A summer party in the summer of her years

It started Friday, and it started early. Paulita was celebrating her birthday this weekend - let's just say it was still summertime in human age lingo - and we wanted to make it a memorable one. We saw Sin City Comedy at the Mile Long Shopping Mall in Hollywood Palace on the Strip and were treated to a rip-roaring performance by "The Legendary Wit," a comic who has no equal in the world of entertainment.

I perfected the art of the guffaw that night. Paulita did not even comment as she usually does that my laugh-out-loud was too loud. She was hysterical herself. She was laughing so loud I had to take a double, triple, quadruple look.

And it was one rip, one crack after another. The Legendary Wit had done it again.

He takes ordinary items, like a discarded toilet seat in one hand and puts a plastic bull on top of the seat and says, "Bulls__t!" He reverses the order, putting the toilet seat above the plastic bull and says, "Holy Cow."

He cradles two plastic white lambs in his sweaty armpits and says, "Silence of the Lambs." He takes a string of baby dolls and puts military helmet above them and says, "Infantry."

He puts some plastic grapes over a toy airplane and calls it "Concorde."

He asks some in the audience what their favorite movies are. One of them says "Pulp Fiction" so he wraps himself in a picture of trees - from which paper (pulp) is manufactured and rubs his body with the picture and exclaims: "Pulp Friction."

He just went on and on, non-stop for about thirty minutes as the audience guffawed.

Friends were waiting at the night club in Gold Coast on Flamingo but since Paulita and I got out of the theater at 10:30 and didn't make it home until 11:00, I called our friends and told them we couldn't make it anymore. Paul had refused to go to bed until he actually saw us home. He was still up and playing Halo 3 with his internet friend when we got home.

We usually don't celebrate Paulita's birthday because it's so close to August 8. Our daughter Natasha was born on 8/8/88 (August 8, 1988) and over the years August 8 was always a special midsummer day for us and our friends.

People looked forward to August 8 because it was an opportunity for a spell from the dog days of summer. People made plans to attend our daughter Natasha's birthday party year in and year out.

Our friends simply forgot that before August 8 there was July 19, which was Paulita's birthday.

Natasha is in college and would rather celebrate her birthday with her friends in LA. So this opened up the door for Paulita just a wee bit. Last Thursday I decided that it was time we celebrated Paulita's birthday.

It was a small group, just a few close friends, but we made sure that everyone would have fun.

First, I asked our friend Bobit to bring beer (he brought Heinekens) and the ladies had margaritas throughout the evening. We asked everybody to sing, but it was a motley crew, so most were too embarrassed to sing in front of people they did not know.

I waited for people to go to the backyard so I could execute my Great Plan for the evening. I was going to lure Paulita to the pool and push her in and watch as all hell broke loose, with people peeling off their clothes (not all) and jumping in.

We never went outside.

We'll do it next time. Summers are long in Las Vegas.

And it was not even Paulita's birthday yet. Her birthday is today, Sunday, and we have tickets to Tickled Pink at the Harmon Theater for an extended but quiet celebration.

Religion in the Rockies

My wife and I both grew up in Catholic schools. We had Religion up to the gazoos. Ask me or my wife anything about our religion and we can respond with a 32-page dissertation.

Our son Paul, however, is a product of the public schools and has had only scattered religious instruction, just enough to get him through First Communion. My wife and I both plan on enrolling Paul in Bishop Gorman High School in Las Vegas, a great Catholic school and the stopover for many aspiring young athletes in Nevada.

On the way to Zion National Park in southwestern Utah last weekend, we passed by a town called Virgin River. I surmised that the town is called that because Virgin River runs through it.

Paul is one who seizes every opportunity to hold court whenever he is with his parents. He always has our full attention whenever we go on trips, with his mom sitting in front alongside driver-dad and Paul sitting right behind.

"Why is the Blessed Virgin Mary called that? Why not just Blessed Mary? What is a virgin?"

My wife immediately played defense. "Virgin means pure of heart, kind, almost God-like, worthy of being God's mother," she explained, apparently not noticing that she actually defined "Blessed."

I would have attempted a more technical definition of "virgin" but I wasn't sure I would have succeeded in framing it in a way that Paul would appreciate. There are times when I am flummoxed by Paul's questions.

