annamanila's

Cagayan de Oro, a week before the deluge

2011-12-28T23:17:00.001+08:00

“In this season of love and kindness, think Cagayan de Oro”

My last night in Cagayan de Oro City last December 10 was a memorable one – and not only because it was raining furiously.

I arrived in CDO, as it is sometimes called, five days before to fair weather. The friendly cab driver, who took me from Lumbia airport to my hotel, however, said it had been raining intermittently all week. He also complained about the pre-holiday traffic, especially in the part of town where I was bound for – near Gaisano Mall.

I spent the next days talking with entrepreneurs in the city, carefully selected for their innovative ways of doing business. I was doing field research for a book on “Product Strategies of Micro and Small Enterprises” to be published by my office, the Small Enterprises Research and Development Foundation. A wonderful excuse for visiting Cagayan de Oro again, if you ask me.

I haven’t told you yet Cagayan de Oro is my favorite city in the South, have I? I have been there thrice before and my experience left no doubt its tagline as “The City of Golden Friendship” is not just empty sloganeering to promote tourism. Its people are gentle and genteel, warm and hospitable, and yes … always smiling. When they say “kamusta ka,” they actually wait for you to answer! Most of the people I talked with during that trip would pick me up at my hotel and take me back or, if I was going someplace else, bring me to my next destination. I always came away with gifts of their products in spite of my lame protests “I don’t want any freebies, just discounts.”

One of my best and most admirable friends is from CDO. Her name is Loreta Rafisura , a handmade paper maker, social entrepreneur, Fair Trade champion, poet and writer I met on my first visit there some 12 years ago. She is a survivor of two episodes of cancer, the reason, I surmise, she is always in a joyful and thankful mode, constantly looking for ways to reach out to the poor, like putting up a library and computer center for them. We call each other kindred spirits, which flatters me no end. Loreta is why a trip to Cagayan de Oro is to me always something devoutly to be wished for. In this last visit, she coordinated all my meetings with other business women -- Vivian Libao, abaca bag maker of Puyo fame; Esmer Gabutina who has wonderful ways with sinamay; and Litlit Mejia who parlayed her mom's home-based ham making venture into a modern, globally-competitive manufacturing industry-cum-restaurant chain known as SLERS.

There are other reasons I love Cagayan de Oro and nurture the secret wish to retire there someday. It is climatically well situated, being outside the typhoon belt. The temperature is almost never harsh, but fairly cool, at an average of 28 degrees centigrade.

It is also one of the most progressive cities in Mindanao, with a thriving industry and trade community. Easily the most famous is Cagayan de Oro’s ham-making and meat processing industry, with 40 producers as of last count. No visitor hardly ever leaves Cagayan de Oro without a package or two of jamon de Cagayan, the most popular of which are Oro, Pines, and SLERS brands.

On my third day in the golden city during that recent visit, I took a bus to Iligan City for more interviews and meetings with entrepreneurs. An hour and half’s ride from CDO, Iligan is another beautiful , prosperous and pleasant place – but that is another story. Let me just say that there, again, I was blessed with sunshine plus a gracious host by the name of Danny Capin, a fortunate combination that allowed me, at last, a glimpse at majestic Maria Cristina Falls, which eluded me on my previous visit to Lanao del Norte.

From meeting the grand dame of Iligan, I was driven straight to the bus terminal to go back to Cagayan de Oro, where I would spend a last night before flying back to Manila the following day.

That final evening in CDO was unforgettable – not so much for what happened as for what took place after.

Up to that time, I was having amazingly good luck with the weather. But when it rained, it poured -- torrentially.

From the bus terminal, I took a cab to the Fair Trade store, along Velez Street, where I had deposited the bulk of my luggage for safekeeping. The rain started as I was having a merienda of jamon de cagayan sandwiches with the young ladies manning the store. After shopping there for more items for my Christmas gift-giving, I was ready to go to my new hotel a block away. As the rain didn’t show any sign of relenting, I accepted one of the girls’ offer to accompany me to the hotel with a big umbrella.

I must have been beat – though I didn’t feel it – for as soon as I hit the bed in my hotel room, I fell into deep sleep. It was dark when I woke up and I could hear the rain had slowed down into a drizzle.
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Of flawed dads and errant daughters

2011-06-20T00:46:00.003+08:00

The “mother and child” relationship has been celebrated and idealized so much in art and literature– and yes even in our minds – it almost sounds like a cliché. A mother is so highly revered she is almost deified: the “holiest thing alive” (Samuel Coleridge), “the sweetest sound to mortals given” (William Goldsmith Brown), the one God had to create “because He couldn’t be everywhere at the same time.” (Jewish proverb). In my generation, one of the first songs we learned was the mushy, catchy tune about she“who helped us when we fell and would some pretty stories tell (stories tell) and kissed the place to make it well (it well) …”

Fatherhood is more light-weight stuff. To be sure, dads are treated affectionately, but also often flippantly, sometimes irreverently. A dad is usually remembered for his practical uses: “a banker provided by nature” (French proverb); “ “the provider for all, the enemy of all” (J August Strinberg), someone equivalent “to a hundred schoolmasters” (English proverb); someone who “just has a way of putting things together” (Erica Cosby.) As a child of 14, Mark Twain recalls “an ignorant father” whom he "could hardly stand to have around." “But when I got to be 21,” he hastens to add, “ I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

The physical bond between mother and child is so obviously represented by the umbilical cord. Alas, fathers have no such unassailable ties. They have no wombs to carry their young in, no flowing breasts to suckle and nurture them with; they are deemed to have participated little at human creation except at the exact second of conception. Nowadays, with artificial insemination and upcoming sperm-in-a-dish technology, they need not be physically around at the crucial sperm-meets-egg moment.

The biological gap with fathers is often exacerbated by the patriarch’s traditional role of providing for the family. Dad has to leave home when the sun rises, often when kids are still in bed, and doesn’t come back until nightfall – tired and stressed and hungry and unable to relate to their young in touchy-feely ways except for the perfunctory hug, kiss, and “how was your day, kid?”

And yet, he is expected to be the disciplinarian – the one who should not spare the rod. “Wait till I tell your father you did this and didn’t do that,” a mom would often threaten a misbehaving youngster.

When a marriage flounders and eventually breaks, it is often assumed it is Dad’s fault. He is supposed, often unfairly, to be the one more easily seduced (than moms) by barkada, drinking, gambling, extramarital flings, and other threats to family happiness.

No wonder, Dads, poor dads, are regarded as “provider for all, enemies to all.”

And yet -- what would life be for all of us without our fathers? They can be the sweetest, most indulgent, most protective of all creatures. Come to think of it, families and society in general seem to demand too much of a father. He needs to be strong like Superman, provide like a tycoon, discipline like a Zen guru, show a good moral example like Caesar’s wife. In addition, he should be fun to be with – like Bill Cosby or Dolphy.

My friend has this memory of her father which she calls a “mixed bag of sweet, sour, and bitter.“

“I loved-hated my dad,” she began.

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Ways of skinning the 'CAT'

2011-04-08T14:44:00.004+08:00

Fresh high school graduates are awash with thrills and jitters. Graduation is saying goodbye to the best friend, the barkada, the first love or the current squeeze or crush, the favorite teacher, the beloved campus of their youth. It is turning their backs on childhood and irresponsible ways. It is also the excitement of the senior ball, the battery of final exams, the career orientation seminar. The anticipation of yet another phase of student life: college.

As they get ready for college, there is one major challenge they have to hurdle, one that can send chills down their spines. Will they pass the college entrance tests? Will they get accepted to the universities and courses of their dreams?

How did the successful ones do it? Let’s hear it straight from the winning horses’ mouths:

How they did it

Michelle, who made it through the UPCAT and thence to the University of the Philippines (UP) College of Home Economics a few years ago, said she went through a stoic regimen worthy of military cadets. She made sure she spent at least three hours a day for her self-review. She would rise an hour earlier and go to bed two hours later than her usual waking and sleeping schedule. Saturday was the Great Review Day when she would work from break of dawn to the wee hours of morning. Sundays, however was R’n’R day – she needed that weekly break to unwind and recharge.

As Michelle was a self-reviewer, she bought review manuals from a reputable review center which she mastered with a discipline she didn’t know she had. Not content with that, she prepared detailed outlines for all subjects and exchanged notes with fellow self-reviewers – sometimes by phone, at times by Internet chat, occasionally by meeting together for a combined “group study and social” encounter.

Eric, who passed both Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU) and UP entrance tests but finally enrolled at ADMU, partly because he couldn’t imagine himself cheering for other than the Blue Eagles come UPAA season, believed in the minimalist approach.

He took care to study only subjects he was weak in. A constant essay-writing contest winner and an editor of their school paper, Eric felt confident he could breeze through the English grammar portion of the exam – which he did.

However, he knew Math was his waterloo. Abstract reasoning, too, was almost esoteric to him. Thus, he spent time grilling himself in numbers and abstract-thinking exercises. Weekends, he would go to his uncle’s house in Pasig City (Eric lives in Novaliches, Quezon City) and stay there overnight. The uncle would oblige with lessons Eric calls “algebra for dummies.” “He was better than my Algebra teacher,” he gushes about his uncle “he made finding those elusive X’s easy or at least doable for me even if it took me double the time it would for a regular Math whiz to get it.”

Sam thinks he may have luck on his side. He was a student of the UP Integrated School and weekly UPCAT reviews were integrated into their school calendar. He made it to the State University’s College of Architecture. He reckons that during his time, the passing rate of UP Integrated School graduates was about 70 per cent.

Michelle might have worked as hard as never before. She says her mother was also a sigurista who made her take fish oil and ginkgo bulova capsules, said to be great memory aids. She can’t say whether they worked. But look, she made it to where she wanted to be.

Sam’s mom had her own way of “loading the dice” for her son. She and the whole family stormed the heavens. They lighted candles at the shrine of Our Lady of Manaoag in Pangasinan before the exams and went back to light some more when Sam passed. His mom finished countless rounds of novenas to the Sacred Heart before her son began to take the exams.

To each his own way of “climbing the mountain,” or "skinning the... uhrmm ... CAT."

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The Japanese and I

2011-03-29T01:26:00.003+08:00

A war baby, I was fed, while growing up, with stories about the difficult war years and the uneasy peace of the Japanese occupation.

It should have been easy for me to hate the Hapon but the ambivalent stories impressed upon me made it hard for me to indict them absolutely. Sure, I heard later accounts about “Japanese atrocities “ (why does that phrase sound almost like a cliché?), how the Japanese treacherously bombed Pearl Harbor, how 10,000 Filipino and American soldiers perished in the Bataan Death March, how Japanese soldiers used some Pinays for personal "comfort." But maybe because my immediate family was largely spared of wartime catastrophes, with no one dead nor hurt nor gravely abused, the tales twice told me were mostly benign.

The first story happened on Day 1 of my chequered life.

From Gagalangin, Tondo where we lived to Ermita where the Philippine General Hospital was located was an hour’s distance by karetela (horse-drawn carriage). My long expectant mom, whose time finally had come, would have preferred to be whisked away in a cab for she sensed, by dint of experience, the baby inside her was in a hurry to get out. But alas, taxis were as hard to come by those days as American Spam luncheon meat and Hereford corned beef were hard to buy. Sure enough, whby the time the karetela ho-hooed to a stop, its seats and floor had been splattered with placental blood, with baby’s head already bobbing out. My dad, by then a bundle of nerves, clambered down so hurriedly he almost slipped by the pavement. Who would happen to come by and steady him with a swift hand but a Japanese officer who, summarizing the situation in one sweeping glance, later helped lift anxious mother and half-born infant from out of the carriage into the hospital’s obstetric unit?

When I was a toddler, another friendly Japanese soldier came into my life, or so my Lola loved to tell me. He was a sentry who would pass by our house to and from work. I reminded him of his own daughter whom he sorely missed, he would tell my Lola who subbed as my guardian every time my mom tended her rice store at the talipapa. For the entitlement to pinch my cheeks and make goo-goo eyes at me, the Japanese would give me pieces of bubble gum and candy.

These stories are, of course, third-person accounts but were told and retold so many times I sometimes confuse the memory of the telling with first-hand memory. Actually, it would take about 30 years more before I made my first true Japanese friend.

The Nagoya International Training Center, Nagoya, Japan, where I was sent on a fellowship training on small business promotion by my office in 1974, became both school and home to me for three months.

I arrived at the Center in the early evening after a two-hour trip by shinkansen (bullet train) from Tokyo. The train ride had been pleasant but uneventful and I was reading a pocketbook some of the time -- until we reached tall, snow capped mountain ranges partly hidden by blue gray clouds -- whereupon a couple of Japanese gentlemen suddenly rose from their seats to jolt me away from my book, almost frantically pointing outward. “Look, Fuji, Fuji!” they chimed. Truly, what right had I to bury my nose on a banal story when I could feast my eyes on splendor and majesty just by looking out the window?! I was grateful for the magnificent eyeful, but more than that, I was amazed how proud they were of their Mt. Fuji and – as I found out later -- of many things Japanese.

I fell in love with the Japanese people overnight.

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I was at EDSA, too

2011-02-28T17:44:00.048+08:00

“Who do you think you are -- Gabriela Silang?” my husband snapped, as his eyes swept me over from teased head to 5'1", 98-lb frame to size-4-1/2 feet, when I woke him early and told him we HAD to go to EDSA that Saturday morning 25 years ago.

I hardly slept the night before. I kept vigil with what was happening out there with my ears glued to Radio Veritas. I kept track of the events that stockpiled within hours, ringing if faintly the death knell of a hated regime.

I heard the incredible turns of events unfolding -- blow by blow:

Ramos holing inside Camp Crame. Enrile at nearby Camp Aguinaldo. Both men grimly proclaiming they were ready to die with their ideals intact. FM’s cabinet men coming forward – one by one – publicly resigning from their posts, emphatically renouncing their boss. Butch Aquino imploring the public to join the crowd amassing, nay, snowballing, at EDSA to safeguard the camps and those who sought refuge there. Cardinal Sin urging his flock to leave home and make a stand as a Christian duty.

How could I have slept? For the first time, the dream seemed possible – our liberation from the dictatorship, the end of martial rule, the stop to crony capitalism, massive corruption, the killing of political dissenters (and their disappearances), and other human rights crimes ad infinitum.

(Why I had the radio on that night -- I who hardly ever turned on the set except to find out what was the exact radio time so I could adjust my watch or our clocks – I still cannot explain. My best guess is that Providence wearied of my ambivalence and [divinely] intervened.)

My husband was, of course right. I was no Gabriela Silang. No one would call me feisty, the pipsqueak that I am. I knew deep down I was a mouse, a mouse that wanted to roar, but a mouse just the same. I have this tiny heart that goes out to the poor and the oppressed, but my ass, oh my ass -- it had remained firmly fence-seated and inert and comfortable and very safe.

Ideologically, you might describe me as left of center but as the Marcos rule increasingly strangled not just the economy but also the national psyche, I had veered leftwards more and more. I had also grown more and more restless with my do-nothing ideology.

Months before, I had begun to walk my talk as I joined yellow-confetti rallies and parades in Cubao and Makati as well as the boycott against crony companies.

Still when my husband flatly refused to accompany me to EDSA that Saturday, Feb. 22, 1986, I did little beyond mutter limply about “history in the making and here we are cooling our butts.” Still then a young(ish), unliberated woman, I felt I had no choice but to stay put and vicariously join the crowds by staying tuned to Radio Veritas.

The following morning, Sunday, it was my husband’s turn to wake me with unaccustomed urgency. “Let’s go,” he said. “And bring sandwiches for the soldiers (who were guarding the camps 24/7 and presumably were unfed).

As I was spreading mayo and inserting sweet ham on slices of loaf bread, my husband added: " Don’t forget towels."

Towels? I asked, uncomprehending. Yes, towels, wet towels -- he repeated. It seemed soldiers – those who had not yet defected – were throwing tear gas bombs at the crowds to disperse them.

My home was unfortunately and constantly short of towels. But I had dozens of gauge diapers (well laundered and well bleached after months of use by my then three-year old Bunso). I got them out from the cabinet and force-pressed them inside an overnight bag. My husband lugged a jug of water in case the diapers needed wetting. On the way to where the action was, we bought packs of biscuits and tetra juices.

We arrived to a fiesta atmosphere at EDSA. We met no tanks, no tear gas brigades, no Marcos soldiers creating mayhem. Only people smiling and laughing, and sharing their baon of food and drinks, and listening to transistors, and trading the latest bulletins on which military contingent or which general had defected and which were still steadfastly on the way to the camps to destroy Crame and Aguinaldo and scare away the crowds. There was tension, too, of course, as bang-bang military action was constantly half-expected. But in the meantime, the people seemed bent to savor the unusual -- uhm uhm -- oneness. In that huge picnic that randomly bloomed on the highway, the often divisive Pinoys seemed at last about to pull their act together.

Fast food chains were giving away Styrofoam packs of meals. Soft drink companies kept drinks flowing. We walked past the crowds to hew close to the camp’s gates and fences to find soldiers who didn't look hungry -- just bored and sleepy. I forced on them the sandwiches I prepared anyway.

Then a priest said mass, happily very near where we chose to stay. When the final “go in peace” blessings were given, there was a mild commotion. And I saw Fidel Ramos executing his now famous triumphant leap. Some people in the crowd followed his cue and jumped too. Others broke into clapping. But the elation was premature … it was all a rumor … the news that Marcos had fled.

We went back that night to camp out with a group of neighbors with whom we hitched a ride. The fiesta spirit prevailed at least in our part of EDSA (the Green Meadows area). The towels … I mean, the diapers .. didn’t have to be steeped in water and distributed. There were no bombs – teargas or the more lethal kind. There were no tanks to stop with rosaries and white roses – though we women were given these -- just in case, the leaders said. After dinner, we rehearsed for how we women would take the front lines when the tanks appeared with our smiles and peace offerings and loud prayers. We were assured in the same breath that the menfolk would actually be leading the regiment from behind, ready to overtake the women should the soldiers prove serious in wiping us off the street.

I fidgeted as I waited for the tanks, fingering my white rose and beads. But by the time the sun rose, they had not rolled in. I was almost disappointed. It could have been my mouse-roaring moment. Tsk.

I tried to snatch some sleep on blankets we spread on the pavement. But it was cold outdoors, with summer weeks away. When I couldn't stand the chill, I'd rise to seek warmth from one of the smoldering bonfires. Just then, a queue of people began to form, at the end of which were steaming coffee and hot pandesal, courtesy of a congregation of nuns and priests. I joined the line, yawning, beginning to warm up.

We went back the following evening , Monday, with our eldest son, Ariel, then a teenager, in tow. Adrian, our next son, was imploring to be allowed to join, too. I shushed him with an assurance: tomorrow will be your turn. I was so sure it would be a long, long road show. I reckoned Marcos and family would dig in for many days.

But I was wrong. On Tuesday, there was no more reason to stay the night. By about 8 pm, the whole of EDSA exploded into cheering and dancing and singing. The dictator had truly and finally fled.

We walked home that night – feeling like we were stepping on air -- never imagining 25 years later the EDSA peaceful revolution we just took part in would be called a failed success.

Photo: from OFW News on Web

Resolved as it is hereby resolved 1: muling pagsusulat

2011-01-13T22:12:00.006+08:00

Sa buong buhay ko, hindi ako kailanman naglista ng New Year’s resolution – puwera na lang marahil kung ako ay napilitan nang ako’y nasa hayskul dahil asaynment ito sa Homeroom o sa English Composition o sa Pilipino) pagkatapos ng dalawang linggong Christmas vacation.

Hindi ko alam bakit hindi ako naki-uso sa ganitong tradisyon. Wala bang dapat baguhin sa buhay o sa katauhan ko? (Ang sagot: marami, hindi nga mabilang. Kung baga sa kotse, hindi lang kumpuni ang kailangan kundi major overhaul). Hindi ba ako naniniwala sa kakayahan kong tuparin ang mga pagbabagong ninanasa? (Marahil, nguni’t paano malalaman kung hindi susubukan?) O tamad lang ako o walang panahon o tiyagang mag-litanya ng mga resolusyon? (Tamad? -- medyo. Walang panahon? -- hindi yata, lalo na ngayong namaalam na ako -- o, kay tamis na GOODbye -- sa dati kong kaaway at inaaway na bundy clock. Walang tiyaga? -- oong-oo. Pati nga pagkain, kinakainipan ko, kaya kadalasan nasusuway ang “unang utos” sa Food and Nutrition na “chew your food well” ).

Nguni’t nitong pagpasok ng 2011, ginulat ko ang sarili ko sa pamamagitan ng pagbigay ng ultimatum sa sarili ko upang umpisahan ang mga prayoridad na dapat gawin. Hindi ko man tinatak sa papel ang mga ito, tila bumaon naman sa utak ko. Dahil kaya nararamdaman kong kulang na ako ng tinatatawag na luxury of time na sabi nga ay wala ring tiyagang maghintay kangino man?

Muling pagsusulat

Mag-uumpisa ulit ako ng daily journal, sabi ko sa sarili ko -- isang gawain na sinangtabi ko nang nahaling ako sa pagba-blog sa Internet. Mahigit na dalawang dosena na ang napuno kong kuwaderno kung saan ko binubunton ang lahat ng kadramahan ko sa buhay – maliit, malaki, o pinalaki. Matagal ko ding prinoblema ang mga kuwadernong ito (kay dami naman kase!) – sino ang pupunit o susunog sa kanila kapag may nangyaring hindi inaasahan? Paghati-hatiin ko kaya sa aking mga anak bilang kapalit sa ari-arian at kayamanang hindi ko naipundar? Tanggapin kaya nila? God provides, wika nga, dahil noong isang taon lahat ng papel sa bahay – libro, magasin, litrato, kuaderno, kalendaryo – ay inanod o winasak ni Ondoy. May nailigtas man, dahil nagdikit-dikit ang mga pahina, sa basurahan din humantong.

Susulat akong muli. Kailangan ko ng talambuhay sa pagwawakas ng aking panahon. Hindi lamang para sa mga madramang pangyayari (na pakonti na nang pakonti kahit nga pilit akong nangi-imbento at nagpapasimuno) kundi para rin sa mga pangkaraniwang mga ritwal. Kailangan ko ng tala -- kailan ba ako huling/dapat akong muling magpunta sa bangko, sa post office, sa grocery store, sa doktor, sa botika, sa VFI (kung saan ako sumusulat), sa UP ISSI (kung saan muli akong susulat)? Hwag nyong sabihing “to-do” list lang ang katapat nito, o isang organizer. Ang hindi mapagkait na ispasyo ng kuaderno ang kailangan ko dahil kahit pamimili o pagbabangko, kaya ko pa ding singitan ng drama – o hindi ako si Annamanila.

Kay rami kong natanggap na fancy notebook, note pad at stationery noong nakaraang Pasko. Kung hindi ito isang pagtutulak na ako’y muling magsulat, hindi ko alam kung ano ang itatawag.

(sa susunod: pagkukumpuni ng lumang makina)

Unforgettable Christmas Stories

2010-12-24T02:01:00.003+08:00

Paskung-pasko ay nagmamaktol si Dina. “Ano ba naman si Santa Claus, hindi ba siya marunong magbasa?” Ilang Pasko nang humihiling siya at sumusulat: “Mahal na Santa Claus ang gusto ko pong aginaldo ay pinggan-pingganan. Yun lang po at wala nang iba.”

Nang magising siya kinaumagahan ng Pasko, isang matambok na balutan ang nakita niya sa ulunan ng kanyang kama. Sa laki, sa bigat, at sa korte ng balot, alam na niya -- siniphayo na naman siya ni Santa.

Pilit na pilit na binuksan niya ito. “Ang pangit!” ang bulong niya pagkakita sa isang aparador-aparadorang yari sa kahoy. Malagana niyang hinila at tinulak ang maliliit na mga drawers nito, pagkatapos ay tinabig. Tumayo siya upang maghilamos; ni hindi sinulyapan ang laruang sumambulat sa sahig.

Gaya ng nakagawian nila, nagsimba silang mag-anak at nakinig ng misa sa kapilyang malapit sa kanila. Umuwi sila sa nagpuputok at wala nang maupuang sala na kung sa bagay at talaga namang napakaliit kahit walang bisita. Nakahilera duon ang siyam – oo, siyam -- niyang pinsang nakatira ilang bloke lang ang layo sa kanilang bahay. Siyam na dahilan kung bakit tuwing Pasko, nakakaisip mamundok at magtago ang kanyang amang kadalasan ay “alaws pe-pe.” Sa madaling salita: laging broke.

“Uncle, may bago akong poem,” sabi ng listang-lista at kyut na kyut na pinsan niyang si Myrla sa kanyang Papa. Kayang-kayang paikutin ni Myrla ang kanyang ama sa kanyang hinliliit. Kung may mga Paskong mas broke pa sa broke ang kanyang ama; si Myrla lamang ang palihim nitong inaabutan ng pisong papel.

Nag-curtsy pa si Myrla bago bumigkas ng tula nang malakas at punung-puno ng drama. Nang matapos ang palakpakan, tuloy-tuloy ang bata sa kandungan ng tatay ni Dina at buong lambing itong binulungan. Nang ginagap ng tiyuhin niya ang kanyang bulsa, mabilis siyang sinaway ng bata: “Uncle, ayaw ko ng pera.” “Eh, ano ang gusto mo--” tudyo ng matandang lalaki, “ang pitaka ko?” “Yun” – sagot ni Myrla sabay turo sa lamesa kung saan nakapatong ang maliit na aparador na kangina lang ay tila gustong wasakin ni Dina.

