Sunday, December 22, 2024
9:00 AM |
All My Accidental Christmas Cheers
It is harder to feel Christmas when you’re older. The holidays harden into a mercenary plot that defies whatever magical understanding we used to have of it when we were children, when even the slightest Christmassy thing had the sheen of absolute joy and we were still given to believing that Santa Claus existed. Now, I am nearing 50 years old, alive for almost half a century already, and even I know—from what scraps of memory science I have read—to cast doubts whether the Christmases I remember when I was young were truly as joyful as I remember them to be. Or is this just nostalgia talking? I have learned since then that the memories we have are actually palimpsests of other memories of the same thing—and never the thing itself; in other words: ghosts upon ghosts piling together to create an image of the past that might not have been. I have not believed in Santa since I was ten; at near-fifty, I no longer believe in memories either.
Even then, an optimistic part of me still behold these memories as a kind of sacred ghost. How can I not? The ones that I have the sharpest recall of are taken from the years in my family’s life when we were poorest: for most of the 1980s we rented a ramshackle downstairs “apartment” of an old house somewhere in the bowels of Tubod, complete with an outhouse for a toilet—really what you would call a pit latrine; and “ramshackle” this apartment might have been, but somehow my mother and older brothers made into livable quarters through sheer ingenuity. [I say ingenuity because I’ve visited this apartment again only a couple of years ago for a documentary—and it is ghastly, and made me think: how were we able to live in this godforsaken place for quite a number of years?] And yet, this place is where most of my cherished Christmas memories are located.
I remember the night my brother Rocky came home from Cebu, and asked us kids to catch the shower of gold coins he flung to the air from a couple of bank pouches. We scrambled like mad, and with such joy, to collect what we could. [Those “gold” coins were newly-minted 25 centavo pieces, which at the time were just released as legal tender, dating this memory to 1983.]
I remember all the noche buenas we’ve had in that apartment, which was always swarming with friends and visitors. Those noche buenas must have been very simple—but for a kid not used to a regular feast, a Tupperware full of spaghetti [or chicken salad, which was my brother Rey’s specialty], a ham gifted by some friend, and plentiful rice must have been the very vision of wealth.
I remember my brother Edwin buying us our first Christmas tree. This was already in a time, perhaps around 1988, when we could finally breathe a little easy finances-wise, but that trek with my mother and my brother to Nijosa, and choosing just the one perfect plastic Christmas fir tree for the family to enjoy, and choosing the tinsels and decorations and lights to go with it—finally signaled to my boyhood consciousness that perhaps our fortunes have changed, and perhaps we did not have to go hungry anymore. After all, we just bought a Christmas tree!
I’m sure these memories are real. My remembrances of them may be palimpsests—but I am also aware that these memories are what makes me a human uniquely myself. Largely jaded I may have become, but these memories serve a purpose of reminding me I was once a boy full of Christmas brightness [that kid catching those gold coins], and fulfillment [that kid sated with simple noche buena], and hope [that kid happy with his new Christmas tree]. After all these years, these memories are still the kindling that sparks some joy in me come Christmas time, although the sparks have been muted by time and the joy blunted by the very adult reality of the withering world around us.
Christmas is really for children, no?
Christmas for adults is dancing unwillingly in a program for an office party.
Christmas for adults is all the utang paid after getting your 13th-month pay.
Christmas for adults is fretting over all kinds of holiday anxieties—the gifts to give, the parties to attend, the cards to send out.
In adulthood, I know I’ve tried my best to hang on to the magic of Christmas. I would attend the family Christmas dinners on the eve of the celebrations—although of late they have become obligations rather than a source of joy; I would listen to a personal playlist of Christmas songs that constituted mostly the Christmas albums released by The Carpenters—although admittedly I would play these songs mostly in July [don’t ask why]; I would foment new Christmas rituals, like watching annually a bunch of movies that made me feel Christmas joy—among them, Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, A Charlie Brown Christmas, When Harry Met Sally..., and It’s a Wonderful Life, but I have not actually done this since the pandemic. One time, to make the family Christmas dinner more personal, I attempted to make curated and handmade gifts for everyone—which was something completely out of the blue because my family never give each other Christmas gifts. The effect I was going for did not come to fruition, so I never did it again. I think it was that one Christmas that I finally grew up and told myself to stop trying too hard.
That realization of not trying too hard has been a gift. Because these days, I find Christmas joy in the accidental things. Like, one time, I was in Manila in early December and just happened to wander into a park somewhere in Makati—and right at that moment, a cascade of brilliant lights suddenly covered everything. It felt truly magical, because unexpected.
Or that time we were navigating holiday traffic from Cebu to Dumaguete, and we were trapped waiting for the next ferry to take us from Bato to Tampi, and while we waited in the light of stars of early evening, a bunch of folk singers sang daygon—or traditional Christmas songs in Binisaya—to us. That felt like a blessing.
Or this year, when all thoughts of celebrating Christmas was erased by the specter of a semester ending in December. While other people thought of parties and gifts, my only focus was on completing students’ requirements and grading—a backbreaking effort that nullified any kind of holiday cheer. But I hastily accepted some intimate Christmas dinners—and they have been lovely. A soothing balm for a harried soul, a reminder that we are still human despite our anxieties and expectations.