"I was made by God and came out of mommy's tummy, why do I look like you?" he asked.

I said weakly, "when two people get married, the son usually looks like his father and the daughter looks like her mother."

"But Natasha does not look like mommy," Paul said.

My mouth filled with air and I burst out laughing.

Paul's knowledge of his Catholic religion is really spotty. I once asked him, just to test his knowledge, if he knew who Jesus Christ was.

"Yes," he said, "he's the dead guy." I always laugh at Paul's matter-of-fact outrageous statements.

On further reflection I realized that Paul was the wisest of us all. We do in fact depict Christ as the one who died on the Cross for us. All our homes have crucifixes somewhere. Most Filipinos have rosaries with oversized crucifixes hanging from their minivan's rear-view mirrors.

We Catholics are so focused on Christ dying for our sins that most traditional Catholics have the mindset that we all have crosses to bear. We are here on this earth to audition for the Big Luau in the sky by bearing our burdens, being Christ-like.

I find it strange, but also refreshing, that my son - my youngest - does not know his religion and is learning it in drips and drabs at his own pace. I would rather that he learns his religion that way. Force-feeding religion to a child is the surest way to raise agnostics.

When children grow up and rebel, one of the institutions that they start to question and eventually reject is their childhood religion.

Paul was in a Halo 3 XBox 360 match and conversation with his classmate when he came to me and asked me if we were Christians or Catholics. I said matter-of-factly we were Catholics.

"All this time Paul did not know we were Catholics?" I thought to myself.

"Why do we sing Osama Bin Laden in Church?" he asked me and his mom after Church one Sunday afternoon.

I said, "we don't sing Osama Bin Laden."

Then he sang, "Osama Bi-in Laden" to the tune of "Hosanna in the highest."

Our mouths exploded in laughter.

When we passed the town of Virgin River again on our way back from Zion, Paul asked me, "Dad, why did you laugh when I asked you what virgin means?"

I said, "I didn't laugh."

"You laughed. I saw your cheeks get puffed up," he said.

Where did the Siberian Tiger come from?

Friends and relatives who blow into town are surprised that Paulita and I haven't seen many of the shows in Vegas that people from all over the world fly into McCarran airport to see. I tell them that we Vegans are usually not in a vacation mindset when we are in Vegas. The dry cleaning, the kid to be picked up from school, the grocery shopping, the trips to Blockbuster - all these are the more pressing business that we have to do. Seeing shows like Love, The Jersey Boys, Celine Dion, etc. have not been our priorities.

For me and Paulita, however, the biggest reason probably has been that we spent many years in New York and were spoiled by Broadway. We came to Vegas in 2007 thinking that the Vegas shows were somehow inferior to the Broadway originals. It was only recently that we realized that Vegas shows are on par with Broadway's and that Vegas entertainment offers greater variety.

The last Broadway show I've seen was the Phantom of the Opera. I saw it with my wife and my mom, who was visiting New York at the time, at the Paramount Theater. My sister-in-law, Imelda, who had bought the tickets for us, said that they were good tickets, but when we three got to the theater, we found ourselves sitting at the second-to-the last row in nosebleed section.

I remember my knees going marshmallow soft just from my looking down at the stage. If the Paramount theater had not been carved out of the interior of the high-rise office building in New York, our seats would have been on the sixth floor. That was how high our seats were.

I always carried xanax in those days because I had some medical issues and panicked whenever I felt an onset of the symptoms. So I took one xanax pill which managed to calm me down but it made me a little woozy.

At the intermission, my mom asked: "Where's the hunchback?" I burst out laughing and immediately forgot about my vertigo.

"Mom," I said, "this is Phantom of the Opera, not the Hunchback of Notre Dame."

My mom was very appreciative of her Broadway treat, of course, because she had seen so few Broadway shows in her life. But being so far away from the stage, maybe Mom could not hear much of the dialogue. It was clear to me, however, that she was having a hard time fitting the action and the setting into what she thought she was watching. She obviously thought that the heroine in Phantom, Christine, was actually La Esmeralda in Hunchback.