“Teka, kay Dina ‘yan” sagot ng Papa ni Dina sabay kamot ng ulo. “Pero, hmmm, ayaw yata niya.”

Sa puntong ito tumayo si Dina, tumakbo papuntang silid, nagbabaga ang mukha at nangigilid ang luha. Sinusi niya ang pinto at iniyak lahat ng sama ng loob –kay Santa, kay Myrla, sa kanyang Papa. Nakatulog siyang humihikbi. Pag-gising niya, tahimik at walang tao sa kabahayan. Mabilis niyang nakita ang agad hinanap ng kanyang mga mata.

Ang maliit na aparador ay nasa lamesa pa din at hindi na pangit.

II.

He wrote me a heart-breaking letter from Palawan where he had a business buying and selling lobsters and other seafood. "I am sorry, I can’t come home on Christmas," he said. The pre-Christmas catch was very meager, he explained, and he had to wait another week of diving to make his trip worthwhile. “Don’t worry,” he hastened to add, “I’ll ask my mom and dad to bring my caboodle of nieces and nephews to spend Christmas eve with you and the children,” as though it would make an iota of difference.

As the holidays approached, I prepared myself for a blue-blue Christmas.

I was inconsolable but I behaved coolly that Christmas eve. I decorated, cooked, whipped, baked. When my in-laws arrived, I thought they hugged me more tightly and greeted me more warmly than they usually did. I was terrific: I acted the part of a faultlesssly gracious host.

At half past two am, the last guest had left, the last dish was wiped clean and the last child had been tucked into bed. I breathed in the silence, feeling numb.

Just then, I sensed the stillness outside break -- even before I heard a cab stop, gently purr, and one of its doors open and shut smartly.

I was all ears as our sweet sweet gate screeched sweetly open followed by the sweet sweet sound of familiar footsteps. Then the sweet sweet knocking on the sweet sweet door told me in no uncertain terms the sweetheart made it home for Christmas.

III.

Christmas rush many years ago.

The old woman cheerfully sat beside me on what must be the last remaining seat in the congested bus, carrying a box of cake on one hand and a bayong containing a live chicken on the other. She let the bag drop on the floor as the fowl complained cackling but kept the cake close by her. The box was so big it spilled from her narrow lap to rest on a fraction of mine. She kept lifting the box up, anxious it would bother me. I turned to smile at her to implicitly assure her it was no trouble at all.

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When wife meets mistress

2010-12-13T09:41:00.004+08:00

When Nena learned her husband was keeping a mistress, her gut reaction was "to destroy." She wanted to die or to kill or at least to maim (her husband and the other woman), but in time was able to keep hold of herself. She thought, on second thoughts, she could talk sense into the errant pair. At 35, she believed human kindness and reason could work wonders.
Here is an account of their first meeting – Nena and Leny, the wife and the mistress, respectively:
I dropped by Leny’s apartment just as she was on her way to school. Our meeting was a pleasant one, surprisingly. She remarked how good and young I looked. But of course, I took care to look my best – wore my most flattering blouse, suffered my girdle, had my hair blow-dried. I told her in turn she was everything my husband told me she was. Inwardly, I groaned – she looked so young, fragile, and innocent.
She told me she didn’t really have to go school that day. “Great,” I said. “Why don’t we drop by his office – and watch his jaw drop.
When we entered the office, holding hands and beaming, work ground to a halt. We must have made a grand show.
Yes, my husband's jaw dropped as we made our way to his cubicle. When he recovered his senses, he said: “Let’s go out to dinner.” We made plans for the three of us that night – noble, win-win plans. Silently, I congratulated myself. How clever I was!
If our lofty plans had materialized, Leny would study full time. I would be her guardian, mentor and friend. He would keep distance. When she finished and started a career, we would be the best of friends – all three of us.
Two months later, Leny was pregnant by my husband.

Monica tried a similar approach.She arranged to meet Eva, her husband Ding’s officemate and paramour.
Eva turned out to be really nice. She promised to forget Ding. And she also asked me to bring her home so she could meet “Ding’s children … so I can stand firm on my decision to break up with him." Taking a crowded bus, we were hanging by the estribo all the way. When we alighted, Eva said: “You could have pushed me from the bus, you know.”
Surprisingly, Eva was as as good as her word. Maybe it also helped that she was fired out from the office where she and Ding worked. Ding grieved Eva’s loss but Monica’s ordeal was far from over. It wasn’t long before Ding found another lover.

Not all wives can manage their dark impulses when meeting their husband’s mistresses for the first time. Carla is one of the feisty, uncontrolled ones.
Carla happens to be Nena’s sister, fiercely loyal to each other, but poles apart in temperament.
When Carla got wind of what was happening, she did some research to confirm her fears. Once she was certain something was afoul, she followed her husband Ben as she drove supposedly to overtime work. She left herown car behind and instead took a cab so Ben wouldn't notice he was being tailed.
But inside Carla’s bag was a gun, Ben’s gun.
He parked by a narrow alley in a semi-depressed part of Manila, went out of the car, and walked. I paid the cab, and watched him enter a small yard where a petite young woman waited. I was in turmoil … I must have entered the yard too and walked past him. All I remember is holding the woman by the collar and pointing Ben’s gun at her temple ...

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Over 60 and swooning

2010-11-28T15:45:00.032+08:00

“Karma” – my BFF Gabby calls it.

She couldn’t relate to me, she says – which, shorn of diplomatese, may have meant she laughed at me -- in my Dao Ming Zu days.

Those were days I’d go home early to catch plays and replays of “Meteor Garden” where Taiwanese actor Jerry Yan (aka Dao Ming Zu) strutted, with his magnificent abs, big hair, and brooding, slit-eyed looks, into and under the skin not only of the saccharine Shan Cai but also of his huge audience of women, young and old and, yes, older. Days all I wanted to do at lunchtime was to recount the latest Dao Ming Zu tragedy or crisis with office friends, never mind if all of us watched the show the night before. Days I’d watch Meteor Garden episodes on CD which I cajoled my niece Maila to lend me and which I didn’t return though she more than cajoled. Days I’d shop at Bench, where Jerry was poster boy, only so I could grab a free poster.

Of course, it wasn’t the first time I swooned over a 20 year old. There was Diether Ocampo back in his Ang TV and Gimik days; and before him Romnick Sarmenta; and before him Dranreb Belleza; and before him …. ooops, my memory fails me.

She has been karma’d, Gabby confesses, because now, she’s hopelessly in love with K-pop idol Jang Geun Seok of “You’re Beautiful” fame. Hah, I wanted to gloat, JGS is only a Korean reproduction of my DMZ – a second rate, trying-hard copy cat.

This must be second childhood, Gabby frets. “I bought a lot of JGS stuff. I listen to his soundtracks and constantly watch his manhwas (Korean dramas). He has a new one showing here now,” she adds, referring of course to Korea where she is an exchange professor.

Gabby offers she is an escapist-dreamer whose outlook in life is “that there should always be magic and that anything is possible” -- her way of explaining why she is hooked to the young Kor-Kor idol. She is not keen on reality, she says, because reality for others is not HER reality.

Unlike Gabby, I don’t shun roller-coaster reality, even if some of the bumps really did hurt. It has brought enough high and magical moments, to savor while they lasted and to re-savor in the remembering. No, life has been good or has evened out for me – with its admixture of joys and griefs, surprises and disappointments, and gains and losses. Truly, I have sometimes surprised myself how well I played some tough cards life dealt me.

(Which reminds me how an online scrabble buddy recently complained about the tight board we were playing -- you know, the kind where you could only move edgewise. Don’t you just hate it? -- she asked. I replied honestly that I have learned to enjoy the challenge of difficult boards and bad tiles where I have to dip deep into my ingenuity, stock of words, and other resources to form a "respectable” word without passing or exchanging tiles.)

But I escape too sometimes. There is also this secret place in my mind, that I stealthily enter when I am alone, where everything is magical and where I am young forever and the season is always summer.

Is it horribly wrong – this living and dreaming-daydreaming, waking up and then starting the cycle again? Is it so ridiculous and laughable – this delighting in everything that elicits a smile and perhaps some kilig, regardless if it's Jerry Yan, Jan Geun Seok, an old flame, a virtual friend, or some other who has caught our fancy?

There is a secret chamber inside everyone -- young and old, male and female, rich and poor, wise or not so -- that one takes refuge in when the going gets rough or merely tiresome.

We don’t stop dreaming or swooning just because we are 50, 60, or older.

Maybe I should watch “You’re Beautiful” one of these days and then …. who knows?

Photo: from crienglish.com

House of Many Rooms

2010-11-16T17:54:00.003+08:00

My house has many rooms
I lock or unlock at will
Some brick-walled
Fortressed, forbidding
Others with swinging doors
Where I wraithlike slither
From room to room
In the order of the moon's
Waxing and waning
Or shuttle in reverse
In the surreal fashion of dreams
Or flit from end to end
Edge to center and back again
Godlike, omnipresent
In every which corner
Of my house of many rooms.

My house has a charmed chamber
A treasure trove
Of mysterious joys
Of things old
And half-forgotten
That I visit often
When the rains pour
And joints grow cold
And eyes mist with tears
Of remembering and forgetting.
The sun ever shines
Brooks gurgle
Birds twitter
Embers smolder
In that charmed chamber
In my house of many rooms.

You
have this charmed place too
In your house of many rooms
However far you've gone
In whatever clime.

Soon we will meet again
In the chamber of a million charms
Where we all began
And to which we will come back
To know each other
For the first time.

Photo: “The mysterious Door” by , c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved

(Written on the occasion of the 50th year anniversary of our high school graduation)

Peevish PV of the unwrinkled spirit

2010-11-04T13:52:00.017+08:00

Dear PV*

87 ka na nga ba? Owws? Hindi nga. Yung tutuo?

We always love saying this, the UP ISSI staffers of my generation – "PV was looked up to as THE grand old man when we were young and callow and foolish. Now that we are old and jaded and foolish, PV has remained as he has always been." Time has seemingly stood still for him, and allowed us, alas, to catch up with him -- in a manner of speaking.

What is the secret of his youngish looks and longevity? Only he can say. But I can surmise (and I mean surmise beyond the clean, healthy, disciplined life he lives that is for all to see):

PV has amazing energy and vigor … a passion for being productive and creative … an obstinate refusal to be shunted away from the mainstream. He constantly makes himself better, looking out for opportunities to contribute, to help, to get involved, to guide, to lead.

Over the years, over the infrequent zig-zagging of our friendship, over our occasional "political" differences -- -- I have glimpsed love, warmth, sweetness and compassion inside that usually peevish and tough exterior. Malambing at mapagmahal si PV.

PV took me to his former classmate, then Philippine Constabulary Chief Fidel Ramos, when my father was detained at Camp Crame in the early days of martial rule. PV would buy oversized remote control cars for each of my five boys during his trips abroad, never taking them out of their big boxes -- never mind if they took up all the space of a big maleta -- the better for me to wrap them for Christmas.

When I rocked his boat and unwittingly created a leadership crisis for him over what I called "a matter of principle," PV sent me flowers.

I thought I had lost his friendship then ... but it didn't take more than a few months for us to shake hands, hug each other, and make up. The "I am sorry(s)" did not have to be said.

He understood even when we were standing poles apart on some issue or other.

PV has kept his soul unwrinkled.

Tough act to follow for all of us. But we can always try. I know I try.

* Message to be delivered in tribute to Dr. PV -- former boss and mentor at the UP ISSI, and now friend and fellow-SME advocate -- on the occasion of his 87th birthday.

Photo: “01-14-08- camelot” by Frank, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved

No more talismans for daughter

2010-10-20T18:05:00.018+08:00

She was born after I have given up on ever fussing over hair clips and ribbons and laces and Hello Kitties -- just as I was beginning to believe myself when I answer those who marveled over the five successive boys I had: “I don’t mind not having a daughter.”

As it turned out she didn’t care for ribbons and girly stuff. After she turned four, I could no longer make her wear the lacy, patchy – and pricey -- St. Patrick dresses I paid through my teeth for. From that time on, it was tees and shorts and rubber shoes and a Ringo Starr hairdo that didn't require hair clips.

She was to be my Jennifer – a name I burned with, pregnancy after pregnancy, but which had to be set aside again and again because the stork that delivered babies to me seemed to specialize in boys only. But one look at the baby girl that finally came told me she was NOT Jennifer. She looked marvelous and smart and pretty, but, no, she wouldn’t have answered to Jennifer. Fortunately, my husband, previously unconcerned over baby names, was itching to name her and I was just happy to let him. So he named her after what he insisted was the Greek goddess of quickness. (But he was wrong: my later research revealed the name was rooted on a Greek word meaning truth or she who tells the truth.)

Funny, when my boys were just babies and toddlers, all of them were invariably mistaken for girls. Now, that the much awaited finally came, people thought I was being funny when I would insist that the ball-dribbling, yoyo-swinging, mop-haired child was a girl.

I wasn’t too alarmed when she turned out to be more adept at basketball than all her four kuya. She also doted on Barbies and tea sets. She was very good at sewing, drawing, and cooking. Most of all, she was marshamallow inside – easy to bully and frighten and cry.

She cried when she was passed over in the grade school intramural try-outs in relay. I quickly wrote a letter which began: “Dear Miss Cruz, do you want to make a little girl happy?” and the next day, she boasted she had begun joining relay practice.

She came home from class in tears from big-time teasing when their picture-taking session was rained out and the teacher demanded “sino ang may balat sa puwet?” and one hand came up. Guess whose? She was perplexed the whole class rolled on the floor laughing.

Ruffians in school called her names, drawing tears. When the bullying went on unabated, I taught her how to name-call back.

The dark scared her so much I brought home all sorts of medallions and scapulars and vested it with powers to shoo away forces of darkness.

As the years passed, she got over her fears and being bullied, though she still cried easily.

From being a pasang-awa in the relay team, she worked on her athletic prowess to become captain of the high school softball varsity team and its most valuable player.

From being bullied, she became class comic and the life of every gathering with her witty retorts and quick puns.

I no longer had to calm her fears. She eased mine.

Not too long ago, I was brooding over slights (real and imagined) and problems (present and to come). She noticed I was upset, sat opposite me and said: “Hang loose, mommy. Look at me, I am always happy.” “Really, “ I shot back: “Are you happy when you get tres and cinco in your class cards?” “Well, she laughed, “I would be down for a while but not for long.” She moved closer to hold my hand and perhaps by some osmotic process I felt lighter and, yes, almost happy.

She is the one who, when I fretted over a few thousand pesos filched from my wallet, told me to forget it since it’s only money. The one who would tease me to go, get a life. The one who when I insisted she went to church asked me if God wouldn’t have preferred it if she helped someone hard up or sick or unhappy. The one who all her siblings describe as "masarap maging kapatid."

Today, she is a doctor. Still the softest, most kind hearted person I know. I told her once she was my best product.

But …

Today, too, she faces a crisis in her life –the biggest she has encountered thus far. Some of the long-ago fears must have come back for she admits she is paralyzed with indecision. Some of my remarks thrown her way reduced her to tears.

I have become paralyzed too.

I can no longer bring her talismans vested with fictitious power. I can no longer write “Dear Miss Cruz” letters that will melt teacher’s heart. I can no longer teach her how to fight back so bullies would stop bullying.

I can only wish she remembers where she misplaced her gift of happiness and retrieve it and get it back to work – pronto.

I can only hover at the edges and give advice when and only when I am asked and then pray I say the right things rather than impulsive ones TRIGGERED BY MY OWN FEARS.

I can only pray for wisdom and guidance for her and for me -- which is just about the only thing I can do with some degree of proficiency these days.

And yes, I can only remind her she is my best product.

Photo: “Daughter and Mother” by Eden, Janine and Jim, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved

BETTER THAN IT GETS -- SOMETIMES

2010-09-20T05:38:00.011+08:00

(Speech delivered at the launching of IN ANOTHER DRESS, the e-book, by Vee Press and Vibal Foundation, at the Manila International Book Fair at SMX Center, Mall of Asia, on September 17. Likewise launched were e-books by Noemi Lardizabal Dado and Lady S.)

I started my blog four years ago and named it Ode to Old – a thinly veiled attempt to put romance and poetry into aging. I thought if I could convince my readers it’s alright to grow old, then perhaps I could feel good about it, too.

I was at the edge of retirement then, anxious over the prospect of living half a life. You know … waking up with no more "gosh-I’m-gonna-be-late" get up and go. Dressing up with no destination. Walking without direction. Taking coffee and lunch breaks – uninterrupted.

I decided to blog, hoping it would engage and absorb me well into antiquity.

I sub-titled my blog “the best is yet to be.” I did it tongue in cheek, wistfully, wishfully, almost with a sense of desperation.

As I blogged on, I was surprised the jitters began to ease.

Blogging gave me a voice to talk to the world. But one has to talk of things the world would care to listen to.

I guess that is how a blogger learns to look at things with a fresh eye, to look for the instructive, the comic, the unusual in the most commonplace experiences. Or else, WHO would read what a blogger writes?

The requisite introspection in blogging put me in touch with inner wisdom that told me if I didn’t worry, I would arrive exactly where I am now and MORE pleasantly.

I vented left-over toxins every now and then. And I wondered if it was true that once you put down your troubles on paper, they stay put there.

Two and half years into retirement, AM I HAVING THE TIME of my life?

Well … even though most of the jitters have fled, there are days in fact that I do magnificently, days I cope miserably, and days I just seem to get by.

Which, come to think of it, is almost the exact same way my younger days, my pre-retirement days, used to zig and zing and zag.

So, then as now, there are days I couldn’t seem to do anything right, and days everything falls into place, and days ….. I just don’t know.

But I DID know, ten months ago, when my blogs were compiled into a thin volume entitled “IN ANOTHER DRESS” then published and launched, I could almost glimpse the “BEST that was yet to be.”

And I DO KNOW THAT TODAY is another day for hoping that indeed age is an opportunity, much like youth, though dressed differently.

Thank you, Vibal Foundation and Vee Press for reincarnating the book in the digital sphere, for making possible this opportune, exciting, high- tech version of IN ANOTHER DRESS, making virtually the whole world its prospective reader.

Photo credits: Noemi Lardizabal Dado, Alina R. Co

So they'd know whether to plug or unplug: buhay na habilin

2010-09-06T04:32:00.005+08:00

Nang mamatay ang aking best friend na si Arthur, nang madama ko kung paanong nagdusa ang kanyang pamilya noong kanyang mga huling araw, sinabi ko sa sarili ko na hindi ko papayagang mangyari ito sa aking mga mahal sa buhay pag ako'y nakapila na sa dakilang pre-departure area ng buhay.

Si Arthur ay mahigit na kuwarenta anyos lamang nang dalhin sa ospital na agaw-buhay, biktima ng traydor na hemorrhagic stroke. Massive daw ito -- ang mula sa utak na pagdudugo ay umabot hanggang batok. Tatlong araw na walang malay o nasa coma si Arthur; ang humihinga para sa kanya ay isang artificial respirator.

Ikalawang araw nang magsimulang magtalo ang kanyang asawang si Beth at ang mga kapatid niyang babae kung tatanggalin o pababayaang nakakabit si Arthur sa makinang siya lang nagpapatibok ng kanyang puso. Hindi sila nagkasundo, kahit binalaan na sila ng mga doktor na kung sakaling mabuhay pa siya, hinding hindi na babalik ang dating si Arthur na matalino, mapagisip, mapagbiro, masiste, malambing, masipag, maaalalahanin-- bagkus mananatili lang sa isang estadong walang malay at hindi kayang tulungan ang sarili. Sa Ingles, "vegetative state." Mala-gulay.

Lihim ko siyang pinalakpakan nang si Arthur na mismo ang nag-desisyon para sa sarili niya. Huminto siya sa paghinga kahit nakaplug-in pa din sya sa breathing machine sa ospital. "You go, boy," bulong ko sa kanya. Ikatlong araw noon ng kanyang pagkalugmok.

Matagal ko ding pinagluksa si Arthur. Wala na akong makikitang kaibigang lalaki na kasing-bait at kasing-sensitibo niya. Pambato siyang lecturer sa opisinang pinapasukan namin kapwa, ngunit wala lang sa kanya and papuri, walang ere, walang yabang.

Napraning ako para sa sarili ko dahil sa nangyari sa aking best friend. Lumuhod, nagnobena, nagdasal, umiyak. Sinabi ko sa Kanya na handa akong gawin ang kahit ano, ipamigay ang lahat ko, “basta, Lord, pag time is up na para sa akin, bawiin mo ako nang mabilis at kung maari’y walang gaanong kirot at kuskos-balungos. At pinaka-mahalaga, Lord, huwag mong pahirapan ang aking mga anak at asawa.” Gusto kong makipag-negosasyon, makipagareglo sa aking Diyos -- x-deal kung maari. Ngunit, pwede ba talagang makipag-bargain sa Lumikha?

Tutuo ngang binibigay ni God ang lahat ng ating pangangailangan, dahil hindi nagtagal, napag-alaman ko na meron palang tinatawag na living will.

Buhay na habilin. O habilin ng isang buhay.

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Ang aking lihim na buhay onlayn

2010-08-05T19:12:00.005+08:00

Ako daw yung laging kulelat. Chronic latecomer at late bloomer.

Hindi lang sa pagpasok sa eskwela at opisina. Hindi lang sa pagdating sa mga sosyalan at mga miting. Hindi naman daw dramatic ang entrance ko, bagkus kiming-kimi. Mas puno daw ng embarrassment kaysa drama.

Kulelat din sa pagsunod sa mga bago at uso – sa pagbibihis, sa pagsasalita, sa pag-aayos ng bahay o sarili, sa teknolohiya.

Nuong kapanahunan ko, hindi ako nagsuot ng mini-skirt hanggang pawala na ito sa uso. Ngunit nang magamay ako dito, hindi ko na ito hinubad – nang 15 taon. Ako na yata ang pinakatalyadang buntis na naka-mini nuon. Nag-mini ako hanggang tatlong kabuntisan. Kaya’t inabutan ako ng ikalawang pagkabuhay ng mini nang naka-mini pa din.

Naalala nyo ba ang shoulder pads? Natagalan din bago ako nagsuot niyan, siempre. Aba, bagay pala sa akin. Lumalapad ang aking mga bagsak na balikat at lumiliit ang aking puson – siempre, ilusyon lang yong huli, pero yun daw ang mahalagang “total look.” Wala nang nagsusuot ng shoulder pads ngayon – bukod sa akin at, marahil, mga PMAer. Wala akong magagawa -- nagsumpaan na kami ng aking mga shoulder pads na hindi maglalayo – till death do us part.

Mahirap akong hindi makilala ng aking mga kaibigan kahit dekada na kaming hindi nagkikita. Kasi kung ano ang ayos ng buhok ko 30 taon na ang nakalilipas, eksaktong ganoon pa din ngayon. Pabilog ang gupit – apple cut ang tawag -- may bangs na nakalawit sa nuo, pinasabugan ng kaunting hair spray upang hindi magulo. Faithful ako sa aking "do" -- through thick and thinning hair.
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Andeng, Lolly, and the first theme party

2010-07-25T19:00:00.016+08:00

There is always a first time … especially for the young. There can still be a first time, once in a great while, for the old.

Three year old Andeng was about to attend her first theme party which will happen that Saturday at Outback Steakhouse at cousin Seth Matthew's first birthday. Her grandmom – also known as Lolly -- is to attend it with her, plus sundry titos and titas. It must also be the first theme children’s party for Lolly who can't remember ever being invited to any in her time as mom to young kids.

Andeng’s mom and dad had earlier excused themselves from the party, having committed to another gathering elsewhere in the mom’s side of the family. They had reasonably given in, though, to Lolly’s importuning it was only fair Andeng should attend the theme party on the dad’s (also Lolly’s) side of the family. Which translated to: Lolly had to do the shopping for the prescribed western-themed attire.

She thought it was no big deal.

A day before the party, soon after lunch, Andeng showed up all dressed up and eager as a beagle to start the shopping expedition. A bit too early, however, for Lolly who was still by her pc trying to finish the day’s quota of stories for the online magazine channel she was handling. "Sandali, ha," she scowled at the girl who stood there waiting. "Ayaw you tube," she kept repeating, oblivious to her grand mom's protestation she wasn't watching any video but working. As the little girl started tugging at the pocket of Lolly’s duster with one hand and making threatening gestures toward the pc’s power button with the other, Lolly had to get up before she could click “publish” to the last of her postings. As she dressed hurriedly, pushed by the toddler’s impatient eye, she grudgingly admitted THAT -- and countless precedents of THAT the last two years since Andeng had learned to walk and talk -- was how the youngster learned "kulit" works.

At Mega Mall, the place Lolly chose to shop because she was sure “they got it all,” she found to her dismay they didn’t, no, not quite, missing out on the ONE SET OF ITEMS they went there for. -- cowboy costumes for three-year year old girls.

Or maybe the problem was Lolly had very specific ideas of what a western-themed attire should be. Tassled denim shorts, striped bright-colored shirt, and chaleco, also tassled, the color of the bottoms. And please, not to forget a wide brimmed hat to literally top off the set. Plus a final touch -- a kerchief tied around the neck, ala Marlboro County.

With the toddler trailing her, Lolly shuttled from one sub-section of the children’s section to another. She browsed at the character shop, the toddlers’ nook, the accessories store. There was nothing that fitted her stone-cast vision of a three-year-old cowgirl. They half-ran to the children's boutique outside and still another .. still tough luck.