Once this very same December, on a particularly fretful day, Renz took me to dinner at Meltin’ Pot, at their new branch along Hibbard Avenue. He wanted to eat ramen, and I wanted sushi. Out of the blue, while we were waiting for our food to arrive, a youth group came in, asked permission to serenade all of us in the premises with Christmas songs [for a “donation,” of course], and proceeded to give us a number of songs of high octane holiday cheer. That made me smile.
This is me wishing everyone—cheerful child or jaded adult—the best of Christmas cheer, accidental or not.
Dinner with the Antonios, hosted by Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio and Myrish Cadapan-Antonio.
Dinner with the Sincos [Stephen, Mira, and Luis] and Arlene Delloso, with Renz Torres
Labels: christmas, dumaguete, family, friends, life, memories
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, April 23, 2023
9:00 PM |
Sunday Dinner
Sunday dinner at Jade Dragon Palace over at Baly Oriental Hotel with the s.o. and his family. Renz makes my day, every day.
Labels: family, love
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, January 26, 2023
Ready, tentatively, to re-embrace the world after a dark period of mourning and disappointments. Fortifying my mind, channeling Dolly De Leon’s undefeated spirit, and echoing Jinx Monsoon’s mantra: “Water off the duck’s back.” But also mindful about balance.Labels: death, family, life, mental health
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Thursday, September 08, 2022
The film is finally here!
The filmmakers behind 11,103 have been making this film for a long time, and my family is honored to have been part of this project, although we’re not in the final cut. (We will be in a separate feature.) The film features survivor stories of state-sponsored violence during the martial law years of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, and our contribution is our family's story. It will premiere in the U.S. on the 50th anniversary of the declaration of Martial Law in the Philippines, September 17, in Redwood City.
Congratulations, Mike Alcazaren and Jeannette Ifurung!Labels: documentaries, family, film, life, Martial Law, philippine history
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, August 17, 2022
My mother turned 90 today. We share the same birthday. This is a biographical shorthand of her life so far, a few things one might want to know about her…
Mother was a child of the bamboo. She was a very young child when she lost her mother, Bebang, to childbirth [but which was spun off later on as being “gi-engkanto” by some spirit residing in a mango tree]. She had to live with her older sister Epefania with an assortment of aunts and her maternal grandparents in Bayawan, which was then called New Tolong. Mother’s father, a langyaw from Bohol, apparently disappeared after his wife’s death and had not been heard from since. In later years, when Mother would ask what happened to her parents, her aunts would tell her: “Gikan ka sa liki sa kawayan.” She would believe this story for many years. I have written an essay about this.
Mother is really Ceferina, not Fennie. Her birth name was Ceferina Malazarte Rosales, although for the longest time she thought Malazarte was her family name. Her sister was named Epefania. When they were younger women, however, my aunt made them change their names so that they would have “a better future,” because apparently, nothing of significance happened to young women named "Ceferina" or "Epefania." So my aunt renamed themselves "Fennie" and "Fannie." I’m not sure they did this legally though, and their usage of both names old and new has been erratic over the years. When you go over our birth certificates, some of us have a mother named Ceferina, and some of us have a mother named Fennie. Essentially, my brothers and I were born, according to official records, to two different women. I have written a story about this.
Mother escaped Bayawan by making tira-tira. This was after high school, and she was jealous of her more affluent friends who went to study college in Dumaguete and elsewhere. She wanted to leave the stifling life of small town Bayawan, and study in Cebu. But her aunts told her that only the worst things could happen to young women living alone in the big city. So she secretly made tira-tira to sell and earn money, and when she had enough saved, she bought a one-way ticket to Cebu to study to become a nurse, because a distant relative promised to fund her college education. When that promise was broken, she found herself making a living becoming a beautician in Cebu City. I have written an essay about this.
Mother fled Cebu to escape heartbreak, and found her way to Mindanao, in Nasipit, near Butuan, where she met my father, who was her landlord. She rented the space for her beauty parlor from him. He was a dusky bachelor with a penchant for dreams and beautiful women—and soon enough, she found herself married to him. They would stay in Agusan del Norte for many years. I have written an essay about this.
Mother returned to Bayawan in the late 1960s to help my father’s dream to become a sugar planter. They enjoyed a decade of success as hacienderos—but soon lost everything because of the sugar shenanigans of the Martial Law. We became very, very poor. I have written an essay about this, which became viral only a few months ago when it was published on Rappler.
When my father left for Davao to seek another fortune that never came, Mother virtually became a single mother. After selling what she could, she moved the family to Dumaguete in 1980, and for the next decade we moved nine times to seek cheap rent. She sold peanut butter and baye-baye to feed us, while at the same time plied her trade as a beautician without a parlor. She had one goal in mind: to put all her six sons through college at Silliman University—even though it was an expensive dream she could not really meet given her financial circumstances. She persevered. I have written stories about this period in our lives.
