DARK clouds lurk even in the sunny byways of small talk.

Like when you feel cold in the heat of a careless comment.

Sun.Star accepts donations for victims of Typhoon Ondoy

It happened to me halfway through a “kumustahan” with a “kababayan” after our grocery carts bumped along the way between the shelves at Wal-Mart. Of course, such encounters among expats, in the light of our mutual displacement, would sometimes get under the weather of news back home. Even as she worried about her family who barely survived the flood in Manila, she also offered sympathies for my father’s recent death.

To stir the ripples of doom a bit far from my own sense of sinking, I told her about a friend in Cebu whose grief is deeper than mine after his young daughter succumbed to dengue. No need to gnash one’s teeth over storms, I told her, when mosquito bites are enough to swallow many families in sorrow.

Hardly the stuff of pleasantries, my friend’s American husband thought as though tales about serial killers in the guise of typhoons and mosquitoes are more than he could bear. And so, as if to comfort both his wife and me, he piped in: “Ain’t you guys lucky for bein’ here.”

Tough luck, I bantered back. Danger is democratic, after all. You don’t have to be a Third World citizen to feel vulnerable. Even the world’s most powerful nation, I told him, has been restless about swine flu in the same breath as any terrorist threat. And he may as well wish with me the government’s debacle in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina won’t ever happen again. Or, let there be no missing American children whose photos are posted near the door of every Wal-Mart outlet.

He alliterated about poverty and the Philippines and its twin crocodiles of graft and corruption. I could only chuckle, but only because they’re so companionable with the sharks in Washington and Wall Street.

Not a laughing matter, however, and certainly not to be trifled with is the tidal wave of joblessness that continues to leave a lot of Americans belly up after the recession. Recurrent, too, are reports about suicides. And even if their spirits are not roaming restlessly, many are still spooked in the wake of America’s economic nightmare. Not the least of whom are billionaires in the doldrums despite their dollars.

“It's been a tough year for the richest people in the world,” begins a story in a recent issue of Forbes Magazine. “Last year there were 1,125 billionaires. This year there are just 793 people rich enough to make our list. The world has become a wealth wasteland.”

Aren’t we all in the same boat, in this hardship with which we reel and roll along uncertain tides? Is a state of calamity what’s happening only on the heels of a disaster? If so, what were we in then before authorities left us to fend off for ourselves, before the wind howled, the water rampaged, and the survivors wailed amid the silence of the dead?

But such dramatic questions, of course, are more suited for a stagey monologue with thunder and lightning at the background instead of the chatter of shoppers in a grocery store.

Long after my American friend and his Filipina wife finally fade me goodbye with their “see-you-soon” parting shot, I wish we will concur with an agreeable repartee and arrive, with one of my favorite quotations, at the same conclusion: “Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.”

(geemyko@gmail.com)