At first, the Lolly blamed the store. Mega mall ba ito? You got it all ba ito? Tse, cowboy costume lang -- wala pa! Soon, when she felt her 60-year-old legs cramping, she had begun shifting the blame to the people through whose bright idea the difficult theme was conceived – who else but niece Maila and husband Cyric, the birthday boy’s mom and dad.

By the time Tito Best Friend (aka Arman) got to them from an hour of trying to get a parking space and finally succeeding, Andeng was fretful, frustrated, and tired; Lolly fit to be tied and ranting over “mga kaek-ekang pa costume-costume na yan.”

The Tito appraised the situation, looked around for a few seconds, then pointed at a tiny mannequin: “ why not a denim jumper?” Lolly was only too happy to blink and bend and set aside her tassled version of a western costume. After a flurry of choosing and fitting sizes on a very compliant subject, they finally checked out at the counter a blue Dora dress jumper. No tassles, no chaleco, no hat – for none could be found in the store that purports to have it all. Sige na, pwede na, uwi na tayo -- this from the still grumbling Lolly who had by then verbally lifted "ka-ek-ekan" to the level of “kaaertehan” and from thence to "kalintikan."

Lolly's spirits dipped when Andeng's dad took one look at what she bought and asked: "Akala ko ba western attire?' That night, after resting awhile, she took another shopping trip, this time to nearby Ever-Gotesco, otherwise known as the small, community mall, where they're not supposed to "got it all for you." While Lolly bought neckerchiefs (one last dogged attempt to conjure her original stereotype cowboy image) at the department store, the other Tito best friend (Allan) looked around the thrift shops and found cowboy hats at bargain prices. Although the hat was adult-sized, they thought – somewhat dubiously -- they could stuff it with tissue paper or soft cloth to fit a three-year-old head.

Everyone let out a squeal of delight when, coming home, they put the hat on the eager girl who had just wakened (the reason why she had to stay home for that second trip), and saw that when pin-tucked, it didn’t look over-sized at all.

Andeng allowed herself to go through an impromptu dress rehearsal – putting on jumper, shirt, kerchief, and hat as Allan ran for the digicam.

As Tito clicked and the cow girl posed gamely, Mommy and Daddy clapped their “wows.” Even baby Pidong gurgled approval.

And the Lolly? She was smiling, thinking costume parties such great fun.

(Happy birthday uli, SETH MATTHEW, pogi little prince of the OK Corral. We had a galloping good time at your party. Even had fun heigh-ing and ho-ing in costume hunting, despite what this ma-ek-ek na blog piece seems to convey. )

Grim Tales of Basyang

2010-07-16T02:02:00.002+08:00

Tahanan sa Trece Martires, Cavite, nabagsakan ng puno. Mag-ina, patay. Tatlo nasugatan.

Metrorail trains suspended, thousands stranded.

Metro Manila and Luzon plunge into darkness. Some areas to endure two or three days more without electricity.

Ship captain hits head while abandoning ship; 12 barges and fishing boats, sunk, run aground. Captain’s body later found floating in a river at Limay, Bataan.

19 mangingisda hindi na nakauwi matapos pumalaot sakay ang kanilang bankang de motor.

Floods swept away a house in Batangas City, killing two children. Their companions still missing.

- - - - - - -

Tales from Basyang. Unlike the fairytale- like stories the baby boomers of the 1950s and 1960s were regaled with by (Mga Kuwento ni) Lola Basyang, then a popular radio drama series based on the writings of Severino Reyes, this atmospheric Basyang wove grim tales of death, darkness, injury, and destruction. (In 1997, the Lola Basyang stories were adapted on TV with a contemporary twist, starring Manilyn Reynes as Lola Basyang's now grown-up grand daughter out to perpetuate her grand mom's story-telling legacy.)

Typhoon Basyang, internationally code-named Coson, struck Metro Manila and Luzon Tuesday almost stealthily -- like the proverbial thief in the night. Most of the residents of the affected areas were caught flatfooted, clueless that they would be directly hit, and probably expecting only a mild weather disturbance. They were not prepared for the howling winds, the persistent downpour, the sound of rushing floodwaters, the systems-wide power outage -- which for many were quite reminiscent of Typhoon Ondoy that wreaked unprecedented havoc not yet a year ago.

In its latest online news update at 9:58 am, July 15, Inquirer.net reports a death toll that has risen to 23. The fatalities, mostly from areas south of Metro Manila, drowned or were crushed by trees toppled by Basyang’s strong winds.

The figures on the missing also went up to 57, according to the National Disaster Coordinating Center (NDCC). These were mostly made up of fishermen whose vessels capsized or went missing during the storm.

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They could have pranced all night ...

2010-06-25T14:40:00.017+08:00

Only for that day, they will play dress up to the nines. The moms who blog and lunch and farmtown together, who whisper deep dark secrets to each other, and attend each other's kids' birthday bashes. Only for that one day, they won't be drudges nor grunges but rather hot mommas on the run -- but only on cam.

Both Chats and Cookie wore their dreamy wedding gowns. Chat's was off shoulder, off-white, minimalist (her word). Cookie's was a spaghetti-strapped, lightly embroidered number that couldn't by any stretch of the imagination be called maximalist. Each married ten years (more or less), they seemed to have defied the years as they fitted easily and flawlessly into the flowing white dresses they wore on the last day they were maidens. They were so pretty one could almost cry.

Cess, slender as a whisper, looked like a girl going to her first prom in a half black, half psychedelic outfit that showed off her waif-like, almost pre-pubescent-like figure and sweet countenance.

Noemi stirred excitement when she announced she was coming in the Pitoy Moreno gown her mom passed on to her but changed her mind for reasons she didn't explain. She was nonetheless glamor and sophistication personified in what she settled for -- her silver wedding anniversary outfit. A maroon, off-shoulder, gown with a darling sparkling side accent.

Anna showed up in a two-piece burgundy ensemble. Snug. Sleeveless, backless, strapless. Audacious for someone well past 60 and who for 30 years considered it unchaste to wear anything more revealing than three-fourths sleeved and sabrina-necked blouses. But what the heck, what did she write "In Another Dress" for?

At professional photographer-blogger Mike Yu's residence-cum-studio at Bel-air Village, Noemi, Cess, Cookie, Chats and Anna posed and preened and pranced and strutted, as Mike gave out directions: "smile," "ok, look serious," "now, act wacky." He was generous with his "greats" and "nices" and "perfects" as he clicked away.

The ladies also pranced in informal outfits and costumes and props they thought represented the themes of their personal blog sites. Chats was the quintessential Fitness Doyenne as she posed in jogging pants and sports jacket, while Cess sat for the camera wearing the uncanny combination of shorts and tees and angel's wings, a subtle symbol of what a young, stay-at-home mom ought to be to stay afloat and keep sane.

At one point, one of the ladies fretted: "Oh, dear, we are all dressed up with nowhere to go?!"

Nowhere to go?

But didn't they go to "town, " a metaphorical town ? -- and painted it red, had the time of their lives, behaved like dorks or divas (take your pick), did something they've never done before except perhaps in their imagination, and did it with all the flaire and elan and bravura they could muster? Mike thought they were "naturals." "Natural for what," it didn't occur to any one to ask.

Perhaps this is one of the late-life adventures the most senior of the ladies subliminally foresaw when she wishfully subtitled her ode20ld blogsite "THE BEST IS YET TO BE." It should be right there ... along with her bucket list of visiting Bohol and Batanes, of writing a book, of walking in the rain, of drinking one too many, of picking her neighbor's rosal flowers when the neighbor is not looking.

How did the blogging moms end up in Mike's studio, making like one-day celebrities? Blame it on the stars maybe. Better still blame it on Noemi who moves with Mike in bloggers circles. Blame it on Noemi's penchant for dragging along her barx when she gets exciting invitations like Mike's.

Yes, Mike Yu, who is between photographing stints abroad, has been taking photos of bloggers for several months now for his Bloggers Gallery project. Before the end of the year, he plans to gather and showcase the photos into an exhibit.

(Mike, we all feel lucky to have been photographed by you and perhaps make it to your exhibit. Thanks and hugs to pretty Bambi who wielded her magic brushes and combs to transform us or at least for trying to, while engaging us in her charming chika. )

P.S. Wench, you missed the adventure, and what an adventure. Rolly, thanks for "... as a whisper."

Chronically lost and officially sexy? (Understanding geographic dyslexia)

2010-05-30T02:00:00.002+08:00

Si Pining, kaibigan at kabarkada ko noong hayskul, ay tsampyon sa pagiging ligawin – 50 daw ang nagpahahayag ng pagibig sa kanya noong hayskul, at di pa kabilang dito ang mga torpeng binatilyong pasulyap-sulyap lang sa kanyang direksyon.

Limampu?! – ang tanong ko sa kanya habang halos magkandapatid ang aking ugat sa gulat o ngitngit (o inggit). Hindi ko masabi sa bruha: “Eh kaya pala walang natira sa aking boylets!”

Sa sobrang pagka-allergic ni Pining sa manliligaw, pinagupit niya ang kanyang mahaba at kulay uling na buhok nang tumuntong siya ng kolehiyo. Buhok daw kase ang nakahalina sa kanyang mga tagahanga. Hindi pa nagkasya doon, tinago ang balantok na binti sa paldang hanggang sakong ang haba, at sinubsob ang ulo sa mga libro. Kung hindi daw niya ginawa yun, baka hindi siya nakatapos ng pag-aaral. O hindi siya nakatapos nang may karangalan. Istorbo daw kasi ang pagiging ligawin.

Nguni’t sadyang iniligaw ko kayo. Pasensya na, dahil hindi ito ang tipo ng pagka-ligawin na gusto kong tumbukin sa artikulong ito.

Kundi ang tipong pagiging ligawin na sa tingin ko’y ako ang may hawak ng setro at korona, nang walang pangambang may magtatangkang mang-agaw o mag-protesta.

Oo, napaka-ligawin ko. “Nasaan ako?” “Kakanan ba ako, kakaliwa, o dederetso?” “Papunta ba ako o paalis?” Ito ang istorya ng buhay ko. Isang buhay na hitik sa di-mabilang na pagkawala, paghahanap, at muling pagtatagpo – at hindi sa eksistensyal na kahulugan ng mga salitang ito na disin sana ay maipagmamalaki ko kaysa ikahiya.

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Sa panahon ng MO/MU, uso pa ba 'I love you?'

2010-04-26T01:48:00.004+08:00

Ligaw tingin. Pero tinging makalaglag-matsing.

Yan daw ang ginagawa niyang pagpaparamdam sa babaeng napupusuan – sabi ng anak kong binata. Ayaw niyang aminin na torpe siya. Yan lang daw ang istayl niya.

'Tapos?’ -- tanong ko.

'Tapos, depende sa kontra-tingin -- alam ko na ang timpla,’ sabi niyang alanganin ang ngiti.

Paano ba binababasa o linalasa ang tingin ng dalaga?

Eto ang paliwanag niya.

Pag ang balik tingin ay wala lang, dedma, burahin mo na lang siya sa iyong alaala Pag galit at inis, lumayo-layo ka na. At pag bumulalas pa ng tawa, sampalin mo ang sarili mo o magpakain ka na lang sa buwaya.

Pero pag ang tingin sa iyo ng dalaga ay tila nagtatanong sabay kiling ng leeg, oy, may pagasa. Pag may ngiting pigil o manibalang, at lalo na kung mamumula pa ang pisngi niya – aba, wagi ka! Pag iwas-tingin naman siya, na tila nahihiya, malamang din may biyaya.

‘Tapos, pag natimpla na?’

‘Eh di magpapalitan na kami ng phone number. Magtatawagan. Magyayayaan nang kumain, manuod ng sine, mamasyal. ‘Yun.’

‘Kayo na?’

‘Kami na.’

Pag ‘sila na,’ aasahan ko nang may bago na namang dalaga siyang laging dadalhin sa bahay – laging maganda, laging palangiti, at karinyosa. Minsan, nagtururuan sila ng chess. Minsan naman naglalaro sila ng computer games. Kadalasan, nanunood sila ng TV – DVD marathon ang tawag nila. Kapag masyadong gabi na, ‘makikitulog na lang daw kung maari.’ Siempre, sa kuwarto ng binata ko hihiga ang bisita; siya naman sa sopa sa sala. Sos, ‘yan ang problema. Scrabble na namang magdamag si Nanay sa kompyuter sa sala!

Wala daw akong tiwala sa kanila, bulong-bulong ng anak ko. Hindi ko lang masabi -- may tiwala naman ako sa kabataan; sa hormones nila, wala.

Minsan, ang anak ko naman ang hindi uuwi at makikitulog sa bahay ng nobya. Hindi ko na pinag-aaksayahan ng buntong-hininga iyan. Matutulog na lang ako nang mahimbing. Hindi ko na problema ‘yun. Problema na ‘yun ng nanay sa kabilang bahay.

Hindi ko na mabilang ang mga dalagang natulog sa bahay. Papalit-palit kasi ng nobya ang binatang ngayon ay malapit nang maging matandang binata.

Hayskul siya nang matutong manligaw.

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The 'Tycooning' of the Magbobote (from tindero to taipan)

2010-04-14T00:43:00.004+08:00

In Gagalangin, Tondo, Manila, in the time I was growing up, there was a ‘tindahan ng Intsik’ in every street corner, which co-existed with smaller Pinoy-owned shops we called ‘sari-sari’ stores.

Right opposite our house, on the corner of Pampanga and Angat Streets, was a tindahan ng Intsik owned by a man we fondly called Sin Teng. He was a smiling ebullient Chinaman with gold on his tooth and premature silver on his hair, who didn’t stop smiling and glowing even when young boys made fun of his accent and called him ‘Intsik beho, tulo laway.’ He made friends with his suki-housewives who would linger to small-talk him and steal glances at yet another new fair lady beside him – usually from the Chinese mainland who would be sure to speak no Tagalog -- and wait for Sin Teng to introduce her as his wife No. 2 or 3 or so on.

It was from Sin Teng we purchased our daily bread and the isa-singko Spam and Kraft (cheese) slices to eat it with. Same with the coffee and milk and Toddy (a popular chocolate drink) and Coke and Pepsi to chase the bread down with. Mongol pencils, intermediate pad paper, crayola, Manila paper, everything we needed for school – he had stocks of these which never seemed to run out. If someone was sick, we didn’t have to go to the drug store a ten-minute sprint away: we could get the most common medicines from Sin Teng -- Capi-aspirina, Mentholatum, Phillips Milk of Magnesia. Sin Teng runs his shop quite unlike the sari-sari store of Mang Iking and Aling Tonya which was right next door and thus should have been the more logical convenience store, but was almost always inconveniently out of every other thing we needed.

On hind sight, I realize I was witnessing then how the Chinese storekeepers drove their Pinoy competitors out of business; on hindsight too, I know I should have recognized it as a premonition of the future. They bought their stocks in volume so they seldom ran short of stuff and were able to sell cheaper. They mostly didn’t allow credit (or allowed it discriminately and sparingly). Sin Teng didn’t, which was one of few reasons we would sometimes run to Mang Iking and Aling Tonya – on whose wall was clipped several small sheets of paper each of which was labeled with a customer’s name, all caps, underlined. These were in essence yesterday’s credit cards – but for poor people only – for the rich dealt in cash.

Mang Iking would huff and bristle when he spotted one of us headed to his store rather than the Chinaman’s but would still take down the piece of paper with ‘Aling Celing’ written on it – that’s my mom’s name. He would hand us the toyo or suka we needed grudgingly, but not before adding yet another P.50 to Aling Celing’s already number-laden card and not before reminding us sternly to tell our mom that ‘mahaba na ang listahan ninyo.’

But Sin Teng's was the store of choice even if it allowed no credit and even if we had to cross a mean street to reach it. His store was big and wide (easily 5 times that of Mang Iking) and open and well-lighted and welcoming and you didn’t have to knock and shout ‘pabili po’ to be attended to. He sold cheaper than did the Filipino stores like Mang Iking’s. And he would sometimes give us small gifts – I remember ponkan in December and tikoy in February. I guess Mom was special among his customers because she was half Chinese and could strike up a conversation with his wives with a smattering of Mandarin.

Si Kristo Bilang "Tao Lamang"

2010-04-04T03:40:00.001+08:00

Si Kristo’y namatay. Si Kristo’y nabuhay. Si Kristo’y babalik sa wakas ng panahon.

Sabi nila, dito umiikot ang paniniwalang Kristiyano.

Ako’y Kristiyano dahil sinasamba ko si Hesukristo.

Mahal ko si Hesus at di gaanong mahalaga sa akin kung siya'y namatay at nanatiling patay, kung siya ay Diyos o tao o Diyos na nagkatawang tao o taong lubos na naging maka-Diyos at dahil dito’y nagkaroon ng pagka-Diyos. Hindi makakapagbago sa pagmamahal ko sa Kanya kung siya ay nagka-asawa o hindi, nagkana-anak o hindi. Kung naranasan niya ang mga bugso ng damdamin ng tulad nating ‘tao lamang' o hindi.

Hindi yata masyadong totoo iyan. Kasi, kung ako lang ang masusunod, mas nais kong si Hesus -- si Hesus na Kuya ko, o si Pareng Jess para sa iba -- ay nakaranas ng buong ispektrum ng pagmamahal, tuwa, pagnanasa, galit, takot, lungkot, pagaalinlangan – katulad ko at katulad ninyo. Masarap sa aking isiping siya'y tumatawa, naaasar, lumuluha, Na naranasan niya ang panhik-panaog ng kalooban ng “tao lamang” – minsa’y malakas, minsa’y mabuway, minsa’y patumpik-tumpik, minsa’y manhid, minsa’y nag-aapoy.

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Aba, Ginoong Nanay! (Tungkol sa mga Houseband, Desperado Man o Hindi)

2010-03-24T22:09:00.004+08:00

Sa tradisyonal na mundo ng tahanang Pinoy, markado ang mga papel ng lalaki at babae. Dito, ang Ginoo ang lumalabas upang makibaka sa mas malaking mundo. Ang Ginang naman ang mapagpalang kamay na nagpapatakbo sa tahanan upang maging maaliwalas at kaaliw-aliw paguwi ni Mister.

Sa machong mundong ito, isang kalapastanganan ang konsepto ng ‘tatay na nanay.’

Nguni’t dati lang yun. Umikot na ang mundo ng bahay Pinoy. Nalindol na din ang mas malaking mundo. Naalog na ang mga pagtingin at papel sa buhay. Dahil sa pagbabagong dala ng mas bukas, mas praktikal, at mas makatarungang pananaw.

Sa nakaraang 20ng taon, naimbento ang salitang house husband o, di naglaon, houseband. Mayroong mas kyut na tawag sa kanila -- ‘ginoong mom’ o ‘mister mom.’ Basta, ano man ang bansag, sila ang mga lalaking maybahay -- mga ginoong nagaasikaso sa anak at sa bahay habang si ginang ay naghahanap-buhay.

Tsokolate mmm! (Tsura lang ni Padre Salvi)

2010-03-13T02:32:00.002+08:00

Hindi lamang and kusinera ni Padre Salvi and marunong magluto ng tsokolate ah at eh. Tayo din. Ang kaibhan lamang, bihira sa ating mga Pinoy ang nanunuri kung sino sa ating mga bisita ang hahainan ng tsokeh (tsokolateng malapot) at sino ang aabutan ng tsokah (tsokolateng malagnaw). Ang alam ko, pag kaunti na ang tableya sa kusina mo, magtiis kang uminom ng tsokolateng malagnaw, hindi b-ah? Kung marami naman ang istak mo nito, eh di suert-eh.

Hindi ako sigurado kung ang tawag sa tsokolate eh noong panahon ni Padre Salvi ay tsokolate batirol na. Hindi naman yata nabanggit sa Noli (Noli Me Tangere).

Ayon sa isang Spanish-English dictionary, 'bater' ay 'to beat or wisk; 'batedera' ay 'whisk,' 'beater' o 'mixer.' Dahil mahilig tayo sa short cut, ginawa natin itong 'batidor' o 'batirol.'

Ang mga Mehikano daw ang nag-imbento ng batirol -- isang kitchen implement na gawa sa kahoy, may ulong bilugan at ukit-ukit at buntot na mahaba at makinis. Muchas gracias, senyores.

May Pasko bang walang umuusok na tsokolate, mapait-pait, manamis-namis, at mabula-bula? Para sa akin, wala! Hamon at tsokolate ang Noche Buena ng aking kabataan. Aali-aligid ako habang nagpapakulo na ng tsokolate ang Nanay ko, sa pagasang ako ang mauutusang magbati ng tsokolate. Eh hawak ko na ang batirol -- ganyan ako kakulit -- may magagawa pa ba siya? Dahan-dahan kong ibababad ang batirol sa tsokolateng wala na sa apoy, at paiikutin hanggang lumapot at bumula. Bilib sa akin ang Nanay ko -- napapataas ko ang bula.

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Ang Mataray na Palengkera (Iba pa ring mamalengke sa palengke)

2010-03-04T00:37:00.001+08:00

Sa dami ng mga supermarket, mini-mart, at convenience stores na naglipana – mamamalengke ka pa ba?

Bakit mo titiisin ang init, ang ingay, ang amoy, ang gitgitan, at ang mga bangaw at langaw sa Nepa-Q Mart o sa Farmer’s Market, eh mayroon naming Shopwise at Hypermart, na mabango, malinis, tiyak ang timbang, at kung saan hindi ka na kailangang makipag-tawaran?

Laman ako ng palengke dati-rati. Pagkagaling sa opisina sa Diliman, daan muna ng palengke sa Cubao. Umuuwi akong bitbit ang dalawang mabigat na plastik bag sakay ng dyipni. Kaya yata hindi ako tumaba noong araw. Nguni’t mula nang magtayo ng mall sa may labas ng aming subdibisyon, ang ginang palengkera ay natutong sumampalataya sa 'we got it all for you.'

Nguni’t iba pa rin ang palengke. Binabalik-balikan ko ito … lalo na kung may malaking kainan sa bahay.

Pag pupunta ka ng palengke, dapat maaga! Mas luntian ang mga gulay – kababagsak pa lang. Mas sariwa ang karne – kabubuwal pa lang. Mas mapula ang hasang ng mga isda – kararating pa lang mula fish port. At hindi ka gaanong magpapawis – mababa pa ang araw.

Nasa Farmer’s ako noong isang linggo. Alam mo ba na may Dampa na din doon – yung ‘bilhin mo, iluto ko’ istayl. Maraming kainan, walang iniwan sa food court sa SM o sa Robinson’s.

Akalain mo, may trolley na din sa palengke. Asenso! Humila ako ng isa at tinulak ko pataas sa rampa. Sosyal! Di ko na kailangan ang taga-bitbit.

THE TRUTH ABOUT RETIREMENT, ACCORDING TO AN ATYPICAL SENIOR

2010-02-12T19:02:00.001+08:00

One and a half year into retirement, am I having the time of my life?

From the depths of my heart, I wish I could say: "Yes.”

I thought I owed a happy answer to Princess Parungao who once thanked me for making her feel it was "perfectly alright to retire and get old." And to Gibbs Cadiz who called me an “inspiration for seniors” to embrace (computer) technology and who assumed he wanted to live his life the way I do mine when his “time” comes. I thought I owed it, too, to a handful of others who think I am still one hip and groovy and hot babe -- regardless I no longer hot-flush – and that I can still pull and tickle and rock and kick ass -- in spite of impending muscle atrophy.

But on second thoughts, Princess, Gibbs and company deserve a more honest answer, don't they? And I want to be a harbinger of hope, yes, but not of the false kind.

There are days, in fact, I cope magnificently and days I do miserably, but more days I feel so -- uhmmm – so so.

Taking time out to smell the flowers is great but you do it a few whiffs at a time and not make a fetish out of it. Getting fixated on sunsets is okay, too, except they last only a few minutes and are precious and few and elusive these rained out months.

And can one really make a career out of grand mothering? I love my Apo Andeng to death and it is terrific to be loved unconditionally in turn and be at the receiving end of milk-laced kisses and chocolate-coated hugs. Sure, I get all soft and gooey when Andeng climbs into my lap or thrusts out a hand trusting me absolutely to lead her where it is safe and happy. But those are the good days, when the Apo has woken up on the right side of the crib. Andeng, like most brats, I mean, toddlers, has horrid moments as well, capable as she is of throwing the most spectacular of tantrums, and -- oooh, see if I’d dare come within 10 meters of the Apo when she’s in the middle of one. Yes, thank heavens for the freedom of choice grand moms are entitled to.

I sometimes make much of virtual pleasures. Can you blame me? The online trove is a rich and enchanting wonderland that can suck in any unsuspecting Alice, Dick, or Mary. There’s e-mailing, scrabbling, blogging,YM-ing, G-talking, Face-booking, Farm-towning, plurking, twittering, photo-bucketing, You-tubing … with more digital delights out there one can never fully explore in one’s lifetime. One has to be cautious about living one’s life online, though. The dangers are many and real; and I don’t just mean back pains, butt sores, head aches, detached retinas, and cabin fever. Worst, all the logging and clicking and buddying and chatting can -- uh-oh-- put one in indefinite quarantine from the real world – not too unlike living in an opium-induced daze.

Sure, there is more time at post retirement for the things one has always enjoyed doing. Like baking, cooking, going out with ladies who lunch, reading, bookstore browsing, writing. Pingpong, badminton, walking. All these, in measured doses.