A relative of ours, whom I would not name to protect her mother's reputation, took her mother to a Miss Saigon Broadway performance when the star of the show was still Lea Salonga. As we all know, Miss Saigon is about a prostitute in Vietnam who falls in love with an American serviceman. Many of the characters in the play are scantily-clad Vietnamese prostitutes and the full regalia of their wares are on display onstage.

Seeing the scantily-clad women on stage, our relative's mother - who was sitting in the third row and had a close-up view of the actors - kept uttering in obvious disapproval, Hmmm! Hmmm! (pronounced Hoom, Hoom). The actors - mostly Filipinas - were looking at the woman and were clearly wondering, what's wrong with that old woman.

The relative of ours said she swore that she would never take her mother to a Broadway show again. And if anybody paid her to bring her mother to the show, she would put her in the nosebleed section.

Last Father's Day, Paulita and I took our son Paul to the Barnum and Bailey Circus show in the Orleans Arena in Vegas. I had no idea that circus shows had evolved. Barnum and Bailey is not your traditional circus show. It is now a spectacular that even adults find entertaining.

A man goes into a cage, the crew puts a blanket over the cage, the cage is spun around, and when the blanket over the cage is removed, the man is gone and there is a Siberian Tiger in it. Where did the guy go and where did the Tiger come from?

They can make people disappear and reappear in the rafters within seconds.

My wife and I bought a sword for Paul that Paul asked one of the clowns, Surly Muscles (Sean Davis), to autograph. Later Paul asked us if Surly Muscles was famous.

"Yes, Surly Muscles is famous," I assured Paul.

"As famous as Tiger Woods?" he asked.

Top Ten Reasons Seniors Can't Work at In-N-Out

I was wondering why there were so many people, so many cars all the time at this one In-N-Out Burger place on Tropicana Avenue near the Strip in Las Vegas. I was naturally curious, as any retiree with lots of time on his hands would be curious.

"Why is that place packed all the time?" is the logical question.

No longer able to resist the temptation to gulp down In-N-Out's double-double, I finally took my wife and kid last year to that In-N-Out place on Tropicana by the Strip and like everybody else, placed our order and sat and sat and sat. You can't call a restaurant a fast-food place, I guess, if you have to wait up to half an hour to get your order to go.

There we were, waiting for what felt like half an hour - I'm sure it was less time than that. I hate long lines, especially at the supermarket where there's always a fat woman who must rummage through her pocketbook to find the right coupons to give to the checker. My wife tells these really hilarious stories about my reactions whenever I'm held up at the checkout counter by a fat woman who can't find her discount coupons.

Yet, there I was, calm and collected, minus the usual feelings of anxiety and restlessness and slow boil because everybody else was waiting for what must feel like, for them, their last meal after losing a fortune in Vegas.

What is taken to Vegas, stays in Vegas.

"This is where all those who lost all their money in the casinos go for their lunch or early dinner, and that is why it is always full," I thought to myself.

Since our first adventure in In-N-Out last year, I have since found out that that particular In-N-Out location holds the distinction of being the biggest selling In-N-Out location in the universe. That In-N-Out outsells the next best selling In-N-Out outlet by a mile.

I have noticed this about In-N-Out employees. They are all neatly dressed, smart-looking in their white uniforms, complete with a white soda jerk hat for the guys and red baseball caps for the gals. They all look like college students with a future. Of course, this could also be said about employees in most fast food restaurants. Rarely will you ever find dead-enders serving you who, if they are not old, will most likely grow old in their jobs. In McDonald's case, all the female employees look like jail bait.

Speaking of age, I was sitting there watching those young, college student-looking employees methodically put ketchup, mustard, a few slivers of onions, lettuce and tomatoes on top of hamburger patties that are separated by probably the best cheese slices in the universe, sprinkle the whole mix with the In-N-Out special sauce to come up with the most desirable burgers in the western United States. Paris Hilton goes to In-N-Out whenever she craves burgers, and I'm not following this up with any hamburger patty jokes.

I have fun watching the white-and-red clad employees put together what must be a couple of hundred (exaggeration) double-doubles over the nearly half hour that I wait every time I go to that In-N-Out Burger place on Tropicana. And they never get tired.

