LOST! (Geographic Dyslexia)

... 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

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 ...

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

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

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.

3.

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

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

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

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

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

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.)