BETTER THAN IT GETS -- SOMETIMES

(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

My Journal, My Voice - 1

Sometimes, I go crazy-like. Like:

I am old and ugly and dumb and uncool!! and I don’t even try to pretend I am not. And other people are horrid!! and life sucks!! and who asked to be born anyway??? and, you, who’s running this lousy show, will you just stop a sec, I WANNA GET OUT!!

On my journal, I write down my anger, fears, woes. I write with exclamation points and question marks and big capital letters and double underlines. As I write, my fury flows with my tears, smudging pages. Soon it abates, dissipates as though by putting all the toxin on paper, it stays put there.

Weeks, months, years later, I reread what I wrote. Whew and whoa! Was that me spewing all that poison? Was that me feeling such negative emotion?

I laugh at myself. How OA can I be?! As I read, I knew -- the next time I feel so horribly, I can and will take myself less seriously.

Today, I feel down again. Not deeply-darkly down but spring-feverishly so. I bring out my journal and force-feed on the bright and the beautiful, the good and the glad. Write three -- I commanded myself -- just three things to be high about.

At first my mind is frozen, my hands leaden. You can do it, I cheered myself on.

(I begin tentatively) Good health, with no maintenance prescriptions yet.

Hipon in my fridge, Anne Tyler, Quindlen and Lamott in my book shelf. “New” ukay shirts in my closet, a consultancy contract in my pocket. Writing, blogging, online scrabbling, badminton, baking. (Now, my pen is flying).

Warm bodies in my life. My children – not all of them bright but all of them beautiful. My Apo Andeng – certainly both bright and beautiful – and sweetly addicting. My sister, my pamangkins and apo sa pamangkin – doting and doted on.

Warm buddies – old, new, real, virtual.

Sunrise, sunsets, sunflowers.

My journal.

Before I knew it I had written down 30 and still writing.

MY SO-CALLED POEMS -- Part 1: Inanities That Rhyme

When I was a young girl (yup, I was one, long ago and far away), I wrote lines, forced them to rhyme and called them poems.

This one, published in our gradeschool newsletter in its mimeographed glory, must have made the golden moon turn blue:

Oh, wonderful, wonderful moon
I wonder why you don't shine at noon.
Are you a pretty lamp in the sky
Or just a round ball up high?
If you are a guide to me at night
Please don't go away from my sight.

Hey, my teachers didn't think that was too bad. For soon after that was published, I was "commissioned" to write customized poems for special occasions. One "Red Cross something something Day," the class orator recited this earthshaking masterpiece to a young audience. An audience of one awed pupil (who lipsed the lines as they were being recited onstage) and 997 blank-faced others.

Red Cross, ah, the organization
That is loved and honored by the whole nation.
You helped the Filipinos and soldiers in war
Ah, you're the help that God has bore.

Red Cross, you'll die never
For you, you are the nation's saver
---------------- (Sorry forgot the unforgettable lines that ended this disaster of a poem. Pang Red Cross talaga?!)

In high school -- season of sexual awakening, crushes, and "uy, may gusto" contagion -- my verses were that of a bright-eyed girl starting to think the world revolved around one special boy. A boy whose specialness was simply in making the mistake of sending her her first cellophane-wrapped bunch of Valentine flowers.

I keep each rose you gave me and every night in bed
I kiss its faded petals as I kissed your lips so red
One way they make me happy but another they make me sad
For they speak of a love that was lovely but now has turned to naught.

You've gone away, gone far away beyond my reach
And now I'm sure you'll never come back sweet
So each night as I count the stars with a pillow on my cheek
I hold each rose you gave me and kiss it as I weep.

I wrote more love-sick inanities in first year college.

They say that you care, I hope you do too
But to say you won't dare, is it true, is it true?
You talk about the weather each time you come a-calling
But the sweet words you say never, though deep down I am waiting.

True love can speak, true love can sing
If yours is not weak, let it ring, let it ring.
Ring it low and sweet, music to my ear
Then loud and hard ring it, that all the world may hear.

Now, tell me if I hadn't every reason to want to hang or bang my head in shame when at 12, Bonch (my youngest daughter) showed herself capable of writing such as this:

I curse the clock for being slow
I curse it too for being fast.

Indulge my nostalgic mood and wait for Part 2 -- Growing in My So-Called Poetry. That is, if no one heckles Part I. Please don't ask if that's a promise or a threat.

Have Written Before, Will Write Again

Been walking around lately in a state of near panic. More than a week since I last wrote. Feeling high and dry. No topic nudges nor pulls. No meme tags nor tugs.

