Our Life: Unsung Days I

1. The Red Rider

Prism Vista City, 2006.

It was a Saturday. Breakfast was finished about half an hour ago, and the table had been cleared up. Yet the husband and wife remained there, seated across each other with mixed feelings.

At length, Tamara Greenfields, the wife, sighed. Currently in her mid-thirties, she was likewise slim and spirited. "So. It's been what, a whole decade now?"

"It has, yes," came her husband's careful reply. "Honestly? I enjoy quieter times like these, when we could talk so freely to and of each other."

"You and your sentiments." Tamara smiled thinly, her sharp, intelligent blue eyes gazing at him with a touch of that fondness which she'd nurtured well over the years. "That said, Randy... yeah, you're not wrong there. Really been a wild ride, it has."

"Wild ride." Randy chuckled, placing his own head on his steepled fingers and peering at her from the perch. "Aptly said. Considering how other families sharing our circumstances might not have lasted as long, though, I say we ought to be thanking God while we're at it, Tamara."

She nodded slowly. Ten arduous years of marriage it had been, with eight of them--and counting--being spent alongside Saka, their rambunctious only son. So far. "I've not forgotten to."

Tamara took another good look at the love of her life--Garendi (a name which, after quite a few mystified attempts to properly pronounce it, she had watered down to just 'Randy'), a mere credit-transfer student when they'd first met.

Back then, she had majored in literature and culture. Out of several culture-specific classes concerning Oriental countries (including those of China, Japan and India), she'd elected to attend the class examining Indonesian culture--being, to her, the country that had some of the friendliest people, with among the most-attractive tourist spots in the world to boot.

What first gave rise to this opinion had been her prior visit to two locations there as a high-schooler alongside young Keenan, both as part of a family midsummer tour; firstly to Sanur Beach in Bali, and then to Yogyakarta (a 'Special Region', as the brochures would have it, within the country).

While in Bali, she had been delighted to find herself mingling with so many other foreign nationals; the pristine beaches there had likewise left deep and favorable impressions.

In Yogyakarta, meanwhile, their local guide had asked one night whether it would please her family to watch a Javanese puppet show known as the 'wayang'. The girl had eagerly agreed, though she'd dozed off halfway through the six-hour show.

Later, she found out to her pleasant surprise that in Indonesia, people of five different faiths (all officially acknowledged by the state) could and did coexist as and like long-time neighbors.

This singular discovery would prove fateful.

At some point during a session of guest-lecture in her fourth semester, Tamara had actually gotten to try playing one of the Javanese musical instruments, the gamelan.

As her instructor further explained with some detail how said instrument was ordinarily played in tandem with so many others during the display of a certain Javanese puppet show known as the 'wayang', the girl had unabashedly squealed right then at some of her fondest memories' proverbial dots getting reconnected... despite her at-best-mediocre results in the immediate tests.

Such results had, in the meantime, prompted her to try to find a peer who might help out.

That was how she'd come to know Randy: a native Javanese of average height and wiry build, with brown skin tone, black hair and eyes, and sparse black moustache; who was, incidentally, quite adept at cooking some of his native cuisine (the rendang and the rawon quickly becoming her favorites over the years). He'd likewise undertaken to show her some of the wayang figures, their names, and their perceived backstories. Such intermezzos had helped them to grow personally closer and closer...