What I am trying to say is one still has to fill one’s days with a balanced fare -- enjoyable and dutiful ; fluffy and solid; physical and cerebral. What I call the three Ps: Poetry, Purpose and Play. And, not to forget -- Passion!

Purpose pre-occupies and fulfills. Play distracts and tickles. Poetry ennobles and recharges. While passion overwhelms, consumes, sends one outside oneself.

To me, smelling the flowers and marveling at sunsets are poetry. Baking, cooking, and gardening are usually purpose. Scrabble and Farmtown are unadulterated play. Reading and writing can be both poetic and purposeful -- and for now the closest to being my life’s passion. And Apo Andeng can be all 3 Ps, alternatively or all at the same time.

I guess I am getting more than the poetry and play I can use or am entitled to. What I need is more purpose and, I guess, passion. More sense of urgency. More deadline-chasing and “gosh , I’m gonna be late” get- up- and -go -- staples both of my working life. Also some sharing. And some paying back and forward. I am looking for these. I am going to find them soon.

So – once again now -- how am I coping these days?

On top of the heap today, groveling at the pits tomorrow, and neither here nor there most days.

Which, come to think of it, is the exact same way my pre-retirement days used to zig and zag.

Conversations With My Sons

2009-12-31T01:35:00.004+08:00

Tonight, we were watching the evening news on tv -- my sons and I. A not too usual happening since they usually come in late from work, from a night out, from a badminton or basketball game, or from whatever it is young adults are usually pre-occupied with.

As most of you know, commercial breaks on tv nowadays are outnumbered by political propaganda. On an given night, the viewer is treated or jaded (take your pick) by the beaming faces and shining promises of Gilbert (Gibo) Teodoro, Manny Villar, Noynoy Aquino, and Eddie Villanueva, not to mention those of vice presidential hopefuls and senatorables. Personally, I have to give it to these candidates, though -- many of these ads are imaginatively conceptualized and professionally, with some even subtly executed, making them visual and cerebral treats. But perhaps compliments are due the cooks? I mean, you know -- the media specialists that created them.

As my sons and I watched one campaign ad after another, I thought it was a fine opportunity to take a quick survey of my children's political preferences and views. I knew from previous conversations we had that they had not really made definitive choices, in the same way that I have not. But we all agreed happily the pickings were not as slim as in previous elections. For the first time in a long time, it seems, it is no longer a question of choosing the lesser evil. There were enough good men running.

To begin the ball rolling, I said: "You know, I sorta like Gibo. He seems to have what it takes."

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IN ANOTHER DRESS -- Another Biased Book Review

2009-12-25T23:28:00.003+08:00

Indulge me again (for the umpteenth time) as I reproduce here this very biased book review by my dearest bloggie-friend, superb writer, and -- sige na nga -- surrogate daughter -- the fair Lady Chateau aka i-mom-on-line.

“For age is an opportunity, no less than youth itself,

though in another dress. And as the evening twilight fades away,

the sky is filled with stars invisible by day.”

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

One of the earliest entries that I read from Annamanila’s Ode2Old blog is Magnificent Mommy Moments. (In fact I think this was where my friendship with Anna began.) I so liked it – especially the part where she is surprised by her kids with a new bed, but she was too tired from work to notice that she was already lying on it – that I went on to read her other entries.

I got to Sunsets on University Avenue with that touching poem she wrote for her dad. And then I clicked on other links that led me to stories of women in love and in trouble.

Never mind that it was a retirement blog and the author was as old as my mom! I was enjoying the entries!

Since then, I became a fan of Annamanila, always waiting and looking forward to read her. I love Anna’s humor and imagination, how she is able to eloquently put into writing even the deepest emotions. And always, always, I come away feeling richer – the heart fatter and the mind fuller… with much spare to chew on.

(Now this is not bola, Anna, even though we are good friends… hehehe)

From fan, I became a friend. The friendship that blossomed out of blogging is altogether a different and beautiful story. It began with a simple coffee date, that was followed with more and longer ones, and with more other friends. We became tile buddies, playing scrabble online while chatting into the wee morning hours. (I miss those nights, Anna!)

Anyway…

Last week, Annamanila launched her first book – In Another Dress. It’s a collection of her best essays and stories from her blog.

The blog is now in print! I was thrilled to see that most of my favorite entries were included in the book. I know this is a dream come true for you, Anna. And I am truly happy for you.

The book will soon be available at National Bookstore. But if you would like a copy sooner, the book is currently being sold at UP Institute for Small Scale Industries (UP ISSI). Please call Ving Cinco at 632 9287076 for inquiries. You may also call the publisher, Extempo Publications, at 632 3745239.

By I-Mom-Online

"PEOPLE OF THE LIE" IN MAGUINDANAO

2009-12-13T03:19:00.001+08:00

"I never dreamt the American dream," was my patent answer to persistent questions why I never left the Philippines for the USA or Canada or some other prosperous country when migrating was so easy back in the 1960s and 1970s.

But nearer the truth is it never occurred to me to leave.

I probably lacked the daring required for someone to leave warm home and hearth to venture to a foreign land where nothing is certain except cold strangers and colder winters. I probably lacked ambition, easily content with the tiny professional niche I managed to build here which brought me much in psychic income but little in material rewards beyond a small home and no-frills amenities. It must be the gift of shallowness, as in mababaw ang kaligayahan. I probably lacked foresight to think in terms of "next generations" and pro-actively secure a good life for my children and my children's children.

Could it be, on the other hand, that I define the good life a bit otherly than the Pinoy-everyman does?

Is it possible I have inherent faith in my country and people and by extension in my God. A God I cannot imagine --when pouring out His beneficence -- to distinguish between east and west and north and south and between white and yellow and brown and black.

This is a faith that is often severely tested by biting realities in this otherwise fair land -- including an economy that wouldn't take off, a body politic that refuses to mature, graft and corruption that have grown endemic.

And now comes the most acrid of acid tests – keeping faith with my people in the face of the most appalling calamity that has ever visited Jose Rizal’s “Eden lost” outside of World War II. A man-made calamity, it may be called -- but then how can we call them men , these creatures, these monsters and beasts and deviants that collectively and wittingly perpetrated the infamous Maguindanao massacre??!!

Two compelling questions for all of us to ponder: How in heaven’s name did these creatures think they could murder political enemies in numbers and get away with it? And how could a group of thinking adults have summoned the moral justification for inhumanity most foul?

IN ANOTHER DRESS: AN UNBIASED (I think) BOOK REVIEW

2009-12-10T03:51:00.004+08:00

Anna Manila's In Another Dress

It was my first time to attend a book launching. It was also my first time to meet some of the mommy bloggers, whose blogs I've constantly followed before and with whom I have managed to keep my virtual connection through Facebook and Plurk.

The first person I met was no less than the author herself. While still catching my breath after a three-floor flight with a toddler in my arms, not knowing there is a functioning elevator at ISSI, I blurted out when she asked me if I am also a mommy blogger, "Kayo po si Anna Manila." To which, she answered "Ako si Myrna."

I was quite guilty when she asked me if I have seen her blog. I did actually that day of the book launch and perhaps even two years ago when I was still actively blogging through a blogspot address. I've seen her online through Pinoy Moms Network. But so embarrassing as it is, yesterday I just saw a glimpse of her blog.

She welcomed me and my three year old son to her book launch with so much warmth. Never mind if she hadn't laid eyes on me before that. I couldn't be grateful enough.

When I started reading her book, I was glued, hooked, addicted to it. I couldn't put it down. I felt for a moment I was in a world alone with her book. I felt I was with her, travelling with her through her stories. Amazed as to how great a writer she was. Her book is not a book with just one story, the kind which you want to read in one sitting to know how it ends. Hers is a compilation of her life's anecdotes, so well written that I didn't want to stand up and put it down. Hers is gathered from posts published in her blog, but made me savor every short story in one sitting.

(Read more)

In Another Dress: A (Biased) Book Review, Sort of

2009-12-01T16:22:00.005+08:00

MY MOTHER, THE AUTHOR

by Alina Kanina

I used to joke Mommy, with hurt in my voice, “why didn’t you give me your payat genes?” I was referring to her special gift of gobbling sweets and carbohydrates without gaining an inch on her waist. Whereas I, her bratty bonch, have accepted my fate of diet pills, crash diets and gym sessions just to keep insecurities away. I learned to accept eventually that I was going to be chubby all my life. Tough luck, huh?

But this doesn’t mean I didn’t inherit anything good from her. In fact, I have a lot to thank her genes for. I got her unflinching “work before play” attitude; her go-getter stamina, a zest and passion for life and...according to her, a creative flair for words.

My mom writes like she breathes and eats. She conjures words and phrases like she stirs and throws ingredients in a pot of stew.

And I’ve got to admit, growing up with a writer for a mom made my life “more interesting” in school. Hey, don’t get me wrong, she didn’t write anything for me. She wanted me to sweat it out like the rest of my classmates. That’s how great a mom she is! Well…let’s just say she edited me and edited my essays well, making masterpieces out of relatively “ho-hum” compositions.

But in college, I started attending more scriptwriting classes than creative writing ones. Perhaps, it was a conscious or subconscious effort, knowing that I could never measure up to my mom as a creative, feature and technical writer. I carved my own niche, but I realize I wouldn’t be a great TV Writer now if not for my mom’s merciless editing and bashing, her gift for finding better words and syntaxes, which still amazes me to this day.

(For the full text of this very biased blog piece, click here.)

Photo by Rachel Yapchiongco

DEFINING THE PINOY AT ELECTION TIME

2009-11-21T11:51:00.002+08:00

As individuals, we are defined by our choices. By the books we read, by the food we eat, by the stuff we shop for, by the friends we hang around with, and the idols we choose to emulate. That’s why any parent worth his gray hair is on his guard making sure his young sons and daughters do not fall into bad company and get exposed to questionable influences. You must surely remember the injunction we have been brain-washed with since we first learned how to walk and talk– the “tell me who your friends are and I will tell you who you are” la-di-dah.

As a people, we are defined by our collective fortunes, our collective action, our collective image to the world. And yes, our collective choices ...

LIKE AN ANGEL SHE WRITES

2009-10-26T01:13:00.003+08:00

One unforgettable day last year, Intsik, who used to read my blogs dropped in to say he thought I wrote like Anne Tyler does!!

That was enough to send me running to the bookstore to grab my first Tyler, The Accidental Tourist. I have since read Patchwork Planet, Dinner at Homesick Restaurant, The Ladder of Years, St. Maybe, Morgan’s Passing, Back When We Were Grown-ups, The Amateur Marriage, Digging into America, and Breathing Lessons.

There are at least seven more books I haven’t read in the Tyler list and I am not in a hurry to finish them all. When you like something very much, you don’t consume it in one gulp. You prolong the feast, relishing word by delicious word, phrase by succulent phrase, page by exquisite page.

When a book hits me hard, as a Tyler almost always does, I virtually go down on my knees at its end, kissing the book, blessing the author, and wishing her "Long Live!" that she may forever write and never stop filling and refilling the treasure trove of her works.

Tyler neither writes of heroic exploits, power plays and gothic romance, nor the ransom of kings. Her characters are never the rich and famous and powerful. Tyler novels are abou ordinary, slightly crazy people like you and me -- belonging to ordinary, slightly crazy families, and doing ordinary, slightly crazy things. But now and again, Tyler gives them tiny explosives to throw to jolt things out of kilter.

You do not get caught in the crossfire between good and evil in a Tyler story. There are no bad guys in the Tyler world. Neither are there irreproachable heroes. Her main protagonists are endearingly fragile and flawed, inflicted as they are with more than the normal quota of eccentricities or misfortunes.

There is Rebecca Davitch (Back When We Were Grown-ups) who found out late in life she had turned into the "wrong person" by marrying an older man with a ready-made family. She was horrified the dignified, scholarly young woman she once was had become a "bag lady" at 53, prone to laughing a trifle too loudly and delivering inane little speeches that rhyme. She scrambles to reclaim the self she feels entitled to and in the process finds out she never really strayed from it.

Delia Grinstead (A Ladder of Years) is the quintessential "ordinary housewife," so ordinary she is often invisible to her own husband and almost grownup children. In the middle of an ordinary beach vacation, Delia ups and leaves her family and reinvents herself in a strange town, as though it were the only way to get the attention she seeks. Though lonely and insecure, she resolves to stick to her decision to move on and away.

And what about Macon Leary (the Accidental Tourist), the most famous of Tyler’s blundering heroes? Macon is a geographic dyslexic, wandering constantly "in a fog adrift" – scarcely able to tell left from right, north from south -- who paradoxically does well as a travel writer. He also fumbles in his personal life, throwing away a still salvageable marriage, retrieving it, then junking it again. He finds diversion in the arms of a fuzzy-haired dog obedience trainer as loud and kooky as he is quiet and stodgy.

Tyler has a knack of creating outside-the-box jobs for her characters to make their living from. Rebecca is a professional party-giver willing to host any gathering -- from a date between an engaged pair to a convention of mobsters. Macon is a tourist writer with a twist – he writes for people who, like him, hate to travel but have to. Barnaby Gatlin (A Patchwork Planet) snubs his birthright to a family business to work for a company called Rent-a-Back doing odds jobs for the elderly. Rita Bedloe (Saint Maybe) specializes in fixing other people’s clutter while Emily and Leon Meredith (Morgan’s Passing) mount puppet shows.

Tyler writes like an angel, a critic once said. I agree. An angel with a sense of humor! Mirth – now sardonic , then impish -- lurks in every other Tyler page, pouncing on the reader when he least expects it, evoking a half smile or a throaty chuckle. A religious fanatic is Saint Maybe; a confused 50-year-old wants to "go back" in time to when she was a grown-up; a diner owned by a dysfunctional family is named "Homesick Restaurant;" a mother is so busy she "didn’t have time to think;" a protagonist is chronically lost, constantly "praying that just by luck he might stumble across his destination."

Tyler’s characters are textured, fleshed-out, and familiar. They are us, our families, our friends, our neighbors – struggling to find our way out of the humdrum of our lives. Tyler lets her characters fall but picks them up, gives them second chances, and allows them to forgive themselves. In that sense therefore, she, angel-like, helps us readers find our own redemption, too.

These are a few of the hundred reasons I love Anne Tyler. And it helps that she’s 60- something like me, is named almost like me, confesses to being shy like me, and writes, according to one and only one person in this huge planet, a bit like me. Even as I recognize that as blasphemy, I still can’t help but pick it up as flattery and hang it on a wall somewhere inside me.

DECLASSIFYING DASTARDLY SECRETS

2009-09-19T00:13:00.023+08:00

We were lingering over dinner at Kalye ni Juan -- my certified platinum amigas and I -- when we got to talking about terra incognita. We agreed that though we go back many years and trust each other more than anyone else in the world, there are still things we keep from each other. Indiscretions. Intimate secrets. Deep, dark, dastardly episodes of our lives.

May these be now declassified? -- we wondered.

"Well, I plagiarized when I was in high school,” I began, feeling absolutely bold and wicked.

This opened a flurry of cutesy confessions.

“ I read my daughters’ diaries.”

"I sent Valentine's Day flowers to myself."

“I hid chocolate from my children.”

“I used to pad the family expense account.”

Someone yawned out loud then heckled : “Are we all so dull? Can't we talk of more exciting stuff?”

Such as what?

Such as – amidst giggles – did any one of us have a face lift or a nose job or a lipo?

Lipo? Uhmmm – an amply endowed amiga demurred – maybe this year maybe next year or just as soon as the clinics guarantee the bulges would stay deflated forever. Face lift? No, never, we chorused. Too invasive. Too much down time. Too hard to disclaim. Too expensive. Husbands will not allow it or will never stop throwing it to our -- uh oh-- faces when we complain about money. Children will tease and laugh. Children-in-law may gossip. And nose jobs? What for?! -- was the consensus, as each lifted her own proboscis a bit higher, regardless button-cute or just short of Grecian.

The only coy admissions that part of the session produced were to an eye job (by two amigas) and to re-landscaping in that region where babies pop out from (by almost all).

“Those are still so lame and tame,” the heckler complained again. “Don’t we have stuff rated X or R?”

“What about ... did we love someone we shouldn’t have?” Emma volunteered primly. Did I just imagine she blushed?

“Oh, you mean did anyone of us ever have an affair?” Lyn shot back as the heckler sat back with a smile that said "now we're talking."

We looked at each other, half expectant, half afraid of what we might be about to hear and not knowing how to deal with it.

No one should have worried. Nothing scary was forthcoming.

Jane broke the silence by persisting: “Such as what else?”

“Such as getting rid of someone we shouldn’t have?" -- this from me.

“Like an old flame?” Emma asked.

"A lover?"

"Or a baby?"

"No way!"

When do we take old skeletons out of cupboards? -- we speculated before we stood up to go home, none of us the wiser. Will there come a time they wouldn't shock nor embarass anymore? When we get to 65? 75? At our deathbeds?

When we have forgiven ourselves?

Maybe never.

THE TRUTH ABOUT RETIREMENT, ACCORDING TO AN ATYPICAL SENIOR

2009-09-04T10:49:00.009+08:00

A year into retirement, am I having the time of my life?

From the depths of my heart, I wish I could say: "Yes.”

I thought I owed a happy answer to Princess Parungao who once thanked me for making her feel it was "perfectly alright to retire and get old." And to Gibbs Cadiz who called me an “inspiration for seniors” to embrace (computer) technology and who assumed he wanted to live his life the way I do mine when his “time” comes. I thought I owed it, too, to a handful of others who think I am still one hip and groovy and hot babe -- regardless I no longer hot-flush – and that I can still pull and tickle and rock and kick ass -- in spite of impending muscle atrophy.

Purpose pre-occupies and fulfills. Play distracts and tickles. Poetry ennobles and recharges. While passion overwhelms, consumes, sends one outside oneself.

So – once again now -- how am I coping these days?

On top of the heap today, groveling at the pits tomorrow, and neither here nor there most days.

Which, come to think of it, is the exact same way my pre-retirement days used to zig and zag.

(TO NGOs and PVOs who might chance upon this blog piece – would you have need for a volunteer writer/editor/proofreader/publicist/website coordinator/promotion person to work part-time? Please contact the author at myrnaco@gmail.com if you do.)

THE BIG WAIT

2009-08-21T13:56:00.021+08:00

The hour of make or break for the doktora-not-yet had come after three months of reviewing for the boards. Imminent too was the moment of truth -- was she really studying or merely snoozing behind the "do not disturb sign" permanently posted on her locked door that only opened when she wanted to yell for food or drink? Was she really browsing the Net for medical science updates or was she playing doctor to the virtual characters I knew she has been creating stealthily on the SIMS II game board?

And will all the preparations -- both heroic and absurd -- work? The expensive review manuals? The topic outlines she painstakingly wrote for the more critical subjects? The fish oil and ginkgo biloba capsules she swallowed each meal to sharpen her remembering and thinking caps?

And why should this mom protest when asked to buy red undies and Red Ribbon ensaymadas that are supposed to work like a charm for any board taker? Didn't she herself wear something old and new and borrowed and blue on her own wedding day? (And don't nobody ask if wearing those 40 years ago worked -- or else).

Each time daughter came home from the exam, I asked if she remembered to kick the last chair in the row she was seated on her way out of the test room. Even if it didn't kick in more good luck as it was touted to, it could've at least been good for releasing some of daughter's pent up tensions.

We also looked heavenward for help. We went to Pangasinan to burn candles at the miraculous shrine of Our Lady of Manaoag and vowed to go back -- passed or flunked. I prayed two novenas to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and promised to pray a third -- win or lose.

The night the results were expected to come out was a long one. I kept vigil with my daughter and other doctors-in-waiting at the pinoyboardresults.com chat room. I was almost certain there were other moms of takers in the room but I seemed to be the only one anxious and audacious enough to actively participate in the exchange. When the youngsters asked each other about their waterloo subjects, I volunteered it was Prevmed (preventive medicine) for my daughter and fretted when no one else agreed. We argued about the passing rate reports that rolled and coasted from a low of 25 per cent to a high of 75. Not a few loudly wished it was 100 per cent and I had to bite my lips to keep from saying there would be inevitable passers and flunkers. We collectively held our breath every time the results were rumored to come out -- first at 10 pm, then at 11 then at 12 midnight, finally at 3 a.m., even as more rational voices tried to persuade the rest it was really more sensible to go to sleep and stop torturing themselves. It was well past 4 a.m. when I -- the most stubborn in the chat room -- finally gave up and tumbled into bed.

The next day could have been another stretch of agonized waiting but for a merciful appointment Bonch and I had with the eye doctor at 6 p.m.

On our way home at about 10 p.m., our phones beeped in succession.

I braced myself as I read my eldest son's message:

"Mommy, hwag kang malulungkot ha? Kalamayin mo loob mo. May anak ka nang doktora. Pasado si Mayet!"*

**Pandemonium in the car!!**

And that is how Dra. Mayet has ceased to be Dra. not yet.

*Translation: Mom, don't be sad. Compose yourself. You now have a doctor for a daughter. Mayet passed!

LOST! (Geographic Dyslexia)

2009-07-09T22:22:00.042+08:00

... He wanders in a fog adrift upon the planet, helpless, praying that just by luck he might stumble across his destination.

- Anne Tyler (in Accidental Tourist, describing main character, Macon Leary)

“Where am I” is a question that has confounded me all my life. A life in which I have lost and found self many times – and not in the existentialist way of philosophers and romantics I would have preferred.

I didn’t know till lately there was a medical term for what afflicts me. For decades, I’d simply call myself the most “ligawin” person in the world. Then I’d add, as though it was the cutest thing to say, that, alas, it had nothing to do with being attractive to guys – unless I count the young men who’d call on an almost daily basis with yet another credit card deal or some other telemarketing proposition.

I am so ligawin I still lose my way around the UP campus after 30 years working there. I am so ligawin I'd enter the main door of an unfamiliar office, transact my business, and then try to let myself out through the door of a conference room right smack at a dozen people all gaping at me. I am so ligawin that when I eat out, I can get lost going back from the comfort room to my table at a big restaurant till my friends are about ready to page me. I am so ligawin I break into cold sweat when I take a cab from a strange town and I can't give the directions the driver expects to get me home.

Aside from board rooms, stock rooms, and other spaces I shouldn’t have entered, I have also tried to climb into cars not ours.

When I am in a strange place and I wish to explore it, I walk a straight path. When I reach a fork, I turn back.

Three times I got lost in Antipolo in May time. Twice in Divisoria during the Christmas rush. Once in a subway in Nagoya, Japan while on official tour. No big deal. I took a cab back to home or hotel, where the first thing I did was to scold my companions for losing me.

I got lost big time in Agoo, La Union at a time only rich and important persons had mobile phones. My sister, her children and I braved humongous crowds and horrendous traffic to witness the phenomenon of the dancing sun and to gawk at Judel, a Bernadette-wannabe. I like to think I saw the sun spin out of orbit for a minute, unless it was just my eyes obliging my overwhelming need for a miracle. I also thought I caught an uncanny whiff of sampaguita flowers, unless someone sprayed bottled scent all over the hillside. Anyway, when the crowds dispersed, we inched our way to where we were parked. Suddenly, my companions sank into the sea of people, whereupon I spent the next two hours trying to fish them out -- them or the car which seemed to have plunged, too -- whichever surfaces first. When it got dark and my limbs were about to crumble, I found a house that offered meals and later agreed to put me up for the night. I made friends with the lady of the house who accompanied me to mass the next morning at the Agoo Cathedral, and thence to the PT & T office where I phoned home, and finally to the terminal to board a Manila-bound bus. After we hugged and said goodbye as though we had been friends for a thousand fortnights rather than overnight, Manang Nida handed me a small box. I have kept her gift rosary made from shell to this day.

At Divisoria Mall, when I gave up looking for friends who strayed as we panic-bought for the holidays, I stumbled across an obscure store selling old inventory of Pollypocket dolls at give-away prices. The finger-sized dolls in compact-shaped doll houses were to-die-for gifts for little girls, of which there were plenty among my grand and god children. When I finally reunited with friends at the end of the shopping day, they drooled over my buys.

"Wandering in a fog adrift" is releasing control, letting the fates take over. It can spring wonderful surprises.

Come to think of it, there have been adventures, not all of them unpleasant, I would have missed if I didn’t have this condition I now know as geographic dyslexia or dysgeographica.

It has given me cold comfort to put a name to this chronic disorientation that follows me about. Warmer comfort is finding out from google searches I am not the most ligawin person in the world. Odd comfort is realizing I am not stupid after all but only minorly impaired in the way that the reading dyslexic and the color blind are.

I don’t know what caused it or if it can be treated. I just know I went to school, held a job, raised a family, and built a social life little encumbered, though sometimes embarrassed, from not knowing what direction I am facing or whether I am coming or going. People around me, except the closest, are none the wiser I am afflicted. Of course, I had to abandon pretensions to be tourist guide or pilot or driver or navigator or traffic policeman. But hey, I can be a travel writer like Macon Leary, the vulnerable Anne Tyler hero (The Accidental Tourist) who can get lost on a road map.

I can even be president, like the world’s most accomplished dyslexic, George W. Bush.

(For more on dysgeographica -- also known as directional dyslexia, also called geographic dyslexia by Anne Tyler -- log on to the exquisitely instructive site of someone similarly afflicted -- poet, writer, editor, and blogger Dr. Metablog .)

Over the Hill and Blogging

2009-06-20T03:12:00.010+08:00

On the edge of retirement, I became a blogger.