Is this the 13th-blog block?

(Oh, Verna, how can I ever make it to 213?!)

Pining says not to worry; it happens to her, too. Toe says she felt she had hit bottom too after her No. 8 and urges me to blog about being unable to blog. Sexy mom and Rhoda react coolly, confident I should be back and writing in no time.

And here comes Ernie, my old, faithful friend Ernie, with his simple reminder: "YOU HAVE WRITTEN BEFORE, YOU WILL WRITE AGAIN."

Ernie, seasoned writer that he was, periodically suffered from writer's block too. And when that happened, all he did was: " THINK OF THE TRUEST THING I CAN THINK OF. THEN I WRITE ABOUT IT."

He makes sense, doesn't he? Good, old Ernie. My true love Ernie. Ernest Hemingway to most.

Ernie goes on to say that if we want to see things clearly, we should try going hungry. Emptiness purges the insides, opens the third eye, reveals the occult. Then floodgates open, words and ideas tumble out in torrents. -- when we run empty.

And I remember once again the poignant story of Ernie going hungry in Paris.

Ernie was then a young correspondent in France, with a wife and a baby, and was being paid for each piece he submitted. Most of the time his check got soooooo delayed, because it was war time, you see. (Which makes me imagine an overwrought postman, his mailbag a shield, zigging and zagging to avoid the crossfires.)

So sometimes, he went dry too, my Ernie. And not only in the place where the writing comes from but where we need to fill'er up with bread and meat and other gross stuff we sometimes wish we don't need.

And well, one day, with no more dollars (franks?) and cents in his pocket, and scarcely enough in the pantry to feed two, Ernie went out of his unheated, upper-floor apartment, telling Mrs. Ernie to go ahead, finish the food, because he, Ernie, had been invited out --implicitly to lunch.

On the way to where he was presumably invited, Ernie carefully avoided the sidewalk cafes Paris was known for, then as now. It wouldn't do for his already grumbling stomach, of course, to smell the scents of bread baking, coffee brewing, gravy simmering.

So Ernie, poor Ernie, took the long route to the Louvre, where he filled himself up with food -- for the soul. How much more luminous the Mona Lisa looked, he exclaimed, when viewed on an empty stomach. How much more vividly he saw colors and how much more sharply he perceived nuances behind canvas!

Satiated, Ernie came home, no longer needing to avoid the kitchen scents of roadside cafes. The gut-emptiness now forgotten, he wrote, wrote, wrote.

Now, excuse me while I drink drink drink. No lunch for me today.

Have you tried the Hemingway way?

Otherwise, what works for you on days the writing muse fails you?

(Note 1: This Hemingway vignette, recounted and paraphrased with much unpoetic license, is from the autobiographical (Paris is) A Moveable Feast.)

Muning: a love story

Here's a story written by my bunso, Alina, when she was a seventh-grader and which won the grand prize in the RCBC Kuwentong Kalikasan ng Kabataan competition sometime in the late 1990s.

It was summer when Muning entered our lives. Our team just won a game of kickball, and we rested on a stump on a vacant lot behind our house. As the sky darkened, we watched the first stars appear. Then we heard it -- "Meow."

Big blue eyes on a black and white face peered at us from behind the aratilis tree. I'll never forget how it looked when it went near -- half frightened, half eager. It licked my hands as I bent to touch it. I nodded when my Ate Mayet said: "Let's take it home."

Mama, who didn't like pets at home, but always gave in when we begged, didn't say much when we she saw Muning. She merely said: "If you want it, you have to take care of it." She reminded us that Aling Nelly, our helper, had enough to do as it was. We promised, crossing our hearts. None of our four brothers gave Muning a second look. The new found pet was all ours -- Ate Mayet's and mine.

We spent the next weeks fussing over Muning. At first, it was a cuddly kind of play -- we stroke her and she licked us. She twisted herself like a snake when she wanted play. She pressed her body against our legs when she wanted cuddling. But soon Muning tired of that and wanted rough and tumble. She got into the habit of leaping at us when we were unaware. Maybe her kitten claws got itchy and she relieved it by scratching furniture. Maybe her teeth got itchy too and she took to biting us a little. She was just being playful but sometimes her games hurt.

One day, she bit me harder than she intended to. I took my finger to Mama for inspection. "There's no wound but Muning should behave," Mama said sharply, looking at the torn sofa.

Ate Mayet wanted to take Muning to a cat psychiatrist. In the States, there were doctors for neurotic cats, she said. She searched the Yellow Pages and asked all our titas. But no one knew of one.