This has led me to believe that they are aware they make probably the best-tasting double cheeseburgers in the world for under $3.

My mind wanders. What if I or any other senior is doing that job? Could we do it? No way, I say to myself.

The Top Ten Reasons we seniors cannot put together the Double-Double cheeseburger at In-N-Out:

10. We can't work while standing anymore; we need a desk.

9. We can't work for fifteen minutes without taking a bathroom break.

8. We probably will forget to wash our hands on at least one of those bathroom breaks.

7. We will constantly reach for a tissue to blow our nose.

6. There will be an avalanche of complaints when we pass gas.

5. We will create a personnel crisis when we accidentally brush against co-workers of the opposite sex.

4. We will look like customers instead of employees.

3. We will bitch about the low wages.

2. We can't take orders from our 19 year old boss.

1. Our falling hair will end up in the burgers.

Michado and Opus Dei

When my sister Loida and her family visited us here in Las Vegas recently, we caught up at the Goldilocks Restaurant on Maryland Parkway. She really loved the chicharon bulaklak, the crispy-fried pusit, the sisig and the lumpiang sariwa.

Loida suddenly remembered our mother's lumpiang sariwa, which is probably the best lumpiang sariwa that all of us siblings have ever had in our lives. Loida then proceeded to talk about Mom's cooking. "One beef-in-tomato-sauce our mom cooks very well is...is...is..." Loida was going through a TOT (tip of the tongue) phenomenon. I offered, apritada? No, Loida said, not apritada. Paulita offered caldereta? Is it menudo? We went through a litany of dishes that are made with beef and tomato sauce. "No, that's not it," Loida rejected them all.

So she called our sister Linda on her cell phone. Linda immediately said, "michado." Yes, that's right, my mom's michado was the favorite dish that we Lumba kids grew up on.

Luckily for all of us Lumbas, our TOT is not a precursor to Alzheimer's. My mom is 96, very lucid, still handing out nuggets of wisdom to her 20+ grandchildren, whose names she can still remember. On our father's side, no one has ever come down with Alzheimer's. Of course, no one in our father's family has lived long enough to have Alzheimer's.

My mother is the mother lode of all Lumba TOTs. I remember Mom visiting my and Paulita's South Orange, New Jersey home and having lots of conversations at the kitchen table.

In one such conversation, Mom told us about her favorite granddaughter's activities aside from tennis. Mom told us that she took Jeri to a dance school twice a week when Jeri was six all the way to her early teens.

"What did she study at the school?" asked Paulita.

"She danced, twirled and jumped.," said Mom.

"Oh, did she study modern dance?" "No," said Mom, "what do you call that dance where the dancers have special shoes?"

"Oh, she must have studied tap-dancing," offered Paulita. "No," said Mom, "it's very common, a lot of little girls study that dance."

"Jazz, hip-hop, break dancing?" Paulita was clearly into this, like a Scotland Yard sleuth trying to solve a mystery.

They went on and on until, exhausted, both gave up.

After a couple of hours or so, Mom came back down to the kitchen and announced to Paulita, who was cleaning up after feeding Paul: "Ballet."

I got a call once from a brother who asked me for the right word to use. He described the word as subjunctive, not actual. It was at the tip of his tongue, he said. I asked him, "Is it hypothetical?"

"That's the word," he said, and hung up.

During that lunch Paulita and I had with Loida, we talked about our siblings and complained to each other about how some of our siblings had calcified in their philosophies and mindsets. We talked about a brother of ours who clearly is now a member of the ultra-conservative religious wing of the Republican Party.

"How did our brother become like that?" Loida asked.

I said, "Well, all his lifetime friends are like that. They're all conservative Clinton-hating, Obama-baiting stalwarts of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. Many of them are former, if not still current members of...." I stopped, having my own TOT experience.

I struggled and struggled and couldn't find the word. I offered a hint, "You know, the club referred to in The Da Vinci Code?"

Paulita said, "you mean the Priory of Sion?"

No, I said, it was the organization on the other side. We searched and scoured our memory baskets, and all was in vain.

When I finally opened the door of the car after parking it in the Self-Parking garage of Harrah's casino on the Strip, I remembered.

"Opus Dei," I said.

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.