When I began my blog, I thought I’d write about the truest thing of myself I could think of -- that I was growing old, miserable, and afraid.

My first blog pieces rankled with pre-retirement jitters. I made fun of my fears at best, fed on them at worst with dramatic flourishes.

My sister, a government lawyer, died 10 months after she retired. Technically, it was a conspiracy of diabetes, asthma, hypertension and depression that did her in. But virtually, she stopped the clock herself with her own obstinate refusal to live empty days with husband gone, work done, and children flown from the coop.

I had reason to be paranoid, hadn’t I?

As I kept blogging, I was surprised the negative vibes eased.

With its requisite introspection, blogging could have put me in touch with higher wisdom, an inner guru that tells me I would have arrived exactly where I am now without worrying – and more pleasantly.

With its requisite raising of external awareness, blogging made me watch out for opportunities to try new things, meet new people, and to look at experiences with a sharp eye for the instructive, comic, unusual or O. Henri-esque twist, with which to hug, tug or at least nudge the reader.

Can it be true that once you put down toxin on paper or -- uhrrmmm -- onscreen, it stays put there?

Most obviously, blogging became a hedge against my fear of a life bereft of purpose. It was something I could do with a passion well into antiquity, as long as rheumy eyes can still peer and squint and gout-stiff fingers touch-type.

I have since retired.

My blogs no longer brooded as unrelentingly as before. From one day to the next, I could be distraught or upbeat or just lackluster, and the temper of my blog pieces could swing with my inner pendulum. By turns, I reminisced about lost youth, paid tribute to someone important to me, philosophized about my losses, made mountains out of little mounds of achievements, laughed at my spotty record as mom-wife-sister-worker-friend-neighbor, celebrated the first- time wonder of being grandmother, vented disappointments and frustrations and leftover dreams and aspirations. I also narrated stories of women who confided in me their hurts for an aborted book project a decade ago.

In short, I blogged chunks of my life and pieces of my mind.

Two and a half years into blogging, I have yet to discover the secret to being old and happy. Nor am I that convinced that the best is truly to come. But I now know without doubt that when I learn to love myself, I wouldn't care how old I got. I am getting there both in years and in self- esteem.

I also know now that much like youth and the middle years, old age is what we make it. Getting old does not take away our capacity to laugh (or cry), to be passionate (or nonchalant), to get involved (or stay detached), to grow (or atrophy) . And it does not completely disenfranchise us from making the usual life’s choices.

We can choose to be old and hopeful.

Sometimes, I still forget. But as I blog on, I am constantly reminded.

(Draft intro to a prospective book that's half reality and half in the realm of dreams)

What If ...

2009-06-05T00:32:00.022+08:00

What if you had a barkada of certified platinum forever friends who go back with you to your maiden days, and the dearest of them had to leave for distant climes and couldn't come back and visit though she sorely wanted to and neither could you fly where she was though you had tried to put on wings and you didn't meet for 15 long years, except online, by phone, and in each other's dreams?

What if you learned the absent one could finally come home --"soon, very soon, in a month or so" -- and you began to count the days, while psyching yourself you shouldn't mind the waiting, now that you could glimpse its end, and you sometimes slept smiling, imagining the sweet day you finally see her face to face and press her close to your sun-drenched heart?

What if the barkada -- all ten of you with that one dear exception -- gathered one night ostensibly to celebrate the college graduation of one of your kids -- and then talk among you swerved inevitably, wistfully to the absent one's imminent homecoming and you desultorily began to plan a reunion itinerary, and then: suddenly, wonderfully, incredibly, the one being talked about walked in, as big and vibrant as life -- face glowing with anticipation, arms open to engulf you like a rising tide?

Here's what happens if all that happened -- and, believe me, it all happened.

Please click here to see what happened and please don't forget to turn up the volume:

http://upissi.multiply.com/video/item/2/Arrival_of_a_Balikbayan_BFF

If I Didn't Take a Walk

2009-05-23T14:45:00.034+08:00

The things I would have missed if I didn't get out of the house and take a walk.

It is not just the walking, but taking in, breathing in the surroundings. Paying attention to the houses and gardens and roads and byroads and commercial places. And best of all, squinting-- voyeur-like -- at the folks that animate the spaces.

The subdivision in Pasig where I live is typical of a lower-middle income community. No uniformed man stands guard at the unprepossessing gates that are always flung open. There are no truly majestic homes, neither are there too ramshackle shanties. Upward economic mobility is, however, apparent in a house being expanded here, another being repainted there, still another being landscaped further down the street. And the vehicles, ah! The buying of cars cannot seem to keep up with the building of driveways so that night after late night, one sees the no double-parking ordinance being blatantly ignored.

Folks here dislike being cooped up inside their homes.

Women visit each other's yards or meet halfway across the street to talk about, I would imagine, the knock-out terpsichorean style of Aling Dionesia (or Dionisia) Pacquiao, the latest medical advisory on swine flu, the bumper harvest from their avocado or cayomito tree, or -- God forbid -- that strange woman who never went out for years except to go to work but have now taken to daily walks ("Weird!"). In my paranoid, self-absorbed moments, I am thinking that would be me.

After five or thereabouts, when the stabbing summer sun begins to relent, children and children-at-heart would tumble out from their doorways to do their thing alfresco. Badminton rackets with or without nets, balls with or without baskets, monobloc chairs and tables with or without San Mig bottles on top would make their appearance on spaces that one would hesitate to call sidewalks, so precariously close they are to pedicab routes.

Around this hour, too, I put on capri pants, padded sandals, and wrist bag to take my long walk -- well, long in minutes but short in distance-- from my door to what I call the community mall and then back.

There will be others taking it with me, most of them more purposefully. Guys with a leash on hand at the end of which is a frisky beagle or an imperious-looking dalmatian. Housewives out to get some fresh stuff for dinner. Children scurrying to get their mother's errand over with. Senior citizens, about my age, taking a slow, effortful step at a time, doubtless complying with some therapy regimen after a stroke or some other medical episode. Obscenely fit for my years, I am sometimes loath to overtake them. And when I do, I occasionally whisper, when I remember to, a prayer for them in lieu of what I really want to do -- gloat I am still somewhat lithe and limber on foot.

Sometimes, when I walk, I ask myself over and again what I am walking for.

I walk to put some structure to my post-retirement life. I walk to treat my eyes to a break from a computer screen or a book. I walk to savor the breeze blowing my hair. I walk to keep from losing my mind or getting cabin fever. I walk to make sense of my life or parts of it. I walk in lieu of a boring 30 minutes on the treadmill or the 500 crunches I have wearied of doing.

Lately, I walk to see a guy.

This special person -- I do not even know his name. I began to notice him years ago, usually on the way to my office. He was always sitting on the pavement, deep in thought, asking for nothing, giving nothing, and bothering no one.

On the way back home, I would sometimes see him again, in almost the exact same place, as though he had not moved.

I have wondered about him then. My sons couldn't tell me much except that he was a fine basketball center they used to play with who got hooked on drugs. Apparently, substance abuse has addled his mind.

Someone must be taking care of him -- or used to -- because he looked well scrubbed and well fed -- or used to.

Nowadays, he looks grimy, emaciated, and hollow-eyed. His long, curly hair is untrammeled and his beard unkempt. When I asked around, I found out he had a kind sister who used to keep an eye on him and feed him but that she died a few months ago.

He no longer sits quietly at the usual spot. I see him dredging canals and scavenging trash cans in search of who-knows-what. Once, walking close on his heels, I watched him bend down again and again to pick up some stuff to put into his mouth.

I think I will call him Danny. By giving him a name, I might figure out what to do for him other than dropping a small bill by his side when I pass him, which he would acknowledge by looking up, his soulful eyes almost smiling. Then he would mumble what I could only make out as -- "Manang, Manang."

Vivid Vignettes of a Vincible Childhood - 2 & 3

2009-05-07T01:06:00.005+08:00

2. SOMEONE TO BEAM OVER ME

We couldn’t have been more than 13 -- my classmate and I -- when we espied the man and a woman inside a taxicab. Both were dressed up to the nines. The woman wore a shimmery gown, French-twisted hair, and vivid makeup. The man was dapper in a barong tagalog.

“Look at her” -- I cried aloud from our seat in the jeepney we were riding -- “she’s so beautiful! “ My friend gushed just as volubly: “Parang artista!”

The traffic was stalled by then, as it always was on that hour in that part of Juan Luna Street. This was circa 1950s when vehicles were not yet fitted with ACUs and car windows were often down. So the couple heard us – every effusive word we said.

I don’t exactly remember how the woman looked, whether she was fair or morena or slim or amply-built or if she blushed at our unabashed admiration. But I have not forgotten how the man tightened his possessive grip on the woman’s shoulder and beamed very happily and proudly at us.

I thought in my girl heart I didn’t have to be that beautiful. But I wanted some guy to beam like that for me, too, when I grew up.

MY PROFITLESS LIFE AS A SIDEWALK VENDOR

Summertime and the living was easy ... and lazy. Except my mom had other ideas. She wanted me to work to earn pin money. And what better way but to be a market peddler. And what better product to sell but the molido (camote-coconut bars) her Kumareng Luring prepared so nicely.

Why me? Why not my Ate? Oh, no, she’s too old – dalaga na -- to do that. Why not Zeny, our bunso? You guessed it, she was too young and couldn’t yet count money. Go, now, she shooed me away, handing me a heavy basket-tray and reminding me to rearrange my unprintable, rage-contorted face.

So there I was, all of nine years old, pouty and about to cry, standing by the talipapa entrance behind an apple crate on which perched the basketful of molido. Throngs of people passed. A few would eye what was in the basket but most went past it without as much as a glance.

I was instructed to shout out my merchandise. “Molido, molido kayo dyan. Masarap ... bagong luto.” But the halfhearted tindera couldn’t bring herself to open her mouth. Her anger soon gave way to boredom, and boredom to near panic when the morning passed and nothing happened.

Two or three women stopped by to ask “how much?” They must have found “dalawa singko” too expensive and turned away.

A kid younger than me was the one who hovered around the longest. Then she was joined by two more. They looked and looked but didn’t buy. “Penge?” the littlest one asked shyly. I had the urge to give it all to them -- molido, basket, and crate -- and be done with it. But I wasn’t gutsy and angry enough.

By lunch time, I had zero sales. It was time to go and face the truth.

It was my first and only foray into selling. It must have spoiled me forever for entrepreneurship.

(Years later, I taught entrepreneurship, researched and wrote articles and books about it as a “fake it-fake it - never made it” expert.)

Vivid Vignettes of a Vincible Childhood - 1

2009-04-29T00:24:00.006+08:00

The Nether World of Our Silong

We used to live in a ramshackle house we had the audacity to call a chalet. Looking back, its only legitimate claim to being a chalet is a six-step stair leading to its front door, posts on its four corners, and a silong less than a meter high.

I loved-hated our silong.

We had slatted floors in parts of our house where coins, keys, and sundry small items would go through accidentally and very often. We, children, had to make a dash for under the house to retrieve whatever fell through the slats, at our elders’ say so. On rainy days, the silong would be puddled with water and mounded with mud. We were obliged to go there, when asked, and get ourselves dirty. Even when it got dark, we went there just the same, if there’s something to retrieve, with a flickering candle and a pounding heart.

But the silong was also a magical place where we let our imagination fly with games of fantasy. We pretended it was prison, and we were all counts of monte cristo. We pretended it was the pit with a pendulum where we mock-tortured each other and from which we foiled each other’s attempts to escape. It was also the place some Count Dracula might sleep and wake thirsty for plasma and the “dungeon” would reverberate with blood-curdling screams.

More placidly in summer, we would spread mats on its earthen floor, and take cool naps in the company of its denizens – lizards, spiders, beetles, snails and – who knows – maybe even little snakes?

Best of all, the silong was a place to gather the cutest little eggs you ever did see – lizard eggs about the size of oval MMs. Better than easter egg hunts, I swear! -- anyhow unheard of then. We gingerly put the fragile little thingies in tiny bamboo baskets and later boiled them in small clay pots. Some boys in the neighborhood might also help us look for the eggs but mostly they hunted for spiders which the silong likewise bred abundantly.

When we girls grew too old to play house and cook lizard eggs, the boys seemed not to weary of spider hunting. “Oh well, boys mature slower than girls” was how we excused them. Until my Ate Mila, always the feisty and smart one in the family, figured it all out. The boys were actually no longer so much interested to catch spiders as to catch a glimpse of skirts and things that skirts are supposed to hide!

Soon after my Ate’s brilliant detective work, our slatted floors gave way to wooden slabs. There was no more reason to go to the nether world of our silong.

Lola Gone Loca Over Sweet Sour Andeng

2009-04-22T03:12:00.026+08:00

After lunch, these bumming-around days, I commute the dozen steps from our door to my son’s to begin my sweet-sour hour with Apo Andeng, the terror of a toddler who calls me “Wawa.”

Today, Andeng waits by the door. I play-act I don’t see her and walk past her. Winking, I ask Yaya Jo-ann where Andeng is, even as the little girl blabbers her heart out and tugs at my duster. Keeping up the pretence, I raise my voice to call out: “Andeng, Andeng, where are you, Andeng?” as I look around with unseeing eyes. Eventually, I tell the yaya: “Ay, sige, wala pala dito si Andeng” and heads for the door. When, on cue, she begins to wail, I freeze on my tracks and say: “Aba, nandyan ka pala, bakit nagtatago ka?” and scoops the now giggling, wiggling bundle. As I carry her home, I chide her: "You've wised up to this game your lola-gone-loca plays, haven’t you?"

If you ask me to describe Apo Andeng in a non-physical way, my patent answer is: “Ang batang mabait-bait na masalba-salbahe.” The truth! -- nothing but, so help me.

AT 1-1/2, my grandchild is a little princess of quirks. An awww-shucks sweetie pie one minute, generous with her kisses, gimme-fives, bless-bless and and ilong-ilong; and the next minute a little shrew who can outmatch me, padyak for padyak, belat for belat, “no-no-no-no” for “no-no-no-no.”

Today, she is all of the first, and my obligatory hour with her pleasantly stretches to two, then three and beyond.

Inside my room, she goes through our routine without protest. "Hep, hep" -- she lifts her arms high. "Hurray!" -- I tickle her armpit. "Hello Andeng, hello!" -- she makes a fist, presses it to her ear, and blabbers . "Bye, bye Andeng!" - "Baba," she imitates, bringing down the pretend-phone. "Ang baho, Andeng, baahooo!" -- she wrinkles her nose and goes "aaah-chooo!" There is more to her bag of tricks and she takes them all out: Where's the light? Where's the lizard? Kiss Wawa (mwaaah), embrace Wawa (uhmmm, sarap), untog Wawa (ouch, sakit!). Beautiful eyes, close-open, clo-jol, pongpong gasile-pinanganak kagabe.

All too soon, it's computer time, as she eyes the pc nearby. We play the funny-baby videos first -- you know, the type where babies chuckle like laughing bags that couldn't be turned off. I let her fuss with the keyboard and the mouse. By now, she knows she can help herself to the keys, except the power button.

Up next: music videos. And she dances on my lap in perfect beat to tone-deaf Wawa's eternal relief. After a surfeit of “All the single ladies,” “You’ll always be my baby” and other favorites, she goes down to roam her preferred nooks around the room, imperiously opening drawers and closet doors as though looking for contraband.

Inside one closet, she espies the box where her Tita Ninang Mylene keeps her bling-blings, points at it for me to take down. I comply with the royal wish and set the box down on the bed which she promptly climbs. That preoccupies her for half an hour – trying one bling on after another, stretching necklaces and bracelets to their limits, and finally succeeding in breaking one. I lie down beside the sitting princess, keeping watch, even as I worry how the Tita Ninang – also a royal pain in the you-know-what -- would react once she gets home and notices the broken whatnot.

Just then, Andeng puts all the stuff back to the box, then closes it, as I have taught her to do. She snuggles up to me, nuzzles one lola body part after another -- kitten like -- as though looking for the cosiest, settles for the stomach and falls asleep without warning. Just like that.

I let her nestle on me for a while, listening to the sound of her breathing, then ever so gently let her slide down to the mattress. She promptly turns on her side, laying a tiny hand on my waist, a tender foot on my thigh. I begin to drowse, too, and in the ambiguous neverland between waking and sleeping, wrapped in a child's feathery embrace, I see the world recede and I smile at it thinking it is very, very good.

Lenten Parody: Good Friday Favored Eats

2009-04-11T01:31:00.021+08:00

Fridays are when we almost always have ginisang munggo – usually with tiny hipon and bits of pork or chunks of pig trotters (the lower end of pata). The munggo is either stand alone or accompanied by a second dish of … uhmm … maybe pork adobo or breaded pork chops.

But since yesterday was Good Friday, we had to comply with the Lenten tradition of banishing animal flesh from the dining table. I remember abstinence as a way of gaining spiritual indulgence by not indulging (in pork, beef, lamb, veal or fowl and their ilk). Abstinence is supposed to win us brownie points in Christian virtue and assure us of a ticket for the trip to heaven we expect to take sooner or later.

But who’s kidding who?

Look what we gave up animal meat for yesterday!

Pasta (penne) marinara

Inihaw na panga ng tuna (grilled tuna jaw) from DIL's trip to Davao.

Tinolang tahong (mussels) from the fish stall in the kanto.

Hinalabos na hipon (boiled shrimps) also from the kanto.

Buko pie from Laguna where we visited several churches -- bisita iglesia style -- the day before.

All our favorite seafood we couldn’t indulge in everyday!! And we call this fasting and abstaining.

In past seasons, I have served at one Good Friday meal or another one or more of these: steamed maya-maya coated with mayonnaise and hardboiled eggs, oyster omelet, prawn tempura, chili crabs, broccoli with shrimps and quail eggs, relyenong bangus, pucherong dalag, or pesang isda with miso-kamatis dip. For merienda, there was always ginatang bilo-bilo or home-made halo-halo or grated gabi in uncooked gata topped with crisp pinipig. All elaborate and fancy victuals I usually don’t have the time and patience -- not to mention the budget -- to prepare.

The Doctora-not-quite had reason to mock-complain: “Mommy, this is no way to observe Good Friday. We didn’t go hungry; we over-ate.”

“ Arrggh! There goes my diet,” the Bonch said, her grin contradicting her groan.

True to form, my youngest son, a man of few words, agreed with a double-thumbs up before peeling yet another hipon on his plate.

In her mind, the perpetrator of the Lenten parody, tried to excuse herself with the thought it is not everyday her brood of six gather all together around the table.

And she consoled myself she may have already made the more authentic self-denial by renouncing all through the day the most delicious of online pleasures– internet scrabbling, blogging, Facebook-ing, YM-chatting, G-talking. She broke the 24-hour abstinence from the pc only to google pasta marinara to cook and the 14 stations of the cross to meditate over.

Oooh lala! Didn’t the clock just strike midnight? Excuse me, while I log in to the scrabble club at last, heart pounding, fingers trembling, mouth foaming.

Nnnno, those are not wwwwithdrawal ssssymptoms. And oh nnnno, I'm nnnnnot an a-aaahddict.

(P.S. Here's my recipe for pasta marinara: Gather all seafoods you can get from your pantry. In my case, I grabbed a dozen kani or crabsticks from the ref and filched a bowlful of tahong from the tinolang tahong we were having for lunch and chucked them to add to the half-kilo package of frozen mixed seafoods I got from the supermarket. Wash well and set aside. Saute minced garlic, chopped onions, and sliced tomatoes in 1/2 cup of olive oil. Add cubed carrot, diced celery, sliced button mushrooms, and then all the seafood. Be sure not to overcook the seafood, especially the squid. Drop in a dozen green olives and 2 pieces bayleaf. Pour two cups marinara sauce and one cup tomato sauce. Season with salt, ground pepper and thyme. Optional: Add a tablespoon or two of sugar. Pour over pasta (spaghetti, fettucini or penne) cooked al dente. Serve with grated parmesan cheese.

Catching the Spirit of Doreen Fernandez

2009-03-30T04:43:00.027+08:00

I still miss Doreen Gamboa Fernandez, she whose food columns at the Inquirer I read as greedily as its comic strips and opinion pages.

Now, the written word – when strung together with warmth and charm and flair– is comfort food enough for the soul sometimes. And when a writer waxes sublime or funny or instructive over food of the kind that feeds our mortal body, -- now, that makes us, the reader, doubly satiated and comforted, while at the same time pleasantly hungry.

Doreen, all-time dean of foodie writers, always made me feel that way. I stalked her food adventures -- from those weekly Inquirer essays to her Palayok, Lasap, Tikim, and Sarap volumes on Pinoy food and Pinoy food traditions. I marvelled she could write divinely of something as mundane as adobo and dinuguan and pancit and balut. After all – even the thickest thesaurus yields frustratingly few words for saying this or that is -- or isn’t -- delicious.

But like most good writers, Doreen Fernandez did not say. Rather, she showed … in so many ingenious and often scholarly ways.

Unforgettable are her paeans to sinigang, which she declared "the quintessential, the signature, perhaps the national Philippine dish.” Sinigang is so ubiquitous it is coooked in almost all parts of the archipelago and known by various names -- tinowa in Cebu, cocido in Bicol. Sinigang is so democratic it is served on the tables of both rich and poor. Sinigang is so versatile almost any fish, meat or vegetable can be seasoned with pickings from the farm or the backyard. Sampaloc fruits, flowers, leaves and tendrils; kamias, green mangoes, green guavas, green pineapples, alibangbang leaves, batuan, tomatoes, calamansi, and more have been tossed into pots to make sinigang taste like … what else … exquisitely pungent sinigang in varied nuances of "sour."

From her, I learned eating the head of big premium fish like salmon, lapu-lapu and maya-maya can be a smorgasbord of over 20 intricate flavors if one would take the trouble to dissect it bit by bite, while confessing she herself has discerned only 12 or so. I have since then begun my own measly count of fish head textures and flavors – (1) the creamy round center of the eye, (2) the white, pleasantly bland smoothness around it, (3) the bulalo-like fish brain best sucked noisily and unabashedly, (4) the morsels of meat lurking inside skull crevices rendered more tasty by the effort of plucking them out, (5) the delicate flavor of the translucent and silky labial parts, (6) The crisp, fat-encrusted palikpik flanking the head, and (7) the melt-in-the mouth viscosity in unexpected places. I am still trying mightily to make it to ten.

Doreen was an accidental foodie. Her husband Wili Fernandez, who was as famous an architect as he was as a gourmand, was actually the one asked to write about his gustatory adventures. Wili must have thought his better half was also the better scribe. “I eat, you write,” was his deal with Doreen, who didn’t only write-write-write but read- read-read and researched and elevated food writing to a scholarly craft. And yes, of course, which foodie wouldn't eat-eat-eat, too?

When Doreen Fernandez died in 2002 I knew she would be hard to replace in the annals of food writing. Not that wannabes didn’t try. Margaux Salcedo, Reggie Aspiras, Micky Fenix. All of them fine writers, kitchen-savvy, and restaurant-happy, especially Margaux who’s had flashes of on-target culinary lyricism, cynicism, and humor. They are still trying.

I am in fact a wannabe, too. I figured that since I could write some, and cook some, and eat out some, then maybe I could be a second-rate, trying-hard Doreen Fernandez copy-cat.

By some fluke, the past few weeks saw me establishing a new personal record in dining out, with recent outings to Saisaki, Tong Yang, S’barro, Fridays, Flying Pig, Old Vine, Bubba Gump, Abe’s, Look Foo, Mandarin Hotel coffeeshop, Dusit Hotel coffeeshop, Le Gourmet, Red Mango, Burgoo, and Pasto – thanks in part to the grand reunion that was, in part to amigas who lunch, and the rest to my girls who love to drag me to their gimmicks.

What I am trying to say in an unpalatably roundabout way is simply: I might soon food-blog.

My Sister, in Her Beautiful Mind

2009-03-23T00:16:00.005+08:00

I grew up being fed – and getting almost fed up -- with stories about Lorna, my gifted second cousin. My dad raved about her. He made sure -- did I just imagine it? -- I was within hearing distance whenever he recounted her latest to my mom, his eyes twinkling, his chest puffed up inches higher.

It seemed to me then it was always “Lorna this and Lorna that.”

Lorna graduated valedictorian from grade school. Lorna pulled the same feat in high school. Lorna finished her BFS from UP, cum laude. Lorna topped the exams for Foreign Service Officers at DFA. Lorna was sent to Hawaii on a study grant at East West Center. Lorna would be shoo-in as youngest consul, then ambassadress ever. Oh, I forgot, Lorna was also accelerated one or two levels in grade school.

Among us youngsters, Lorna was the benchmark to aspire for. The star to hitch all our rickety wagons to. We cousins, we rolled our eyes at each other during the “compare my children with yours” segment so inevitable during family gatherings. And I got the shortest end of the comparison -- I was, after all, only one year her junior and was supposed to be her look-alike. Oh well, I guess we have the same moon face and waif-like features. But where Lorna was shapely and tall and fair-skinned and had an easy, dimpled smile, I … never mind … let me just say I totally missed out on the rest of her physical charms.

I wasn’t too surprised when I went down from my class one night in fourth year college to see Lorna waiting for me at the lobby. She hugged me tightly, as her mom and mine hovered about. But when she continued to fuss over me at dinner at Little Quiapo -- pinching my cheeks,and fiddling with my fingers as though making sure I had ten -- I beseeched my mom with my eyes – “What’s this all about?”

The answer I got on our way home was quite unsatisfactory. It seemed all of a sudden, Lorna decided I was really her long-lost sister and wanted a reunion.