Summer was about to end the day we lost Muning.

I was in bed with my stuffed dog. Suddenly, a jealous Muning jumped at us and scratched Snoopy, causing foam bits to fly. I boxed Muning's ear and she scratched my face. Her claws almost caught my right eye. My cries brought Mama running into the room.

The mixture of tears and blood on my face scared Mama. "I want Muning out of this house this minute." She shouted orders to Kuya Allan. He was to put Muning inside a big bag and take her somewhere far from home. I wanted to protest but my face was on fire with the medicine Mama applied.

When Ate came home and found Muning gone, she cried and cried. She blamed me, she blamed Mama, blamed Kuya Allan, blamed the Philippines for not having cat psychiatrists. I cried too. Some of my tears were for Muning, others were for my sad and angry sister who vowed never to talk to me again. That night, we both cried ourselves to sleep.

As my wound healed, I forgot Muning. But Ate Mayet couldn't. She was quiet and sad for days. She ate little and talked less.

Mama worried. One day, she took me aside, whispering: "You know I might have acted too fast about Muning."

That night, at the special request portion" of our family prayer, Mama said aloud: "Lord if Muning would not hurt my children again, please let us find her again."

I was thankful when school opened and Ate began to talk to me again. One afternoon, on our way home, I glanced outside the bus and saw blue eyes among green grass. "Is that Muning," I asked doubtfully. "Yes, yes!" said Ate. "Stop, please stop Mang Roger!" she called out to the driver. But Mang Roger drove on.

Reaching home, we dumped our things and went out again, pulling Aling Nelly with us. We searched the place where we thought we saw Muning but couldn't find her.

We looked some more. In an alley, three boys cheered as they dunked an object into a canal, as it wriggled and meowed. Muning! -- we cried. Aling Nelly shooed the boys away.

Muning was cleaned up and fed when Mama arrived home from work. She smiled when we told her what happened. "God answered our prayers, didn't He?"

I guess her bad experience cured Muning. She became a normal cat. Today, she is a good and gentle Mama to four kittens. And you know what, we also have two dogs, seven hamsters, eight ducks and 14 pigeons. Our cousins call our yard a mini zoo and they always come to visit. Mama still doesn't like pets but she loves it when children care for and enjoy them.

I call it a love story -- do you agree? And do you see how such love has blessed the beasts and the children -- and their moms too?

SUNSETS ON UNIVERSITY AVENUE

I was talking about the sunrise tonight with a friend. We agreed it was one of God's most beautiful gifts to us. I remarked that with the late-sleeping, late-rising rhythms I have settled into, I seldom see the sun rise anymore. But God is so good, I hastened to add, because He created its twin -- the sunset. And you know what, I boasted, I have a ringside view to sunsets from a picture window on the fourth floor of the building I work in.

When I hang up the phone, it was then I remembered -- I had a poem written six, seven years ago about the most magnificent sunset I ever saw.


SUNSETS

I.
Rememberances of sunsets past
Lit up my Daddy's eyes.
Smiling eyes, cataract- liined
Soft, grey eyes, glaucoma-blind.
His sunsets were bright --
He still saw them
In his mind's eye.

I tugged at his arm
An errant child
Eager to make up for lost time
Sad he wouldn't rise
To meet the sun
At death's door.
"It's alright," he whispered
"They don't make sunsets
Like mine anymore."

II.
Our laughter
As we drove by University Avenue
Was silenced by a vision in the sky
Huge vermilion clouds
Girded the heavens
Like giant planks on
On a canvas of purple clouds.

Oh, how he laughed behind the clouds
The manic painter!
Proud of his gift to a child
Who lost her sense of wonder.

(Yes, Dad.
God still makes beautiful sunsets.)

We saw this spectacular sunset -- my son and daughter and I -- while we were driving home from the University on a rare day I left my office early. So moved was I that I asked my daughter to draw a sketch of it. (The piece of paper is still tucked up in the jacket of my journal).

I asked around the office the next day .. surely, others must have seen that vision too?! But all I drew where blank stares. Was it a special gift to me and my children?

A few days after, I tried to put the experience on paper. And as you might have seen, it ended up being a tribute to my father as well. When I finished the poem ... it was then I remembered .. the next day was the second anniversary of my dad's death.

Coincidence?

A Curious Meme: page 123

I would have wanted to say this taggee owed the tagger one and so the taggee was obliged to comply with the meme. That would have sounded so cool . But honestly, this taggee is still tickled pink to be tagged and to tag. Which she hopes you will all take to mean she's really still a newbie even after five weeks of blogging and three memes tucked up under her. In fact, she wishes she will never get jaded, will never make it to highschool. This one doesn't mind staying in grade 10 section 10 row four forever.

