the stairs he sang a song that nobody recognized. It was always the same song, started with "Ho, ho, ho," and quickly descended to an incantation that sounded like gibberish cobbled together. And his voice reverberated.

Paul, after a few days of observing this, asked his mom: "Is grandpa Santa Claus? Why does grandpa sing that song?'

My wife quickly shushed him, "Old people are like that. And don't worry, your dad will soon be old too."

"Will my dad also sing that song?" Paul asked.

I don't know why, but the old people I grew up knowing were all fond of talking gibberish.

My own maternal grand-dad was a champion user of gibberish. His favorite target for his brand of gibberish was my younger brother Amado. Every time our family visited his house, he would make it a point to call Amado, "Amato putoto puto." He seemed to take delight in being able to call him that. He had a name for all of us, his grandchildren. Mine was not particularly memorable and that is why I can't remember what it was he called me.

I think the old people in my family use gibberish as a way to let off steam. They do not want to voice out their frustrations over their lifetimes for fear of revealing too much of themselves. So they spew out gibberish.

I tend to conclude that about them because I have become, myself, a serial user of gibberish in my advancing years.

My all-time favorite is "Ja-Bo, Ja-Bo, Ja-Bobo." I started using this in my mid-fifties. I might be driving my car, deep in my own thoughts, then suddenly I would remember an embarrassing episode in my life and I would blurt out "Ja-Bo, Ja-Bo, Ja-Bobo."

At first, my kids who were riding in the back would burst out laughing. My wife would explain to them that I had just remembered something very embarrassing and that I was reliving the pain.

My wife would then turn to me and announce the cause of my outburst. "You just remembered 'I've got you under my skin,' didn't you?"

I once sang "I've got you under my skin" in front of about 300 people in an auditorium after being introduced by the emcee as the Frank Sinatra of the La Salle Alumni Association in New York. It started out well, but soon after it all went downhill. I could not hear the melody. The speakers were on the floor, directed towards the audience, while I was on the stage, well behind the speakers.

The technical people in charge of the sound system were motioning to me to speed up my singing because I was not synchronized with the melody. So I sped up. When I finished, the music was still playing. I knew immediately that I had sung "I've got you under my skin" out of tempo.

For a couple of weeks I had nightmares about that performance. Every time I remembered that fiasco I felt so small and would release the tension that had suddenly built up within me by saying out loud, "Ja-Bo, Ja-Bo, Ja-Bobo."

This became an inside joke in my family.

I was active in the Toastmasters movement for many years in the 1990s and 2000s and represented my club in many speech contests. Once, in an area finals, I thought I had done very well and was particularly proud of my speech. There were three contestants in those finals, held after hours in the City Council chambers at the Jersey City, New Jersey City Hall.

When the decision was announced, the chairman of the judges started with the third-placer (out of three contestants). When he said "Cesar Lumba" I literally jumped from my seat. I think I levitated briefly over my seat, did not immediately stand up. I was trying to process what had just happened. It was the most embarrassing moment of my life at Toastmasters.

Every time I remembered this I would blurt out, "Ja-Bo, Ja-Bo, Ja-Bobo." The sure-fire way to relive the embarrassment was to drive by the Jersey City City Hall on my way to Holland Tunnel going into New York City.

My daughter was fifteen at the time and she worshipped the singing group "NSync" because of Justin Timberlake. She had a crush on him, best I could remember. She was listening to her I-Pod, with a headset plugged to her ears. She noticed that we were practically in front of the Jersey City City Hall and she warned me not to scream: "I'm listening to my I-pod, don't make any noise, not even Ja-Bo, Ja-Bo, Ja-Bobo."

She beat me to the punch.

I think I am coming to terms with my recollections of faux pas, lost opportunities, idiotic statements, bonehead decisions over the years. I don't remember saying "Ja-Bo, Ja-Bo, Ja-Bobo" over the past year.

I do, occasionally suddenly blurt out - especially when I'm quietly reading my newspaper in the breakfast nook of our house - "Champion Boy." My son, who is now ten, will drop everything that he is doing in the media room upstairs and ask, "Dad, did you call me?"

I call him "Champion Boy" I think because I want him to be good in sports and not be a frustrated athlete like me. My parents made me stop playing basketball when I was 13 because of a false alarm about my heart. I stopped in mid-season during my La Salle midgets team's championship run.

I was one of the stalwarts on that team that was fondly called "Murderers Row" because we blew away most of our opponents. The opening game of the 1954 Archdiocesan Athletic League was the midgets game between La Salle and Ateneo. We drubbed Ateneo, 44-28. I was the top scorer with 14 points.

Naps We Seniors Take

You see old people everywhere nowadays - in athletic clubs lifting weights, in dance studios learning the Argentine Tango and dancing the fox trot, you see them even on racquetball courts, tennis courts and baseball fields. And of course on the country's many golf courses.

One place where you don't want to see many seniors is the swimming pool. Seniors and swimming pools are not a healthy combination. Since there is no way of telling which seniors are wearing Depends and which aren't, I have made it a point not to swim in a pool where most of the swimmers, waders and bathers are seniors.

Seniors in swimming pools, however, are not really what I want to talk about today.

What I really want to talk about is the various kinds of naps that we seniors take. We seniors are more active than the generations of seniors that preceded us. Talk of the fountain of youth, with today's maintenance medicines for high blood pressure, diabetes, heart ailments, etc. we seniors can go on indefinitely with our active lifestyles and rarely miss a beat.