I heard the rest of her story when she came to visit at our house that week-end and the next and the next.

At best as I could make it, she fancied we were born, a year of each other and illegitimately, to a Japanese father and a Filipina mother during the time of the Japanese Occupation. Our real mom was her dad’s unmarried sister, Tiya Mercedes, a school teacher in Pangasinan. When our dad went home to Japan never to come back, we were separated and dispersed to different families in order to seal the family secret. “We should make up for lost time, don’t you see?” she laughed, dimpling, as she wound up the story that must have played and replayed in her mind.

As I was instructed not to contradict her, I coasted along. Sunday after Sunday, she would come from her house in Project 4, Quezon City to mine in Gagalangin, Manila. We would watch a movie or eat out or spend a lazy afternoon watching television or taking an afternoon nap together.

When the Sunday visits ended abruptly, I might have felt relieved. (Why does my emotive memory elude me?) It didn’t occur to me to ask “Why, what happened? Where is she? Is she alright?” Not that I could I ask from anyone. Suddenly, the subject of Lorna was taboo.

The next time I saw Lorna was about 10 years after -- at my office. I was already married and a mother of young kids. I was hard put to remember who she was at first. She had become big, very big, and her hair – unclipped and untrammeled -- had turned prematurely gray. In the somewhat unkind words of an office colleague who knew her from their time at UP: “She has seen better days.” I had to agree; she was a caricature of the "Lorna this and Lorna that" of my girlhood.

We talked over lunch or tried to. I could not make out much from the bits and pieces she was saying, except that she was no longer working and that her family was “okay naman.” She seemed to have forgotten we were once “sisters,” and I didn’t try to remind her.

It was raining hard when she left. When I tried to delay her, she showed me an umbrella. Stepping into the shaded catwalk, she stooped to pick up a stone. She turned and held it up for me to see, laughing, dimpling. I thought I glimpsed the long-ago Lorna.

She might have dropped by two more times at the office.

The last time I heard about Lorna was when I stumbled into her sister, Jenny, at a shopping mall. When I asked after her, Jenny said –“Ayun, nasa bahay. We don’t allow her to go out anymore.”

Before we parted, I asked Jenny to give Lorna my regards.

“Sigurado mo?” Jenny shot back with a sardonic smile. Implicit was a challenge: “Are you sure you want to have anything to do with her?”

I played it dumb and just smiled back.

It was lately I discovered Lorna’s condition had a name.

It was the same condition that afflicted Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and John Nash. Both Van Gogh and Woolf took their own lives. Nash went on to become a Nobel laureate for his work in mathematics and his story was told in a haunting movie starring Russell Crowe called ”A Beautiful Mind.”

It is the same condition that has lately afflicted someone I love.

“Nothing happens without a reason.”

Tell me about it.

(Note: Schizoprenia is now treatable although not yet curable. Modern medicine can control its most appalling symptoms like delusions, hallucinations, “voices within,” suspicions, and inability to communicate, interact socially, and cope with stress. Doctors no longer automatically associate the condition with environmental trauma connected with parental and childhood issues but rather factor in the very physiological problem of chemical imbalance. It affects one of every 100 persons worldwide.)

OUR MIGHT-HAVE-BEEN LIFE

2009-03-13T14:27:00.030+08:00

Have you ever woken one morning to discover you have become the person who's not really you?

Rebecca, an Anne Tyler heroine ("Back When We Were Grown-ups") was horrified to find out late in life she has turned into the wrong person.

In her youth, she was known among friends as "The Queen" -- dignified, serene, quiet, regal. In college, she was all set to major in history and to run for honors, too.

When she met Joe Davitch, 13 years her senior, a divorce' with three daughters, she jilted her"half-baked" boyfriend Will, sacrificed a college degree, and let herself be swept off her feet into Joe's life, his ready-made family, his whacky party-hosting business.

Before she knew it, she has become a professional party-giver, outgoing and cheerful, frivolous and funny, on the outside, given to making toasts as inane as:

"A toast to the bunch of us gathered together
In this glorious spring weather
And to Zeb for scoping out the site
And Biddy for cooking with all her might.
And most of all to Nono and Barry
We're delighted they're planning to marry."

At 53 and a grandmother, and having just hosted a disastrous picnic, Rebecca suddenly wondered: "Am I an impostor in my own life?" She looked at the mirror and gasped at the "bag-lady" she saw there with chaotic heaps of cornflower hair, a ramshackle face, and a loose flowery smock.

It was then she began to live on the stealth an imaginary, could-have-been life.

Now comes my friend, Vicky, a full-time University professor and part-time writer, married to a stable, devoted husband, with four grown-up children, being badgered with the same question. She was halfway reading the copy of "Back When We're Grown-ups" I gave her on her birthday two months ago when she called.

She identifies with Rebecca, she says in her plaintive voice.

Yes, Anna, she whimpers. "You blink, and whoosh! There goes your life. Where has it gone to?"

She used to fancy herself a bohemian, she elaborates. Someone who doesn't have a care in the world. Who does things that pleasure her -- and the devil may scratch its head. Not the obsessive-compulsive mom and wife and teacher that she has turned out to be, who worries over duty and responsibility in all her waking hours.

In the early years of our friendship, she had second thoughts about marrying Ben, her boyfriend of eight years. "I have outgrown him, I think. He seems so immature." I remember chiding her: "At least he knows what he wants. You don't." for at that time someone new and exciting had entered her life. Eventually, she married solid, stolid Ben just the same.

Nowadays, Vicky has sedition in her mind. She has to bite her lips to stop herself from barking at her husband, kids and other people around her: "Go away! Give me a break." They seem unable to do anything without her, she frets.

In the last 10 years, she has been bringing her students to Boracay. "When we get there, I just tell them to enjoy. Then I leave them alone. What they do not know is ako talaga ang mas enjoy." Walking, swimming, eating, sleeping by herself, she is herself, if only for a breather.

Her psychological age stopped at 23, she confesses. "Physically, well, another matter" -- this while chuckling.

She apologized for taking up my time, even as she "threatened" to call again and again. "So sorry, you're the only one I can talk to about angsty and irreverent topics." She made me promise not to make "sumbong" to our other amigas who all seemed so content, balanced, religious, and family-centered.

I told her I enjoyed our conversation. And added, how can I make sumbong? "For all you know, I am as out of the box as you are."

That's why I talk with you, she repeats. "There is an aura about you that is girlish and helpless and angsty."

Angsty? Yeah. I think there is a Rebecca in me too that wonders what might have been if I had taken a different road. Different job, different country, different partner. But that is not the predominant me. I can usually convince myself I am happy with my imperfect life and the not too simple, not too complicated person I have become. And when I get the blues or -- uhmm, okay -- the angst, I simply look at the person next to me to know he or she is sometimes bugged, too, by his or her own imaginary, might-have-been life.

Who was it who said that God designed man to be ever hungry, thirsty, craving, and yearning? All because He wants man to at last learn the vacuum cannot be filled by food or water, nor persons or things.

POST SCRIPT TO A REUNION

2009-02-28T17:32:00.032+08:00

50 years musn't have inflicted too much havoc on me. They remembered me at our high school reunion.

Whyever not. I took extraordinary measures to look girlish -- blow dried my hair, suffered a girdle to melt my middle, applied an extra layer of goo on my face, and smiled, smiled, smiled if for no other reason but to lift ooopsy-drooopsy skin.

And I recognized most of them too, if not by face, then by some manner or inflection or gesture or simply by gut feel. And I clasped them to my chest and held their hands, as though by hugging and touching I could bridge the chasm of the years.

At the Tondo penthouse (owned by an affluent and generous classmate) where the first event of the week-long reunion was held, the air was thick when one came in. The excitement was so palpable it crackled like burning wood in a fireplace.

Even as one got immediately engulfed in a flurry of embraces and digicam flashes, one craned one's neck out looking for special faces -- the high school best friend, barkada, crush. The partner at the senior's prom. The comrade in "crime."

When at last you find her or she finds you, it was all you could do not not to jump up and down But you try to keep your cool. You remind yourself: "Shush, you're an old woman now." Still you let out with an occasional shriek: "Omg, omg, there you are. Let me look at you. Oh my, you haven't changed a bit."

But we changed -- all of us. We did change.

Occasionally -- not too often -- I'd get an eerie feeling a strange someone was pretending to be a familiar someone else. How could this glam lady be the Juliet that she insists she is when I don't see a hint of the long-ago Juliet in her. Where have the unruly curls gone? And where the little-girl-lost look?

They looked for my pigtails too and I replied the louse-infested pair had been pruned long ago. In the same way I looked for Renato's killer lopsided smile, Dolly's nerdy eyeglasses, Pining's whistle-bait shape, Fely's copper coloring. Rocky's quiet, brooding ways. Gone. All gone.

It's not just the lines and ridges and the extra poundage. Not just the loss of lush in the hair, rose in the skin, sun in the eyes, spring in the limbs.

We changed inside and out and at the same time there were things that kept constant.

Anna for example is still as shy and as unsure of herself as she was in high school. The difference is that she has learned to affect poise and cool.

Medy still blushes when paid a compliment. And she still wets her lips in the fetching way she was wont to do as an adolescent.

When he met his first love again in the reunion hall, something inside Emiliano broke loose and he had to tell her he had not stopped dreaming of her.

But it takes more than a big reunion event to get in touch with the variables and immutables -- those that do not meet the eye. One tries to circulate from event to event, from table to table, spreading self thinly to cover as many classmates as possible. It was impossible to talk beyond the level of who, what, where, when, and how many, even as the more important why, why not, how, and so what questions remain unasked.

A week after the reunion, three of us took a trip from Manila to Los Banos to visit a classmate who lives there. In the three hours it took to go there by car, we probed into each other's lives and psyche. We continued to talk at the level of hopes and fears and losses and gains and leftover dreams when we reached Guia's beautiful home.

In that single trip, Guia, Milette, Myrna and Anna began to truly know each other for the first time. Never mind if they didn't get to soak into the hot springs they thought they went there for. As they all agreed before they parted, they were together that day -- talking soul to soul -- for a reason.

It was to them a potentially life-changing postscript to the reunion.

(To be continued, I hope)

Little Anna of A Thousand Stitches

2009-02-17T22:40:00.011+08:00

There's a new Anna in my anarchic (well, almost) little world.

She came today in this tiny, silvery package.

She came fully authenticated and identified by its maker/giver.

As we hugged noses, I just knew we're gonna hit it off.

One tiny problem -- where to locate her.

Among the other Annas/Annes in my analectic corner?

Uhmmm, no. She needs a place to shine. Maybe a tiny shrine of her own nearer her new owner the better to know each other.

Lemme see. .... Here ...

There she is in close up. Isn't she beautiful?

(Hey there, you handcrafting genius from the peanut gallery ... you know you have made anna-der dream come true, don't you?)

THE HOUSE OF MANY ROOMS

2009-02-09T00:58:00.008+08:00

My house has many rooms
I lock or unlock at will.
Some brick-walled
Fortressed, forbidding.
Others with swinging doors
Where I wraithlike slither
From room to room
In the order of the moon's
Waxing and waning.
Or shuttle in reverse
In the quirky fashion of dreams.
Or flit from end to end
Edge to center and back again
Omnipresent in every which corner
In my house of many rooms.

My house has a charmed chamber
A treasure trove
Of mysterious joys
Of things old
And half forgotten
That I visit often
When the rains pour
And joints grow cold
And eyes mist with tears
Of remembering and forgetting.
The sun ever shines
Brooks gurgle
Birds twitter
And embers smolder
In that charmed chamber
In my house of many rooms.

You have this charmed place too
In your own house
Of many rooms
However far you have gone
To whatever clime.
The lark still sings
Teasing our shynesses
Awaking strangenesses.
When we cried over everything
And everything mattered
And laughed over nothing
Though nothing was funny
But not when it melted
Into the silence of goodbye.

Soon we will meet
In that chamber of charms
Where we all began
And to which we will come back
To know each other
For the first time.

(Written on the occasion of our high school grand reunion on February 7, 2009)

REUNION JITTERS REPRISED

2008-11-24T18:11:00.004+08:00

Let me reprint this old, old post, now that my grand high school reunion is really approaching.

I have signed up to attend my high school grand reunion .. and things have never been the same again.

All because I will have a fit if no one recognized me when I entered the reunion hall.

I have begun to work out and diet. Although there’s no way I can get back my lampayatot look way back when, I should at least get rid of my spreading middle spread. I need to recover my waistline — even if I had to hire D.I. Trece or the NBI to find it.

I am letting my hair grow. I have months to get back my adolescent hair style — waist length, twisted into pigtails. I’d like to dare frisky Nelson Pangan to pull them again — the way he used to before Homeroom. And surely, I can whack him one — now that he shouldn’t be able to run as fast. I have a tiny problem though. My hair has gone from “betcha-by-golly-wow” thick to “son-of-a-gun” thin. And shall I wear my bangs again? Someone, please tell me if there’s a law against a golden girl trying to look like Tessie Agana when she was Roberta.

I have toyed with the idea of wearing my old Torres High uniform. Not that I could squeeze into any of them by any contraction of the imagination. But well — a modista should be able to sew a maroon skirt and a gold blouse to fit my present XX size, but sorry, sobrang sorry — though I am willing to die for my alma mater — well, almost — I’d die first before I wore that sorry color combination again.

I now look at my reflection every which way, 24/7. Now, if mirrors could complain! I see tell-tale lines and ridges even if I didn’t turn the dresser lights on. Shall I call them laugh lines? But they don’t go away when I am through laughing.

My mirror says I am no longer the “tiny wisp of a campus leader” Rolly Lampa wrote about in the graduation annual. Nor the apple-cheeked girl Romi Mananquil sketched once for a Torres Torch story.

Oh, well! Who will recognize me now? I have gone to pot.

Or have I?

I probe deep into myself, the essential me that mirrors do not reflect.

I am still the same person who loves sunsets, sunflowers, the smell of mangoes ripening and adobo simmering, who loves to read a good story and to write one. My favorite people are still those who are bubbly and witty and funny — like my Ninas barkada Tessie, Pining, Cora, Lolit, Jing and Sol — as I can never be.

I still don’t know a lot of things and have disappointed my kids by saying “I don’t know” so many times. I still can’t swim, dance, sing, ride a bike, or drive a car to save my life. I am still searching for the meaning of life and only know it isn’t just a big house or a sleek car or an impressive title or trophies or plaques.

I am still shy and clueless and sometimes clueless about being clueless. The only difference is that I have learned the art of not showing it.

I am still lampa. The one who the other team left for last at touchball games because she was slow and bungling and easy to hit. The one who always got to be “it” in tumbang preso and patintero games. The quintessential Binibining Atsay. Only that has evolved today as the “Quintessential Pulot Mom” from the badminton and pingpong games I still try to play in a huffy-puffy way.

I am still the girl who can never find the X in the simplest of equations. Over whom Miss Tienzo — for all her awards as outstanding Math teacher — shed tears of frustration. But also the girl who loved to paraphrase Shelley and Byron and Dickinson and was the darling of Mrs. Timario, Mrs. Alejandro, Mrs. de la Cruz, and other English teachers.

I am still hungry for affection, praise, approval, still pikon over slights — real or imagined. Still trying to be the best mom, wife, sister, friend, worker, neighbor I can be. Still working on relationships that have gone awry.

And yes, I am the person about to attend her high school reunion with a mixture of breathlessness and dread.

(My dear buddies: This is why I am on a semi-sabbatical from blogging -- working on "JUBILATION 2009: the best is yet to come" -- meant to be a yearbook like no other. Will see you all soon.- anna)

Good News -- not for the balikbayan only

2008-11-05T18:55:00.006+08:00

In the 1960s and 1970s, migrating was so easy. Back then, one didn't have to part with an arm or a leg in order to work and live in a rich country. Consequently, half of my high school batch are now prosperous expats living the good life in the United States, Canada, and Australia.

When I meet some of them online or face to face in one of their balikbayan sorties, they frequently ask me: "Why did you stay?"

My patent answer is: "I didn't dream the American dream," with its prideful undertones.

But nearer the truth is: "It never occurred to me to leave." So I say that too.

"But why not," some would insist with great curiosity.

Such probing has led me to an exercise in introspection.

I probably lacked the daring required for someone to leave warm home and hearth to venture to a foreign land where nothing is certain except cold strangers and colder winters. Plus I happened to be so ginawin.

I probably lacked ambition, easily content with the tiny professional niche I managed to build here which brought me much in psychic income but little in material rewards beyond a small home and no-frills amenities. It must be the gift of shallowness, as in mababaw ang kaligayahan.

I probably lacked foresight to think in terms of "next generations" and pro-actively secure a good life for my children and my children's children. Tutulog-tulog -- that's me, to a T.

Could it be, on the other hand, that I define the good life a bit otherly than the Pinoy-everyman does?

Is it possible I have inherent faith in my country and people and by extension in my God. A God I cannot imagine --when pouring out His beneficence -- to distinguish between east and west and between white and brown and black.

This is a faith that is often severely tested by biting realities in this otherwise fair land -- including an economy that wouldn't take off, a body politic that refuses to mature, graft and corruption that have grown endemic.

Goodnewsbalikbayan.com keeps faith with this faith.

This new website invites Pinoy OFWs and expats to come home to Pinas -- virtually or actually, for a while or for good. And come home not only for the umbilical and sentimental ties, but also for more practical reasons.

Like for prospects in real estate, entrepreneurship and other investments. Or for enjoying the spectacular sunsets, culinary feasts and nature trips the best way they can be enjoyed -- in the company of a warm and welcoming people.

And also for connecting with other Pinoys in common passions and advocacies that will burnish the Filipino identity and label.

Goodnewsbalikbayan.com sends out the wishful message that the good life need not be sought elsewhere but rather lived right here in our country.

(Goodnewsbalikbayan.com is edited by Noemi Dado, with Dine Racoma, Annalyn Jusay, AJ Matela, and Annamanila, as sub-editors.)

APPROPRIATING PAIN

2008-10-28T00:13:00.012+08:00

I caught my friend Doris crying silently in her cubicle. Although she doesn’t say anything, I know its again that good-for-nothing whom she calls “my everything.”

When your sister or friend hurts badly -- physically or emotionally -- and you feel so helpless, what do you do?

You make your shoulder a little broader for crying on.

You want to say "You nitwit you. Why should you let that SOB hurt you.” Or: "You think you love him but you don't, can't. " But you don't. You don't deny her her feelings.

You want to tell her about your kumare or kapitbahay who suffered bigger than she does, but who was able to cope. But you don't. You don't say "wala lang yang problema mo compared to so-and-so." Nope, you avoid belittling her troubles.

You just listen, make those cooing little noises, try to rephrase her pain, turn it every which way, and hope she talks some of the hurt away. Talking -- like writing -- can be cathartic, you know. You listen -- even if you can almost lip-sync what she's saying. And then you listen again. You take the phone even if it’s 2 a.m.

The cliché way is to pray for the hurting friend. Maybe it is unfair to call prayer that word. I am sorry if I offend others by the narrowness or recklessness of my vocabulary. But it’s too easy to say “I will pray.” It is even easy to do, too. I can pray by rote; I can compose a prayer – as I sometimes do –and say it over and over again until the repetition erodes it of meaning. And my own experience is that prayer does not always produce immediate results but has to patiently wait for “God’s own time.”

There must be more than listening and praying.

Can you – uhmm -- appropriate for yourself some of that pain? Can you carry around a piece of it to relieve someone of his or her load?

I have this lame-brain theory that pain is a universal pie that can be cut up and distributed thinly. And that if you get a slice bigger than your quota, you leave the other person with a smaller and lighter piece to carry around.

But I am just full of hot air, you know. Big deal, big talk.

For … what are the mechanics of appropriating pain for oneself?

How does the hot air translate into action?

I don’t know.

Another’s pain can never really reach me – except in an abstract way. The only way for that pain to touch me is for something to happen in my personal life that will cut and bleed me.

Then and only then will my talk turn into walk.

But I wouldn’t want that, would I? I am not as numb as I might tout myself to be. And if I have really desensitized myself, what pain would I be talking about?

No, there should be a better way. But I don’t know it yet.

Can it be to spread more kindness to the world?

Can it be to fix one’s own unmended fences – no more pretending the damage is not there, but rather pick up the pieces and hammer away.

Can it be to forgive those you are most hard pressed to forgive?

How will that help Doris who is hurting badly?

It is hard to say. I am not blind to the gaping fallacies of my reasoning. My brain is shot full of holes. Still, I rest my case on that fragile ground.

I just know, sure as the sun sets and rises, that people’s fates -- friends’ especially -- are inextricably connected.

(Ano daw?)

(To my friend, D)
Yesterday we cried, stung by life
That promised, gave, then smashed away.
The broken shards lie in the sun
Shimmering, a river of tears.

We swam, my friend, we swam
We swam for our lives.
Our eyes dried with every stroke
As we glimpsed the shore.

Yesterday we cried
But yesterday's far and gone.
We're safe, we're free -- we've always been.
We've forgotten why we cried.

POST SCRIPT ON GAGALANGIN (by Mario Silva)

2008-10-22T01:41:00.007+08:00

Once in a great while, a blogger receives unexpected rewards such as this -- a letter/commentary from amazing Mario Silva sent through his daughter, kindred blogger, exskindiver Chesca.

(Read it for the historical highlights and human-interest sidelights about old Manila)

Dear Chesca:

This is an additional comment to Annamanila's blog. Very much delayed but I think she will still like to read it.

I did not know that Gagalangin is in Tondo. I learned this after going over her blog again. She wrote so many interesting things. The woman (Nena), whose story is so touching, a very admirable woman indeed. I am sure many of our dear women, wives and mothers, have gone through so much of this kind of suffering. She wrote about the native delicacies of our home land (chicharong bulaklak, balun-balunan, day-old chicks, penoy/balut, chicharong baboy, burong talangka.etc). She made me re-live again what is good and beautiful about the Philippines.

Her description of Gagalangin - I never realized how many illustrious sons and daughters Gagalangin had produced. Heroes, great men and women of our history, in our literary field, in the theater, in movies. Kaya pala Gagalangin ... it was the cradle of so many of our "talagang ginagalang" na mga mamayan. I recall mentioning long ago her blog to Ayo, and his remark was, "why did I never know about Gagalangin when I have known Manila for so long?" I think it is because during his time, Gagalangin was so out of the way for the youth like you and the rest of the children who grew up on Quezon City.

Going back to her blog again, I realize that I was mistaken. The street where I learned to drive was not Maypajo but Juan Luna Street, and the eatery that served bibingka beside the Pritil bridge was not Aling Nena, but Ferino's. Thanks to those who commented on her blog. But as you know, I must be given some leeway … it was many, many years ago … more than half a century ago. And going back again to Pritil Bridge, it reminds me of the book "Manila, My Manila" by our National Artist, the late Nick Joaquin. He said that Manila took a long time to make and that its ground used to be the sea and that surely explains the presence of so many esteros, one of them being where Pritil bridge is located. And speaking of esteros, the bridge on Escolta, near Sta. Cruz Church, along where Samanillo Building and Regina Building are located crosses an estero. And in Quiapo, there used to be a street called Estero Cegado (I wonder if that street still exists). Some historians, as I recall, also refer to the Estero de Reina Regente and Estero de Binondo.

One of her commentators also mentioned Bangkusay. Our history records a Battle of Bankusay of 1571. In the war of colonization the Spanish Forces had embarked on a search for native warriors who had resisted them. A fierce battle ensued in Bangkusay between the Spanish forces and the native Manilans. The Battle of Bankusay remains a significant event in our history.

More than 400 years later, on a night in May, 1954, another battle would occur in Bankusay. In this site, a gang war erupted between what was known as the Grease Gun Gang and another rival gang. The case (which I understand was made into a movie) resulted in prosecutions for four separate cases for murder and frustrated murder. The victims were in a calesa parked along Bangkusay street, between Kapulong and Inocencio. One of the survivors testified that he was there because his parents "needed pigs for the Gagalangin fiesta..." There were eleven originally accused, of which, one was killed before the trial, another was discharged and used as a state witness, but was killed after he testified, and nine stood trial. Three were acquitted and the rest who were sentenced to various sentences including life, appealed to the Supreme Court. The High Court in its decision modified the lower court's decision and sentenced four to the extreme penalty of death and the remaining two to life imprisonment. The Court also stated in its decision that it was error for the trial court to have acquitted the three but that as the law stands, it was powerless to effect the correction.

The reason why this is of interest to me is not only because of the element of Bangkusay and Gagalangin in the case, but also I was a young lawyer then and I was assigned by the court to defend one of the accused as "counsel de oficio." The judge who assigned me was my former professor at the Ateneo. The trial lasted several months. I recall that one of the trial dates was January 19, 1955, when your kuya Jimmy was born. I represented one of the three acquitted. My services were performed for free, gratis et amore.

Torres High School, which was discussed in her blog was named after Florentino Torres, one of the first four Filipino justices of the Supreme Court. The site of the school was originally a Constabulary barracks. As I said in my original comment to her blog, I and my brother and two sons of General Castaneda, Mariano Jr. and Juanito, walked all the way from St. Theresa's College in San Marcelino Sreet in Ermita to Juan Luna Street in Gagalangin, where the Constabulary Barracks was located. General Castaneda was the then commander of the military barracks. Our childhood escapade occurred sometime in 1937.

