Let’s get one of these and wrap it around our necks and declare: Everything is all right with the world.

Because it is and the jeepney drivers know it. After taking in all the stress of traffic and carbon monoxide, nothing soothes their tapang usa napes better than this strip of barely woven cotton. The Good Morning Towel is the sheer perfection of the utility function; it serves its purpose of providing comfort and security far better than the girls riding shotgun in the patok jeepneys can.

How could a piece of cloth so flimsy be so useful?

I’d say it’s magic. It’s Chinese Black Magic.

Think about it: the towel is so loosely put together you could practically see through it and yet the damn thing can absorb the sweat of the entire Baseco Compound (whether they actually work or play bingo in the afternoon). And then after, wring it good and the juice of suffering is drained just like that. It’s dry again and the daily toil continues.

Those Chinese characters they have there—it hasn’t changed in generations. I asked Chaps, our Chinese guy on the FHM online staff what it means and he said it means what the towel actually is: Morning Greetings.

And what about the no. 96 in the middle that appears to be a logo of some sort?

I conducted my own online research and found nothing.

It could be anything: Ninety six grade cotton. Ninety six yuan a week paid to laborers who made them. Jeepney drivers necks equivalent to 96 grade sandpaper. Nueve-sais tumbok—what you should be betting now on jueteng if you want a handsome payoff.

But what I did find on the Net: A blogger from Malaysia and Singapore waxing nostalgic about the towels. How back in the days of their youth, every doctor, dentist, and barber kept them handy (presumably to keep violent blood flow in check).

Which got me thinking, it’s probably the same with me. Not the blood flow, although the doctor who circumcised me was a WWII relic, so surely he must have had them lying around with the gauzes.

No, these are good memories.

I remember those towels back in 1980. I was five, and my Lolo Solano used to have a masseur come to his house on Sundays.

This masseur did not look anything like the masseurs we have now. He looked like Leonard Nimoy as Spock but his hair wasn’t real. It was a wig. And it looked more like Moe’s. He wore doctor’s whites and carried with him those storybook black doctor’s bags.

And he had rolls of Good Morning Towels.

Lolo Solano kept a lot of those towels around the house. He’d always asked me to drape one of those on his mottled back—before I proceeded to file his calloused feet with grade 1500 sandpaper.  On TV, I think there was Little House on the Prairie.

Everything was all right with the world.