Nevertheless, there is still that squiggly, itchy question. What's the point to this meme? Hindi ko talaga gets. Well, maybe if virtue is for virtue's sake and beauty is its own excuse for being ... some meme is for ..... aw shucks ... let's just do it. Anyway, sabi nga ni tagger Prab, madali lang naman.

Let me see, the meme simply asks that we:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Then turn to page 123.
3. Mark the fifth sentence. Pick up the next three sentences and post. (In other words, post sentence nos. 6-8 on page 123.)
4. Acknowledge the book and the author.
5. Tag 3 people in turn.

Picked up those instructions from memory. I hope I didnt distort any. On second thoughts, why not distort some ha -- according to Wikipedia (thanks, Sajid) a meme mutates as it passes from blogger to blogger.

So, here goes:

" His name was Hugh. Kate has never met a Hugh before. How did one name a baby, defenseless, small, and new, Hugh?"

From Alice Walker's Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart. (Indulge me to make yabang about Alice Walker -- Pulitzer award winning author of The Color Purple, made into one of the most breathtakingly beautiful movies of all time. Directed by Steven Spielberg lang naman. Featuring Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey lang naman.)

Alice Walker is who I have in my mind when I said (in a blog? in a comment? I can't recall anymore) that at this point of my life, I prefer action that takes place within rather than action that happens without. And that was my alibi for never getting past page 50 of The Da Vinci Code, even as two daughters read it in one or two sittings, ditto 2,500 of my friends , and even as rave reviews made big of DVC, mocking me.

Someday, I will write Alice Walker's praise or that of some other delicious authors like Ayn Rand or Jostine Gaarder or Steinbeck. But for now ... I got to put this meme behind me.

Before I tag the next 'it' I got to come clean: I cheated a little. The book that is right under my nose is "Programming with Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0" by Diane Zak left by a son who's self-studying programming on the computer table. I had to skip it because who wants to post "save and run the application" or "control, alt delete." I am afraid Dimaks owns the patent to that?

So I stretched the instructions a little and chose a book that I was currently reading and was getting into my skin. Can anything get closer than that?!

Awright. I now tag:

Rhodora again (ay, baka naman singhap singhap ka na sa meme)
Dimaks (hmmm i hope its not exam week in Japan)
Gibbs (hmmm pansinin kaya? I worked with the guy in a joint project before he joined PDI, but I bet he doesn't know who the heck is anna).

P.S. I will stretch the rules again and tag a fourth one:

Jonnel! (a highschool senior, gifted, as best as i can make him out) - Take it away, Jon.

Paeans to growing old

It is easy to pay tribute to youth and beauty, to "splendor in the grass " and " glory in the flower."

But how does one romanticize their loss?

Here are a few paeans I found in literature:

As a white candle in a holy place
So is the beauty of an aged face.

- Joseph Campbell

Do not go gentle into the good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

- Dylan Thomas

As I grow older and older
And totter towards the tomb
I find that I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.

- Dorothy Sayers

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.

- George Bernard Shaw

And of course, my favorite:

Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, glory in the flower
We shall grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.
In the primal sympathy which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring out of human suffering.
In the faith that looks through death, in years that bring the philosophic mind.

- William Wordsworth

Those are supposed to make us feel good about aging? -- you might ask doubtfully, if not indignantly. Well, would it be better if we laughed about it?! Much has been written in good humor on the downside to growing old.

Hope I die before I get old.

- Pete Townsend

You will recognize, my boy, the first sign of old age. It is when you go out into the streets of London and realize for the first time how young the policemen look.

- Sir Seymour Hicks

Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man.

- Leon Trotsky

I grow old, I grow old ..
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

- T. S. Eliot

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head
And people in them, acting
People you know, yet can't quite name.

- Philip Larkin

Growing old is like being penalized for a crime you haven't committed.

- Anthony Powell

An aged man is but a paltry thing
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress.

- W. B. Yeats

Are you laughing now? Is it a shallow kind of laughter? Forced? Baleful? Wait ... do you know that love and growing old can still be whispered in the same breath?

Here's a bitter-sweet testimonial from Yeats.

When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book
And slowly read and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and their shadows deep.

How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face
And bending down beside the glowing bars
Murmur, a little sad, "From us fled Love.
He paced upon the mountains far above
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

- W. B. Yeats

Would you know of other quotes about aging? Funny? solemn? somewhere in between? It doesn't matter. Share!!