General Castaneda later figured in a famous incident. In 1947, he saved President Manuel A. Roxas from assassination when he kicked away a hand grenade hurled on the stage in Plaza Miranda, Quiapo, immediately after President Roxas delivered a speech. The grenade rolled over and fell outside the stage, killing an innocent onlooker and wounding others. The would-be assassin, Julio C. Guillen, was arrested, tried, and convicted. He was executed in the electric chair of the national penitentiary in Muntinlupa in 1950.

Before that, General Castaneda, as younger officer, had been assigned to Cavite, where Mommy's dad, your lolo Gregorio, was then assigned as Provincial Treasurer. Your lolo and General Castaneda knew each other well. Mommy told me that she and your Auntie Norma, had always dressed up similarly then they were children and they were often mistaken as twins. In fact, long, long after, General Castaneda happened to meet your Auntie Dollie and had asked her how the twins were.

These are some musings which have come to me since the Gagalangin blog of Annamanila. I hope you can transmit this to her. She writes very well and all her stories are so very interesting.

Daddy

Letterwriter/guest blogger Mario Silva, in his heydays, as trial lawyer in Manila
(circa 1960)

HOW YVETTE TOOK OUT AN INSURANCE AGAINST PAIN (conclusion)

2008-10-14T10:26:00.002+08:00

What breached Camelot was another affair. Unlike the others before it, this one was serious. It broke their marriage.

It was in another Hong Kong trip where Yvette sensed that something was afoul. Taking the trip with them was Jorge's brother-in-law who planed in from California a week before. In Hong Kong, the brothers would disappear at 6 p.m. and would not reappear until the early hours of morning. In Manila, Yvette discovered that all the while, the new woman in Jorge's life was also booked in the same hotel their family stayed in. A neighbor heard Jorge boasting his audacious feat to a tennis buddy.

"Deny to the death si Jorge" when Yvette confronted him. It took a private detective for her to learn that the girl was a 27-year-old former guest relations officer -- also a former mistress of a businessman -- and that the lovers had rented a condo unit. As soon as she got the detective's report, Yvette packed all of Jorge's things and sent the bags to his clinic. Jorge brought them right back, fuming. He refused to go. He also refused to break up the affair. He came home erratically, spending more and more time with his girl. Soon, Yvette and Jorge were sleeping in separate bedrooms.

One day, he came home with a sheaf of legal documents. He wanted a separation of property. Yvette refused to sign. "Our children were begging me not to sign. They thought that if I signed, that would be the last they'd see of their father." But he asked her again and again. When she got tired of his pushing, she finally signed "... matigil lang sya from all the verbal insults he was giving me."

Within a few months, Jorge left the family home. But not before he accused Yvette of being "controlling and manipulative" and declaring that "he never loved me, was never happy with me." He dismissed their marriage as "wasted years."

Later, Yvette would herself put it this way: "We were meditating side by side. Suddenly, he snapped out of the trance, turned to me, and said: "I don't want this. I want romance in my life."

At first, Yvette tried to win him back. She asked friends and relatives to intervene. She stormed the heavens with prayers. She climbed Mt. Banahaw to invoke the help of the mountain spirits. She spent a small fortune on seers and clairvoyants at P10,000 per session. Someone told her of a new "technology" called "radionics" that could work like magic. For several nights, she mounted a picture of Jorge and then played tapes on family and moral values to the picture. All these to no avail.

She talked to Leila on the phone. She reasoned with her, described the family she broke up, warned her of karmic debts and responsibilities. She also told her that Jorge did not have much money, on his own. Leila snapped back: "He's not happy with you. Why do you force him to stay with you?" Later in their talk, Leila seemed to relent: "Alright, we're having dinner tonight. I will talk to him."

When Jorge came home the next morning, he woke Yvette and said: "Leila asked me to go back to you. So here I am."

Stung, Yvette was almost hysterical. "Is that it? You're coming back on her say-so? Do you really think I'd take you back on those terms?" Jorge left without replying.

The next day, Leila called: "I did my part. I can't do anything anymore." Yvette could only say later: " Ang yabang nya."

What made Yvette finally wake up was when Jorge phoned her to "get all your skincare products out of the clinic." Apparently, the lovers had taken a dealership with a competing company. Eventually, the business would collapse.

Three years into their separation, Yvette is beginning to heal. More intense meditation helped her tap the healing power within. She has joined a "truth-and-wisdom" group spreading the gospel of unconditional love and service to mankind. She lately learned that the best way to heal is by keeping busy and being preoccupied with other people's concerns.

She still hurts sometimes. While swimming in the beach last summer, her son almost drowned. After swimming to safety, he told Yvette: "You know, Mom, what gave me strength to swim in spite of cramps? I just thought of how much I hate Papa!"

It gets lonely sometimes. It has been one -- two -- three years of being celibate. She could have bonded. But with whom? The American whom she went out with for a while and who has kept calling and e-mailing? The sweet-faced, white-haired man who talks the same esoteric language she understands? But does she have to bond with someone special -- when all the world could be her lover. "Universal love, remember?" Yvette says chuckling.

A month ago, Jorge sent feelers he wanted to go back home. When Yvette asked him if he was about to give up his mistress, he smiled and laughed. "I think you want to come back for my money," she couldn't resist telling him, aware he was having financial trouble. He laughed again. She figured he was not ready.

If ever Yvette opens her doors, she'll make sure Jorge -- or whoever -- would give her space to practice what she has learned about loving and serving her fellows. She'd make sure nothing sets back her own sometimes faltering journey towards authenticity.

This journey is the most important thing in her life today.

She likes the woman that she is now evolving into. She organized a women support group to assist other hurt wives cope with the pain of betrayal. "As I help others heal, I also heal -- it is self-therapeutic."

The new Yvette feels more in charge of her life. It has empowered her to know that, much as she still loves Jorge, she could live happily without him. The new Yvette feels freer. This new sense of freedom will hasten her self-actualization, she says.

The last three years brought her self-esteem to an all-time low. Now, if Jorge told her again he never loved her, she could readily reply: "It's alright. I love myself."

She doesn't think of the future. She copes day by day, moment to moment. "Pag gising ko, thank you. Bago matulog, thank you ulit."

She also learned to take responsibility. It is neither all of Jorge's fault nor all of her fault. "We share responsibility. In a sense, Jorge is right in saying I manipulated him. I subjugated myself when I was with him out of fear. I lived a lie. I did not do it out of love -- for how could I have given love when I lacked self-love to begin with?"

In a previous life, she and Jorge were also a married couple who lived in England, she found out in a regression session with a psychologist-hypnotist. "In that earlier life, I was the one who was unfaithful. I ran away with a gypsy man," Yvette shares. The information helped her understand the law of karma.

The clouds above us join and separate.
The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.
Life is like that so why not relax?
Who can stop us from celebrating?

- Lu Yu

(Women In Love and in Trouble) HOW YVETTE TOOK OUT AN INSURANCE AGAINST PAIN - part 1

2008-10-07T00:20:00.003+08:00

(as told to annamanila)

Jorge was Yvette’s first love. They were classmates in Pre-med at a Catholic university. He was tall, good looking, intelligent – with a little-boy-lost quality about him that drew women like a magnet. Yvette was captivated by all these. But most of all, she fell in love with what she thought was the “inner man.”

Jorge was religious … or so Yvette thought. Jorge looked beyond the material and superficial … or at least that was how he impressed her. He seemed to understand about Yvette’s own yearning to unravel the mysteries of life, God, and the universe.

Yvette’s fascination for life’s hidden meaning started as far back as she could remember. She would look at the stars and wondered how big was the universe and whether the God that she knew was also the God of all the universe and all that she could imagine as well as those that she could not. She marveled at how high her imagination flew, even as her feet remained on the ground. She asked questions her elders could not answer, such as if God created the world, who created God?

In
high school, while most other teenagers read Emily Loring and Mills and Boons, Yvette buried her nose into the Science of the Mind, The Autobiography of a Yoga, and self-help books.

She dabbled in astrology and numerology. She was curious to know the psychic meaning of colors, interpret dreams, play the tarot and the rune. Before long, she was trying automatic writing with some degree of success. She became a vegetarian in college. She still is.

Outwardly, however, she was a typical youngster who loved dressing up, partying, hamming it up, and having a good time with friends. No, she did not go around wearing high priestess robes or making esoteric pronouncements. “Kikay din ako. Chichay din ako,” she now says, suppressing a giggle. But even then, she had to fight bouts of insecurity. She thought she was plain looking, and doubted if any man would truly want her or bother to have a second look.

Thus, when Jorge, the provinciano from Bacolod, singled her out and wooed her, she couldn’t believe he truly loved her, “… except that he probably discerned the beautiful me inside.”

Before she met Jorge, Yvette had this grand dream of being a missionary-doctor. She fancied herself in some far-flung rural area, serving the poor with the devotion of a Mother Teresa. She would not mind being a spinster, she thought, or even a nun. Nonetheless, she was also open to a relationship, but only “… if I could find somebody who shared my dreams and convictions.”

Jorge went on to medical school as Yvette shifted gears and took up B.S. psychology. She later picked up a Master’s degree while waiting for Jorge to graduate.

When Yvette graduated in 1974, she married Jorge in civil ceremonies. It was a secret wedding. A year later, they were wed in church if only to quiet Yvette’s creeping sense of “living in sin.” It was another secret wedding. They had to keep their marriage under wraps because Jorge’s family would have been devastated over a premature marriage for their student-doctor son.

In 1978, Jorge graduated from medical school. It was only then that he and Yvette came out in the open as a couple. They renewed their marriage vows in church in the presence of their families.

As Jorge struggled through his medical residency, Yvette found a good-paying job in a government corporation. In those early years, she made herself indispensable to her husband. She made sure he was eating well, resting well, and unperturbed by family problems – so he could study well. By this time, the children had started coming. Yvette worked doubly hard. She wanted Jorge to be a good doctor, especially since a successful cosmetic surgeon had taken him under his wing.

The cheating started not long after their first baby came. A letter left unwittingly in Jorge’s car gave him away. It was from Gina, a young medical technologist. The letter relived in lurid detail a romantic interlude during a medical mission out of town.

Other liaisons followed. By then, he had set up his own private practice. He hired nurses to assist him in his clinic. Two of them became his lovers.

Every time Yvette confronted Jorge, he pressed his innocence. He chided her for being jealous, insecure, imaginative.

Yvette in turn blamed herself. “It must be me,” she told herself. She was not loving enough, not understanding enough, not pretty enough. “All the time, I wanted to believe that Jorge was the wonderful person I thought he was, and I failed him.” She was wracked by fear. She couldn’t imagine life without Jorge. He was the sun. Her life revolved around him.

To improve herself, she took up once again the inward journey she had begun. If she could not transform herself into the wife Jorge wanted, then she could at least fortify herself against the pain of betrayal. Slowly, carefully, she gathered the tools that she thought would make herself invincible.

Her search took her to the Science of the Mind and Man (SOMM) program. It was the very “in” thing in the 1980s. But unlike thousands of others who took the course and then moved on, Yvette stayed on and on. For 15 years, she belonged to the SOMM inner circle of disciples.

“The SOMM played on my fears. It taught me to esteem myself, love myself, be happy with myself. I was told that when I am happy with myself, all the rest will follow. I figured if I stayed with SOMM, I will always know how to keep my marriage happy.”

One of the SOMM’s promises to its followers was material prosperity. It was part of what was supposed to follow when one achieved self-awareness. To Yvette, SOMM delivered as promised. Money started flowing in for Yvette and Jorge.

She had by then quit her job, sold their home, and invested in a series of small businesses. She tried shoemaking, running a bakeshop, weaving – all with reasonable success. In 1990, she hit it big with a cosmetic formulation handed down to her by her grandmom who was a chemist. She commercialized and improved it and added product lines. Today, the business has captured a niche in the cosmetic market. And she has learned to manage by exception.

Where before Jorge dismissed SOMM as “another prosperity mumbo-jumbo,” where before he was jealous of the time Yvette spent with the “inner circle,” Jorge now joined in, at first cautiously. “I guess he couldn’t argue with success, so he jumped in.” In time, he too became part of the “inner circle.”

What followed were what Yvette called “my Camelot years.” Five glorious years of peace, love and plenty for Yvette, Jorge and their three children. Five years Jorge played the ideal husband and father bit to the hilt.

As Yvette’s business prospered, Jorge grew in his practice. He was slowly carving a name for himself as a competent surgeon. Their family and finances thrived. Her business and his clinic complemented each other. Jorge carried her skin-care products in his clinic. In turn, they tithed generously. It was the key to prosperity SOMM taught them.

Yvette and Jorge went to Hong Kong, Thailand, and Indonesia for a second honeymoon. Heaven on earth, Yvette calls the interlude. “We slept wrapped in each other’s arms. And when we woke up, we said, ‘I love you.’”

To further fortify their relationship, Yvette and Jorge took the Marriage Encounter program, where they eventually became a “shepherd couple.” They were the seniors who coached other couples on how to heal their marital troubles.”

Together, they grew in spirituality. They discovered transcendental meditation. It helped him relax from the pressures of work. It helped her manage her fears which still lurked from time to time.

As her mind relaxed, so did her body. A hyperthyroid condition uncannily disappeared. “I was scheduled to be operated on. But when the doctor looked again, it was gone.”

Yvette laid her fears to rest. She was convinced she had taken out enough insurance against unhappiness.

“I was presumptuous,” she now admits. After 18 years in marriage and three years out of it, she declares: “In marriage as in all of life, there are no guarantees.”

What breached Camelot was another affair. Unlike the others before it, this one was serious. It broke their marriage.

It was in another Hong Kong trip where Yvette sensed that something was afoul. Taking the trip with them was Jorge’s brother-in-law who planed in from California a week before. In Hong Kong, the brothers would disappear at 6:00 p.m. and would not reappear until the early hours of morning. In Manila, she discovered that all the while, the new woman in Jorge’s life was booked in the same hotel their family stayed in. A neighbor heard Jorge boasting his audacious feat to a tennis buddy.

Later, Yvette would herself put it this way: "We were meditating side by side. Suddenly, he snapped out of his trance, turned to me, and said: "I don't want this. I want romance in my life."

- To be concluded next week -

The Sandwich Years

2008-09-30T23:38:00.008+08:00

In our backyard, where we pile up some of the bigger pieces of junk we have accumulated through the years, is a chair like no other. It has a lightly-upholstered seat and arm rests. It is a most beguiling chair because at the center of the seat is a perfectly round hole so big a basketball can be tossed right through it.

The chair is a reminder of my sandwich years.

You know, of course, the old saw -- there is a time for sowing and a time for reaping. A time to receive and a time to give back. A time for making something of yourself and time for raising a family. And for many – not all – there is a time for the sandwich years.

My children were ages five to 19 when my mother, 72, was felled by a cerebral stroke. Though it was described as moderate, it left her paralyzed on one side of the body, unable to walk, and unable to talk. A year after convalescing in my younger sister’s house, she came to live with me and my family.

The inability to speak coherently can be a condition known as aphasia. For an aphasic, the idea or the word is clear and intact in his or her mind but it just wouldn’t come out right when he or she attempts to get it out. At first, my mother virtually pulled her hair out of sheer frustration from not being able to express herself. Eventually, she withdrew into silence and learned some sign language.

What do you do when your sick, helpless, frustrated, and unhappy mother joins you, your husband, and your growing children in your cramped little home?

First you try to recover from the initial shock of seeing the world turn upside down. Suddenly, your parent needed parenting. You brace yourself for the anticipated tug and pull between the demands of growing children and an ailing mother.

Then you arrange for help. If you’re lucky, you manage, as I was able, to engage the services of a caregiver with a tough physique and a gentle heart -- the first for carrying Mom from bed to wheelchair to bathroom or car and back; the second for comforting her with touch or word in her darker moods. And at first those moods were so frequent it was all you could do not to break down. You get a neighborhood hilot – almost as old as your mom but a thousand times stronger – to massage her limbs each day with some potion, hoping against hope she might get some of her motor functions back.

Then you reorganize the house -- its rhythms and patterns -- around the afflicted one.

From school, each of the children had to take their regulation 30-minute turn with their grandmom. They could do their thing with her -- talk to her, read to her, sing to her, feed her, or simply lie down beside her to hug or hold hands.

On weekends, we pushed her to the center of family activities. We pulled her wheelchair to the table’s kabisera during meals. We took her to mass when we could borrow my sister’s car. We forced her to watch home movies though she would sleep through most of the run. When the afternoon cooled, we pushed her wheelchair out into the yard so she could watch children play and people go by or simply wait for sunset and listen to the bird calls.

I bought her a couple of Reader’s Digest large-font books so she could revert to her old love for reading. She just looked at the pages awhile and let the volumes fall heavily to the floor.

My son came homehappily one day carrying a big magic slate, certain he could now communicate with his Lola. He coaxed her by writing on the slate : L-O-L-A- S-U-L-A-T-K-A-D-I-T-O. Uhmmm, no thanks, her wan smile seemed to say.

My other son bought a bingo set not too long after. My mom hated bingo when she was younger -- dismissing it as a no-brainer -- and it seemed she was not about to love it now. She refused to play.

I guess that was then that an inspiration hit me. With my children’s help, I proceeded to execute it.

We set up a square table at the center of the living room even as we covered the table with a thick folded blanket. I lugged a heavy old box -- fringed with cobwebs and laced with dust -- from a top cabinet and poured its contents onto the table. Some of the tiles bounced as they hit each other. With my mom seated on one side and I opposite her, I bade my older sons take the two vacant chairs. Shuffling the tiles noisily, we built walls out of them on all four sides of the table. We were ready to play.

A son rolled a dice to determine who was first.

I began to distribute the tiles, giving the first set to my Mom, whispering a prayer.

Holding my breath, I watched my older daughter by her side put up the tiles for her.

I continued to watch, my blood rushing to my face, as Mom pointed at this tile and that for my daughter to arrange.

When I tossed one tile to the center of the table, my mom smiled broadly and held up her good hand. She was “pung.”

We all let out a whoop of joy. MY MOM STILL LIKED TO PLAY MAHJONGG!

Later, my children would boast they were the only youngsters in the world taught and encouraged by their elders to gamble, bribed to play every weekend, scolded when they didn't want to, told they could keep their winnings. The katulongs – there were three of them at the time – also learned the game. They didn't have to be bribed to play though -- it was part of their job description.

Someday, I might tell you what the big-holed upholstered chair was used for during those sandwich years.

To Apo Andeng, at One

2008-09-23T03:27:00.007+08:00

Let me count the ways
A year-old girl is made
Of sugar and spice
And all things nice?

Sugar? she tosses in the air
Powdering mom's hair, dad's nose
In sweet sticky chaos.
Best to keep spice rack
Pepper corns and chili bits
Out of that impish reach.

Nice? this minute, horrid the next
Now gurgling, beautiful eyes-ing
Coochie-cooing little wench
Bewitching by the simple expedience
Of close-opening tiny fists and throwing kisses
Like a crown princess.

Horrid? No, no, no, you say.
No, no, no she repeats
A decibel louder
As she reaches for the 'puter.
Watches, rapt, David Cook for a while
Then knocks out power button
Faster than Manny Pack-yaw.

What is a year-old girl made of?
Mama-dada-wawa talk
Taking the first wobbly walk.
Creeping out
Of mama's arms to freedom
Fraught with slips and bumps.

Little girl, this is the world
You've chosen
David Cook, Manny Pack-yaw
Freedom walks, fall n' stumble
Sugar and spice
Some things un-nice.

September 15, 2008

Here's One for Rachel

2008-09-20T09:52:00.003+08:00

Rachel is a biblical character who personifies filial love and devotion of the highest order.

In Heart of Rachel, the blog, the reader can follow the everyday life of a modern
Rachel, but one whose family is intact. This is the life that revolves around Yohan (Rachel's one and still only child) and her loving husband. I haven't seen Yohan but I am privy to his sweetness, pranks, and wisdom, prodigious for his age -- including what Rachel has called 'yohanisms.' I guess I am one of hundreds who have followed Yohan's growing up with much delight and anticipation, through the blog. It is for me like having a virtual grandson. :)

The blog brims over with the simple and complicated pleasures and challenges of motherhood. A feel- good blog, through and through.

I vote for Heart of Rachel for bloggers' choice in the Philippine Blog Awards.

Collecciones (Collectors, Collectibles, and Collecting Instincts)

2008-09-14T01:09:00.007+08:00

My daughter collects abandoned kittens, wounded birds, butterflies with broken wings and such. She feeds and nurses them till they get well or die. Once, she attempted to augment her collection by retrieving a chick named Brutus from the mouth of a neighbor's dog named Bernie by forcing Bernie's jaws open. If Brutus as much as peeped -- which is unreasonable to expect as she was by then missing her entire head -- my daughter would have insisted we take her to the vet's, where we were already notorious for bringing in the only unpedigreed menagerie of pets for treatment. By the way, you should have seen how the manhandled dog ran away -- his tail between his legs -- crying "ralph, ralph, ralph," which happened to be the name of his owner. Poor Bernie, he never knew what hit him.

My office friend Arthur collected yellow green jokes, ostensibly to burnish his lackluster lectures on business planning and entrepreneurship. I asked him to quit it because he often forgot the punch lines anyway. He doggedly kept on collecting and mis-delivering them because that -- his forgetting the clinchers -- made his audience laugh, anyway. Art suddenly died a few years ago and my favorite image of him is still where he scratches his head and smiles sheepishly and boyishly, after botching yet another otherwise perfect little joke.

A former boss handed down to me his breathtaking (his adjective, not mine) stamp collection, which included first-issue stamps, Olympics stamps from 1950 backwards, Princess Diana stamps, stamps almost as big as a fourth sheet of paper, and stamps of unstamply shapes -- circles, ovals, triangles and hexagons. He expected me to wax ecstatic at the small turnover ceremonies we had just before he left for abroad. I managed to coo my feigned delight and I guess I did myself proud for he smiled in a very self-satisfied way. After the collection languished for years in my possession, I tried to pass it on to my eldest son who tried in turn to push it underhandedly to the brother next to him. In time, I gave the stamps away, a little at a time, to another friend who knew how to spell and pronounce "philately" correctly.

I am not so quirky I don't want to be a collector all because every other person I know is into collecting. On the contrary, I like the idea of being fixated on an object rather than a person. After all, we keep losing people when they migrate or die or stop loving us. And while they are still around, people complain we over- under- or mishandle them. Inanimate objects -- blessthem -- stay on and on (unless you break or misplace them and then it's all your fault) and are faultlessly self-sufficient, stoic, and uncomplaining.

My point before I got lost explaining the difference between animate and inanimate collections is that collectors cannot just choose what to collect: it is pre-ordained. When God matched collectors and collectibles, he was quite specific about it. Stamp people are not to be mixed up with coin people, candle people, perfume people, stationery people, rare books people. There are those into Lladro figurines and Murano crystals and those that do matches and caps. Apparently it was not written in the stars that I do stamps.

What was I then? I wanted to collect boy friends and suitors at the very outset but I simply did not have the shape and the looks required. So I reluctantly gave that up. I tried elephant figurines and paper currencies, then baskets, then Delft blues without much success. I was beginning to panic -- like a maiden about to enter spinsterhood -- I was sleeping when collector's instincts were being distributed. Until I went to Japan and saw in the sidewalks what looked like teapots with double spouts. Something clicked in me and I knew I had found the thing for which I was intended.

Since then my friends who are about to travel to Japan do so stealthily because they know if I knew they were Japan bound, I would drop my manners and be inconsiderate and insist they bring me stuff that had to be hand carried, being fragile-handle with care.

It IS preordained -- for why else would I have a cupboard groaning with tea pots now when I never ever got the tea set I made kulit to Santa for in my bereft childhood.

(By the way, I also collect -- aside from Japanese tea pots -- Chinese tea pots and generic -- from whichever country -- whiteware. Hmmm ... lapit na Pasko, di ba?)

You'll Be Fine

2008-09-07T03:26:00.005+08:00

I was cleaning up my word files the other night while waiting for my sundo to come. Came across this poem written years ago when my boss Leon Chico, former director of UP ISSI (my organization) died. He died in California sometime during 9/11.

I was among those who spoke at the memorial service for him. This is what I delivered.

Thought I'd share it with you.

Was it ages ago? My first day at ISSI?
You were my one-man welcoming committee.
Who flashed the first smile
Held out the first hand.
Assured: "You'll do well. You'll be fine."
That chased away first day jitters.
Made the day soar like a song.

Was it ages ago? My first years at ISSI?
I got wed, had my firstborn
Lost my second.
Lived life, got hurt, lost and found self.
Grew a small faltering step at a time.
You were a constant – friend/boss/teacher
Who teased, cajoled, soothed, inspired
Assured in many different ways I'd be fine.

Was it ages ago? The day you left ISSI?
Did you outgrow us?
Were you destined to be an ex-patriot?
You missed people power 1 and 2
Erap's impeachment trial too
You'd have spilled your guts like us
Felt proud of your countrymen.

But you stayed away, flitting about and
Around somewhere
In the rain forests of Micronesia
The steel jungles of California
The predictable non-traffic of Singapore.
Wherever, you always did well
For the people you served
You were fine.

Was it just three Sundays ago?
When the phone rang '
Through dreamless sleep.
"LC is gone" the message said.
Say one for him, it prodded.
I mumbled rote words
But the tears didn't come
It is safe to die, I know
It is safe to fly.
You've never been as fine.

But wait, it was I that wasn't safe
Not from the memories
Of my first day at ISSI
Of my one-man welcoming committee
Of my first season of growing older
Of the one constant boss/friend/teacher.
I choked from all the remembering
Till I heard the wind whisper
"You'll be fine."