That, I guess, is why most seniors today do not know that they are old. We make demands on our bodies almost to the level that we did thirty years ago. There are some activities that we stay away from, like basketball and brawling, which are always a prescription for a heart attack or stroke. But other than those two super-strenuous activities, there's hardly any activity that we cannot engage in.

We strain, we push, we make demands on our bodies that older generations of seniors never attempted. That alone probably accounts for why we take frequent naps.

I have made out a list of the various kinds of naps that I regularly take.

Let's start with the morning nap. This is the cadillac of all naps. Waking up at 4:30 in the morning - we seniors are notorious for early rising routines - I immediately go to my PC and do all my correspondence on the internet. I take breakfast, read the papers, watch a little TV and by 10:00 a.m. I'm ready for my first nap of the day.

This is the most delicious of all naps. Most of the blood in my system is in my stomach digesting my breakfast, almost no blood is in my brains, and I can feel my body going limp.

It may be hot in Las Vegas - up to 120 degrees in summer - but I have to have a blanket over me. That's because the airconditioning is on, and one of life's greatest frustrations is never finding the right temperature to set the airconditioning system to. It's either nipple-rousing cold, or sweat-under-the-covers warm. There's almost never the just-right temperature setting.

So I sleep under the covers. And I'm out like a log until the blasted phone rings. Usually it's my wife calling to find out if I had not forgotten to place my ten-year-old Paul's homework back in his book bag. Once in a while there are important calls - like from the Social Security Office asking me if I had mailed in the form that they had sent me. So, not knowing if the call is important or unimportant, I jump out of bed to chase the call.

The second, most-frequent nap I take is the five-minute nap while watching television. I rent a lot of DVDs from Blockbuster because I am set up for the unlimited rentals on a fixed monthly fee. So I make it a point to have DVDs ready to watch every time. I don't know what it is about television. I could be watching a very exciting, suspenseful movie but somehow, someway I just black out right in the middle of the action - usually right in the middle of the chase, when the good guys finally zero in on the bad guys. I wake up to see the bad guys in handcuffs and the good guys are congratulating each other.

Thanks to whoever invented the DVDs, I can rewind and find the spot where I fell asleep and watch the movie. I don't mind that I already know how it ends because I have always known that the good guys always catch the bad guys in the end. When I watch an action movie, the suspense is in finding out how, and not whether, the bad guys will be caught.

When I fall asleep in a movie theater, however, it is far more complicated. I know that I have to wait for the movie to come out on DVD before finding out how the bad guys were caught. Luckily, these days it's only a two to three month wait.

Then there's the stopped-at-the-traffic-light nap. Since we seniors sleep five or six hours at night, we try to catch up on our sleep during the day. There's almost universal agreement among seniors that one of those occasions the senior's body steals a minute of sleep is when the car is at a traffic stop.

Occasionally I get those plague-upon-your-family looks from people I delay at stops. If they're Italian, I get the Italian salute. The guy forms an apex with the tips of his right fingers and thumb, like poles on a tepee, brandishes the apex skyward, while keeping the left hand on the steering wheel.

There's also the combination of the park bench, the rustling leaves of a spring afternoon, the ducks in the pond that induces a lot of seniors to sleep. If there's a slight breeze, the magic of that moment will put many seniors in slumber mode. Usually, this sleep is taken with one eye open, because grandpa or grandma has the little darling playing in the park and must see to the child's safety at all times.

The fifth most common nap is the nodding-of-the-head during church sermons. This is not a particularly senior activity because much younger men succumb to this temptation. But not all young men engage in this, while nearly all senior men do this.

I am talking about men because women do not usually take naps in churches. They listen to the priest's monotone and find meaning in the holy words. Women always seem to think that the priest's words are directed at them even though the priests do not know that they exist. Men assume that the priest's words do not apply to them, so they catch up on their sleep deprivation during those sermons.

I have to figure out a way to impress upon Paul that church-going is important. He can't sit still in church, often goes out to play with kids much younger than him while the Mass is going on. I know that it's hard for me to be an effective mentor on this subject because I am a bad example. I guess Paul figures that if I can take a nap during the sermons, it's ok for him to do the 50-meter-dash with the other kids in the churchyard.

Once, after coming back from a trip to the Philippines, I hit the ground running, driving to my appointments like I had just spent a weekend in LA. I totally forgot that I was seriously jet-lagged. I was making a left turn on an intersection when I momentarily blacked out. It was only for a split second and I recovered immediately. I knew instinctively that I should go home, turn all the lights out and hit the sack. I was out for many hours.

There's also the nap-before-bedtime. Paul insists that either his mom or I should read to him until he falls asleep in his bedroom. When it's my wife Paulita's turn, I know I won't see her till the following morning because she falls asleep before Paul does. When it's my turn, I pretend to be asleep to induce Paul to follow suit. My eyes are closed, I'm not moving, I look like I'm in deep slumber.

The reality is that I'm taking one of those half-naps. My body says tick-tock, tick-tock, the bird's out of the cuckoo clock, but my mind says don't fall asleep here because the bed is not big enough for a child and an adult. I almost always manage to stay awake, slip out of Paul's bed and make my way to the king-size bed in the master's bedroom.