Dear Bert, from Nena

2008-08-30T13:47:00.006+08:00

Dear Bert,

I'd like to tell you, Bert, about my friend.

She's a brave and admirable woman -- my friend. But I worry about her these days.

At work, she pores over papers, teaches, writes, e-mails, attends meetings with her usual grace. She smiles, even laughs sometimes. She even manages to ask me how I am doing. She makes the usual small talk. In short, she goes through the motions. But her eyes -- they tell a different tale. I catch her off guard with a faraway look. The dark fringes give away sleepless nights. But more than that, her eyes betray an unspeakable sadness.

Meanwhile, as she keeps up her brave front, her eyes get darker, her body slighter, her countenance sadder. Twice I espied her inside her room her head buried in her arms, weeping softly. I asked her if she was sick and if she wanted to be taken to the clinic. She said she had a headache but that it would pass.

When we are alone together, I make subtle openings. I confide in her my own deep secrets so she could start unburdening hers. At another time, I dished out my usual line: "You are so lucky you have everything," hoping that when she begins to protest, a floodgate of confidences would open. She had not taken the bait.

Now that she has taken a long leave from work, I am sure there is something terribly wrong with my friend. She just is not saying. Perhaps, she is ashamed. Perhaps she hates to be pitied. Or doesn't want to get others upset, no matter that they are friends. But it is so unhealthy -- not being able to unload.

I worry over my friend because she has admitted she eats little and has problems sleeping. It figures -- the way she's fast losing weght and how deep the shadows around her eyes have become. For weaker women, this combination is dangerous. It can be a prelude to a nervous breakdown.

I worry over my friend. Because if my hunches are correct, what she is now going through I have myself gone through -- 20 years ago.

I was 35 when my husband took an 18-year-old mistress. My two-year ordeal was the darkest season of my life. I felt the most excruciating pain -- a pain I wouldn't wish on my most hated enemy.

I fought for my husband with everything in my power. Sometimes I smothered him with all the TLC I could muster. Other times I attacked him like a virago from hell. I went to Baclaran every Wednesday, St. Jude every Thursday, Quiapo every Friday; walked on my knees, burnt candles before altars, whispered mantras before I slept.

At work, I couldn't function thinking of the two of them. When he came home late, I thought it could be either of two things: he was making love with his mistress or mugged in the streets. I always preferred the mugging.

When I fell into troubled sleep, at time with the help of pills, I didn't want to wake up to the new morning -- for the pain would start all over again.

Oh yes, he tried to assure me of his abiding love. The affair was an "accident," something he didn't ask for. But he couldn't leave the "poor girl" just like that, he said. He asked for time. He expected me to wait while I slowly died.

My children -- how they suffered, as I found out later. But I was oblivious to them. It was a wonder they didn't grow up wayward. Today, my son would chide me: "You didn't see me grow up. You were too busy with work and with something else."

In the end I got my husband back. But I was so exhausted and resentful it no longer mattered. In the process of fighting, I stopped loving.

This sounds over-dramatic and sad, doesn't it. But every word of my story is true, every emotion I recounted I actually felt. Since then, I've read accounts of woman similarly betrayed. Compared to some of theirs, my story pales. Which got me thinking: If errant husbands had a full appreciation of what their wives -- women they love or once did love -- go through, would they rethink what they are doing. If my husband had an inkling of my personal hell, would my story have ended differently?

I have learned since that no man is worth the pain, the mental agony, the humiliation, and most of all the setting aside of other important things in life like children, career, and one's own well- being. I have learned that the heart can stop caring if it has been battered so.

These lessons I want to pass on to my friend, your wife.

Sincerely,

Nena

(Note: The above is a sort of postscript to Nena's story published here some time ago. Nena told me her story for an aborted book project which I hope to revive. Click here and here to read/reread Nena's story. This letter to Bert was actually written and sent by Nena).

FOOD TRIPPING, CIRCA NINETEEN FORGOTTEN by Rolly Lampa

2008-08-20T22:07:00.004+08:00

Hello Annabanana (cue)

Do you still dream gothic dreams? Next time you dream, dream of food, dream of the stuff we used to down with gusto, and now, regretfully must forego in the cold light of diabetes and cholesterol and gout and highblood.

Yes, mate - stuff like chicharong bulaklak, balun-balunan, day-old chicks, penoy/balut, chicharong baboy, burong talangka, bulalo, longganizang Baguio (puro taba), tocinong Kapampangan (puro salitre), La Paz batchoy (which includes chunks of lechon de leche and crispy chicaron), lechon macao (lechon kawali), bitukang asado, aligi ng alimango, chicharong balat ng manok, kinilaw na tuna, Chinese ham for Christmas, real Anchor butter, marca Pato queso de bola and lately, adobong balut, sisig and crispy crablet with ice cold San Mig.

Food in binary pairs ? - don't forget mami & siopao, champurado & tuyo, pandesal & karne norte, sinangag & paksiw na isda, kari kari & kilawin, sinigang & adobo, pancit & fried lumpia, macapuno over halayang ube and of course that famous Pinoy breakfast trifecta: tapsilog. That last one has apparently been affected by the economic downturn and food shortages -: returning Pinoy vacacionistas assure me that tapsilog is long gone, there's only, ahem, pakaplog. That's pandesal, kape at itlog, the poor man's breakfast. You go to the restaurant and ask the waitress: Miss, pakaplog nga. Har de har har!

Our generation is also hopelessly Americanized, thus: bread & butter, burger & fries, fish & chips, bacon & eggs, hotcakes & maple syrup, pork & beans,roast beef & gravy ---- even the diet food: soup & salad, fruit & cheese platter, etc. Elvis Presley's favorite food remains the stuff of legend: fried peanut butter & sliced banana sandwich.

But since you were waxing nostalgic about your favorite food and the neighborhood places that you got them from, let me give you my own list of where to find the best food in Manila of our time:

Mami / siopao - Ma Mon Luk, Quezon Blvd., Quiapo; later near Sto Domingo Church, Quezon Blvd. Ext., Quezon City
Siopao asado - Maxim's restaurant, C. M. Recto Ave.
Turon saging w/langka - the sidewalk vendors outside UE on C. M. Recto Ave
Bibingka - Ferino's, Juan Luna St., Pritil, Tondo
Halo-halo - the food section, Central Market, Quiapo, where the vendors would fight each other for your patronage
Hopia - Chinese bakery on Echague St., Quiapo
Native merienda - Little Quiapo restaurant, C. M. Recto Ave., near U.E.
Chinese lumpia - w/grated peanuts - any one of several hole-in-the-wall stalls on Raon St., near Quezon Blvd., Quiapo
Fried chicken - Max's - Dewey Blvd., Baclaran
Fried lumpia - Max's - Greenbelt, Makati
Barbecue - the cafe at the corner of Juan Luna and C.M. Recto in Divisoria; honorable mention: Jack's near Monumento in Grace Park
Chicharon - Asia Chicharon in front of FEU near the corner of C. M. Recto & Quezon Blvd
Foot long hot dog - Brown Derby, Quezon City
Ho to tay soup - Hen Wah Restaurant, Rizal Avenue, Sta. Cruz
Shrimp sandwich - La Perla Restaurant, Bustillos St., Sta. Cruz
Comida China - Panciteria Moderna, Sta. Cruz
Chinese take-out - Panciteria Wa Nam, Binondo
Chinese lauriat - Panciteria San Jacinto, Binondo
Burger sandwich - Tropical Hut, San Juan
Sweet spaghetti - Makati Supermart coffee shop, Makati Commercial Restaurant
Beef longganiza w/rice - Ambos Mundos restaurant, Sta. Cruz
Fried egg & giniling sandwich - sidewalk vendors outside Jai Alai, Taft Avenue (only at night)

Food fashions come and go and sometimes they never come back. I think we've seen the last of the arroz cubana (fried egg & giniling) rolls sold outside Jai Alai on Taft Avenue, simply because Jai Alai itself is gone.

Do children nowadays know about pandesal with matamis na bao --- standard recess fare for children in the elementary grades in our time. Do people still spread condensed milk on a piece of toast ? It would be reassuring if that was still on.

And finally, the regional cuisine test: You're a great cook, Anna, so tell us - when you do putchero, do you take off the balat of the saging or not ?

ROLLY

SHORT LIVED THE QUEEN: Mayday Mayhem in Gagalangin

2008-08-14T23:36:00.006+08:00

Her first crush didn’t see the light of day.

It happened in Maytime, summer of beginnings, of awakenings, even rude ones; season of the santakrusan festival and alay bulaklak kay Birhen Maria -- (the Lady wasn’t called Mama Mary back then).

Naku, the hermana mayor wants you to be a sagala tonight -- her mom told the young girl that Mayday, as she came home from the palengke, catching her breath. Excited, she omitted to say she was to stand in for another girl, a cousin, who suddenly came down with the flu.

The 10-year-old, just then beginning to enjoy being quirky, said no, no, no. You can’t make me. I will die first.

You don’t want to be Reyna de los Flores? -- her Mom asked, unbelieving. That’s second honor to Reyna Elena, don’t you know? The girl wasn’t impressed.

She showed her a pink frock of taffeta, chockful of sequins and flowerets, borrowed from she didn’t care who. The girl didn’t give it a second look.

Then she added that Rudy, a young boy from Antipolo Street -- would escort her.

That was when the ten-year-old blinked: “Sige na nga,” she relented, but not before she played pakipot for yet another hour.

Rudy was the younger brother of her Ate Malu’s best friend, Rodora. He was mestizo-looking, tall and quiet, and had this smile best described as pamatay. Every other girl she knew had a crush on him, but quirky as she was, she herself liked to boast she didn’t give a hoot about boys.

She had her first ever hair-styling session at the neighborhood beauty parlor that afternoon. Her long straight hair was intricately rolled, patch by patch, around wire rollers then inserted into a helmet- shaped dome where her head was turbo-broiled -- sort of -- till her ears turned lechon-red. When the hair stylist was done fussing with her hair, she had a headful of coily curls or curly coils – take your pick -- loosely tied at the back. It was called tribuson, the preferred do for young hair.

She had goo applied to her face. And a black pencil drawn on soft places around her eyes. Plus the final touch – red kolorete smack on her mouth and smudged on her cheeks, blusher-like. She liked what lipstick did to her face – almost grown up, and a bit like, she decided, not child star Tessie Agana as the stylist insisted, but her favorite adult actress, Lolita Rodriguez.

That night, amidst torches ablaze, and to the beat of bugles and drums, the mestizo boy, looking dapper in embroidered barong tagalog, took his place beside her. She thought he looked worried but she continued to beam to the crowds, feeling absolutely gorgeous.

A few paces later, as the procession turned from Angat to her own Pampanga Street, he leaned to whisper in her ear as her heart skipped a beat.

(NOTE: Here's where the audience/READER participation begins. Rudy could have whispered one, ONLY ONE, of three things. Pick one, if YOU will.)

· “Anna, this is so boring. May chewing gum ka ba dyan?”

· “ Anna, ang kapal ng pulbos mo. Bawasan mo nang unti.”

· “Anna, mas bagay sa akin ang gown mo.”

As she dabbed a pink handkerchief on her face, “Dios te Salve, Maria” reverberated dolorously, like a funeral march. She felt the beginnings of a stomach ache as the procession traversed the main Juan Luna Street, and then back a seemingly endless time.

She never marched as Reyna again, not that she remembers being invited to be a sagala again.

(Two years later, Rudy became her classmate in first year high school. Neither of them behaved as though he or she remembered that disastrous May evening. They would nod shyly at each other when they met, and that was it. They didn’t even become friends. Tsk.)

Notes:

Santakrusan- or Santakrus de Mayo, a procession/parade reenacting and celebrating the search for the Holy Cross led by Queen Helena of Spain.
Sagala – the young women/girls who marched in the procession, playing the various characters in the long-ago search, wearing long, colorful gowns.
Hermana mayor – the host and organizer of the Santakrusan
Alay bulaklak - flower offering.
Reyna de los Flores - Queen of the Flowers.
Pakipot – coy, hesitant, but only pretended
Pamatay – killer, thus killer smile.
Ang kapal ng pulbos mo, bawasan mo nang unti – You have too much powder on, remove some of it.
Mas bagay sa akin ang gown mo – Your gown would look better on me.

Food Trippin' ala- Gagalangin (Tondo), circa nevermind

2008-08-11T02:58:00.026+08:00

Bibingkahan at the Manila Hotel began by the Pritil Bridge.

In my young and maiden years in Gagalangin, I’d munch on a cob of roasted corn while reading Liwayway magazine, curled up on the sofa. If it rained, I let it. That was my idea of a perfect day.

Great food then as now came in binary pairs – dinuguan at puto, mangga’t suman, tokwa’t baboy. Mine was gatas ng kalabaw at tapang baka. You pour a cup of the rich milk over a plate of steaming, pandan-fragrant rice, add a sprinkling of rock salt, and top the caboodle with chunks of fried tapa just slightly fringed with golden fat. You close your eyes involuntarily with every spoonful -- feeling all is right with the world. Though I didn’t know the phrase then, it was to me the quintessential comfort food.

There must be farms near Gagalangin for the milk was delivered to our doorsteps still mainit-init, with the top cream two inches thick, in a coke or gin bottle, stopped by folded banana leaves twisted screwlike.

My Tio Kulas, a wealthy hatter, lived in a big house on Cavite Street three or four streets away. They did not only own the only phonograph (the only place I could play a vinyl record some relative sent me) but also the only authentic lusong that side of Gagalangin, with which they made authentic linupak every month or so.

I’d hop-skip my way over to Tio Kulas’, though it was 20 minutes away, if it was “linupak day,” for it was more eagerly anticipated than an official holiday. Authentic linupak is not mashed cassava but saging na saba pounded on lusong, with fistfuls of grated coconut and sprinklings of sugar quickly tossed in between the rising and falling of the giant wooden pestle. Since the banana is semi-ripe, the linupak is not sweet and soft but tart and springy. This delicacy is rarely commercially available in the city, then or now.

(Years ago, in a fit of craving, I tried to prepare linupak using only persistence and a kitchen almires. To say it was a disaster is an understatement.)

I have other scrumptious memories of Gagalangin.

Sunday morning would find us youngsters sitting expectantly by Aling Tisya’s food stall in the talipapa. Aling Tisya opens only on weekends and was worth waiting a whole week for. She served the best goto in the world -- the bowl big, generous and steaming, the porridge freshly cooked and not yesterday’s bahao, the tripe and bituka pieces succulent and just a bit softer than al dente, and the calamansi-patis sawsawan slightly more sour than salty. Followed by ginatang bilo-bilo with langka strips and a curlicue of kakang gata on top, which young heart could ask for more?

One didn’t even have to go to the talipapa for a food trip. If you waited patiently at home, the treats would come.

Itinerant vendors would stroll by with puto-kutsinta, taho, and fresh produce in the morning, including the freshest talangka my Lola would magically transform into the most savory buro, inside which was red-black sinfulness called aligue. Never mind how she did it. (The SPCA did not go after people who tortured tiny crabs by salt-treatment, did it?)

By three o’clock, other vendors would come in succession, bilao perched on the head, basket tucked in the arm, shouting out their ware. We were always in a dilemma which merienda to buy. Corn on the cob? Binatog? Bitcho-bitcho, butche-butche, sapin-sapin? Kalamay, maja blanca? Turon, maruya, lumpia? Carioca? Sometimes, it could be halo-halo, ginatan, or sweet beans with crushed ice – a stall was always a dash away.

Later in the afternoon, a different set of vendors would be passing by, with fresh saging lakatan and latundan, tuba, and paros, a sweetish kind of shellfish we scalded and ate as appetizer.

Nights are stormy when you don’t hear “Baluuuuut….. penoy, baluuuut.” It took me some time to learn which end of the egg to crack so that it opened fetus- side up so I could drink the savory broth-like liquid – never enough, always bitin -- before gulping the whole egg in two bites. No, I didn’t have to close my eyes and we didn’t have an expression then for “yucky” or “gross.”

Mendoza bakery was where we ran to buy galletas de patatas and Marie-like biscuits by the hundreds, at 35 centavos per, when a horde of children was waiting to be fed.

Botika Santos, a pharmacy-cum-PX store, had Horlicks, Baby Ruth, Lifesavers, and Cadbury chocolate bars with fruits and nuts when our sweet tooth craved for something imported and our father was home to give us extra spending money.

When unexpected company came, my mom didn’t panic. A Chinese panciteria at the corner of Solis and Juan Luna, opposite Torres High School was open 24/7 – well, maybe 16/7 –which whipped up miki-bihon, hototay, and sweer-sour meatballs faster than you could say yi-er-san-si- go.

At the Torres High School canteen, there was cake I never could get enough of. It had a chiffon base and a custard-caramel topping and tasted to me like a prelude to something ... uhm .. sublime. Anyway, I would nibble on it morsel by tiny morsel, trying to prolong ... uhm ... heaven. At 25 centavos a slice, and my baon usually only 30, it was often unreachable as the ... uhm ... sky.

Around the school were hawkers unlimited who broke into smiles as soon as the bell rang to dismiss throngs of youngsters. Most of us Gagalangin girls literally ground our teeth on manggang hilaw at bagoong, papayang manibalang at heko, and singkamas marinated in salted water. For the sweeter-toothed, there was ice cream sandwich, tira-tira, belekoy, and Milady (pronounced mee-ladee).

Later, when we were a bit older, after a late-night double-bill movie at Scala Theater on Avenida Rizal, there was no way my sisters and I wouldn't stop at this bamboo restaurant at the foot of Pritil bridge, home of melt-in-the-mouth bibingka galapong and to-die for chewy puto bumbong. Put up in 1938 by Ceferino Francisco, it grew so phenomenally that by the 60s it had outlets all over Metro Manila, including one in the Manila Hotel. Its name: Ferino's Bibingka.

Light years away were Jolibee, McDo, KFC, Pizza Hut, Goldilocks, Greenwich and Shakey’s.

Photo credits: The amazing picture was filched from "Sa Likod ng Bahay Kayumangge," (on which I tried to post a comment to ask permission for use of the picture but couldn't as there was a registration process beyond my ken) which gives a more detailed account of the history of Ferino's Bibingka.

I hope the blogger behind "sa likod" will not mind my taking liberties with the picture. But if he/she does, I will delete the photo as soon as he/she lets me know.

Apologia: Tama ka, Rolly Lampa, it was Ferino's Bibingka! -- not Aling Nena's. Wow, what a memory!

More credits: Salamat po, Mario Silva, for reminding me there was a delectable bibingkahan a jog away from Pritil bridge. Ferino's po pala yun!

Where There Is More Heaven Than Elsewhere (Paying Respect to Gagalangin)

2008-08-06T01:50:00.020+08:00

Gagalangin is in Tondo -- as in Gagalangin, Tondo, Manila. But its residents behave as though it is not. It is thinly separated by the unimposing Pritil bridge from the more trouble-prone Tondo of Bangkusay, Vitas, and Moriones, but the residents pretend it is a world away.

Ask a Gagalangin lass where she lives, and she is unlikely to mention Tondo, lest it scare away prospective suitors less fearless and fist-happy than Fernando Poe, Jr.

Kaming mga taga Gagalangin, the old guards say proudly, are respectful and respected.

Taga-rito si Dolphy, King of Comedy, they would tell the uninformed, and proceed to point to where his old house once stood in Sunog Apog. If you had more time to listen, they would probably whisper that Dolphy wanted sorely to marry the mother of his first batch of children, except the family of the woman thought he'd be good for nothing. "Big mistake, huge," they'd probably interject, with a "tsk, tsk."

Ganun din si Tirso Cruz, great band leader, and his famous offsprings. Same with Perla Bautista, Tony Santos, Ricky Belmonte, Gina Pareno. Award-winning movie stars.

Pitoy and Virgie Moreno. Renato Constantino. Atang de la Rama and Amado Hernandez. Armando Malay. Rolando Tinio. Teodoro Agoncillo. Francisco Buencamino, Jr. Vicente del Fierro. Icons of letters and the arts.

They all grew up there, these gentle and genteel people.

It was where I was born and grew up, too. I'd call it the "Gagalangin of my affections," except it is already taken.

The Gagalangin of my childhood was a congenial place where people lived more or less comfortably -- neither too richly nor too poorly. There were very few homes there that would qualify as mansions; neither were there too many rundown shanties. Many residents think it is the best place to live and have stayed put and they may not be too far from the truth.

My family lived in a squatter community, but you wouldn’t know from the way the houses looked.

We had spacious front yards, where we played patintero, piko, and tumbang preso every summer afternoon just as soon as the sun began its downward slope. Being lampa, I was always “it” and ended up “balagoong,” but it didn’t stop the quintessential Binibining Atsay from playing. Anyway, I could often cajole playmates to go inside the house later to play sungka, siklot and jackstone where I was sure to redeem myself.

Our side yards had gardens. My mother tended a proud one that was fed with horse manure, gathered from the droppings of the karetela that plied our street and therefore grew lushly. She had bandera espanyola, san francisco, paco, champaca, calachuchi, chichirika, water plants, and fragrant jasmine, sampagita, and dame de noche that sweetened our nights and our sleep. We also had a guava tree which so became a bone of contention with a kapitbahay who claimed it was theirs that I sometimes wished lightning would strike it down – the tree, not the kapitbahay.

It was much later that the garden gave way to a bigger house to give us children more room to grow. And I guess gardening had to give way to mah-jongg to give my mother more diverting escape from some huge sadness.

Our house had wide capiz windows, the better to watch the santakrusan in May, the prusisyon on Good Friday, and the drum and bugle band at fiesta time. I would spend summer afternoons looking out the window to watch younger children play when I thought I was too old for piko. Weekends were a good time to gawk at folks in their Sunday finery on their way to and from church. I must have watched from the window a trifle too often, for later, high school classmates would refer to me as the “babaeng laging nakadungaw.”

Our house was strategically located near where we studied, Gregoria de Jesus Elementary School and Torres High School. It was also a dash away from the Gagalangin public market (talipapa), St. Joseph Parish, Gagalangin public library, Gagalangin Theatre, Torresian School Supplies, Botika Santos, Mendoza Bakeshop -- Gagalangin landmarks all. As a result, our house was THE hangout of choice. Friends would gather there on the way to the graduation ball, jam sessions, and outings.

In first year high school, six or seven classmates from Maypajo and Caloocan would go home with me to eat their lunch baon at our table and my mom would sometimes serve them hot soup and matamis na saging.

One day, just as we were done with lunch, my Mom anxiously but sternly announced bad news -- she was missing a P50-bill (which could easily be P 5,000 today, given what it could buy then). She apologetically searched through every school bag and purse my classmates carried but didn’t find it. That night, she found the money tucked in a pocket of a soiled duster in the ropero. The following day, lunch was on the house and the classmates cried with joy and relief. But it took me months to forget that most embarrassing moment of my young life.

Six years into my marriage, I left Gagalangin to settle with my new family in Pasig. I visit it now and again, but more often lately -- in my mind.

Some translations:

Karetela - horse-drawn carriage

Kapitbahay - neighbor

Patintero and tumbang preso - team games -- seldom played now -- that required running stamina and quickness/nimbleness.

Piko- a game similar to the western hopscotch

Ang babaeng laging nakadungaw - Woman/girl who's always looking out the window

Ropero - closet for dirty clothes

Conversations With Myself

2008-07-30T12:29:00.024+08:00

1.

I can't write good fiction.

You don't say.

I have weak imagination. I can only write about what I have gone through and known and felt. Sure, I can exaggerate, understate, embellish, take liberties. But I need a solid floor of truth -- no matter how thin or ramshackle -- to lovingly polish, mess around with, stamp my foot on.

The next thing you'll say is you're a poor liar, too.

I don't have a good liar's imagination, creativity, and diligence. I am too lazy to try to remember lies or note them down. And I hate being caught up in the maze of one lie after another. I'm not saying I don't lie.

For a while, you haven't written. Write something, anything.

You don't when you are empty. When there's no kindling in the head. No fire in the belly. When you're dry in the heart, and elsewhere.

Some people hate to be angry or afraid or lonely. But the saddest thing to feel is nothing.

It is sad not being able to write.

Come on lighten up. You're too old to take yourself seriously.

2.

It's funny how others think old people do not feel as they do. Or are not entitled.

People say, shaking their head:

Really, now -- you STILL sleep eight hours a day? Love chocolates? Swoon over Piolo? Go kilig over someone guapo? Smile at yourself in the mirror? March at EDSA?

And, oh wow, you STILL play games online? YM-chat? Blog? Giggle? Sulk? Dream dreams? Take yourself seriously?

As though one is transformed by the wand of old age into a eunuch -- calcified, barely moving, bereft of dreams and appetites. Or at least someone who doesn't do much beyond read newspapers, watch television, dote on grandkids, complain of aching joints, and go nostalgic over lost youth.

Have I joined the ranks of the disenfranchised ... or will soon do?

I need to have a fall back for that "someday soon" when I would be shunted from the mainstream to the edges of life. Or, God, let me just drop out from it.

3.

Before I forget, I can STILL skip-hop ...

And can still write feeling poems too:

I have forgotten the fire
The fire that spreads like a blanket
And takes the nip out
Of a rainy night.

I have forgotten the spark
That spangles the eyes that glimpse it
And scalds the hand
That reaches out to touch it.

Yonder smolders a bonfire of dreams
Whoa, heart,don't go.
Heart, heart
Oh ...

(My 100th post, celebrated with all the angst I am capable of.)