What point am I trying to make? That a lot of what I have written—my stories and my essays—have been inspired by my mother’s life. In a sense, she has always been my muse. When I write about her, I think I also write invariably about my own life and where I come from—and from her I take inspiration. My mother’s life has always been a source of encouragement. She defied all odds when she was younger to build a life for herself beyond the constraints of a small town existence. When she met challenges, she overcame them with determination and hard work, even when it took all of her. When the going became even tougher, she relied on her faith, but also on her will to survive. She was all guts and gusto. And through all that, she remained a beautiful person.
Ninety is a milestone, and a gift. Here’s to wishing my mother the best of all times, and the best of all worlds.
Labels: birthday, family, life, memories, mother
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, May 04, 2022
7:08 PM |
Raping Sugarland
My family lost everything because of Marcos—our house, our car, our lives.
This was in the mid-1970s, right around the time I was born—and because I was a newborn at the time the New Society was being touted as the “saving grace” to a troubled country and because I only stumbled on this information in my adult years, I was never able to ask the proper probing questions, until now.
My father and mother in Hacienda Roca, Bayawan in 1971.
No one in my family ever talked about it either, except in broad strokes that told a simple story of lost fortune: that once we had an extensive sugar plantation in the rich farmlands of Bayawan with the opulent lifestyle [and a vast circle of friends] that went with it, and then we lost it all. No one mentioned Marcos, and I attributed the story to quirks of fate. Bad things happen to good people.
We did not talk about the origins of our reduced circumstances, perhaps out of shame. I, on the other hand, would have been the one person in the family to ask the terrible questions for the sake of writing—but I simply did not know.
What could not be denied, however, was the state my family was in those later years in the 1970s, and especially more so throughout the trying decade of the 1980s. I did not feel much the hardship because I was too young to notice anything beyond the regular hunger pangs I felt—but I know now that my older brothers, all five of them, must have. They bore the brunt of my family’s sudden poverty because they were aware firsthand of what they’d lost. When I’d go through old photos in family albums, I see them enjoying lavish birthday parties. My brothers in those photos had birthday cakes and birthday candles, always surrounded by an assortment of people I didn’t recognize hogging tables laden with abundant feasts. I never had a birthday party—but I honestly didn’t know what I was missing until my 30th birthday when friends surprised me with a birthday cake, and only then did I realize I had never blown a birthday candle my entire life.
My brother Dennis enjoying his second birthday in 1969.
We were very poor, we could barely eat three square meals a day. Things became so hard that when the family was finally forced to sell off our Bayawan house and our car [a yellow Sakbayan] to avoid the stigma of foreclosure, the only recourse was for the family to move to Dumaguete City in 1980. This was when the financial crunch was finally tightening around the illusion of Marcos’ New Society.
We lived like nomads in that decade, moving from one house to the next in search of cheap rent. This is what I remember most from my childhood—all the houses we stayed in, from a small compound at the Capitol Area to a wooden house with many rooms in Calle Sta. Rosa, from an upstairs apartment overlooking Holy Cross High School to a secluded one in an alley off Silliman Avenue, from various apartments in Bantayan to a virtual zaguan of a rickety old house in the bowels of Tubod.
My mother, who was once a society belle in her hometown of Bayawan in the flush years of the 1950s and 1960s, was reduced to a skeleton of a woman darkened by the sun as she went from house to house selling peanut butter she herself made—just to be able to feed us. She still kept in touch with many of her old friends, some of them still well-off, and most helped her out by buying her peanut butter. And when one of them would throw birthday parties, she’d take me along—her youngest child—just so I could have a proper meal. My mother still loves to tell this particular story from that time: that once, when I was 11 or 12, I was so hungry after not being able to eat the whole day that I woke her up in the middle of the night, urging her to pray with me, so that God would listen and give us food. A miracle came: the next day, an anonymous friend sent us a whole bag of groceries. Until now, that sautéed sardines my mother prepared remains the best meal in memory.
In the 1980s, my mother would take me around with her to attend friends’ birthday parties just so I could eat properly.
Our reprieve came with the usual story of many Filipino families. One of my brothers managed to work abroad just as the 1990s came along—and only then, with the remittances he sent the family, could we breathe properly again. I remember buying our first refrigerator. I remember buying our first TV. I remember buying our first Christmas tree. I remember our first car. I remember moving into our new house we didn’t have to rent anymore.
Where does Marcos come into the story?
* * *
“The personal is political,” so the old mantra goes. This truism is an honest accounting: our personal circumstances and experiences are rooted in, or invariably dictated by, the politics that surround us, especially in issues of inequality.
This was my prompt, and when I used this as the framework with which to see my family’s history, I stumbled into a rabbit’s hole. When I went deeper, I was confronted by facts that had not been readily told to me, not even by my family. The twist in my family’s personal history—our descent into indignity—came about because of the late dictator’s rape of Sugarlandia in the 1970s.
Here’s a bit of history.
Negros enjoyed decades of untold wealth because of one crop that grew abundantly on the island: sugarcane. All over the provinces of Negros Occidental and Negros Oriental, landed families controlled haciendas that produced sugar for export, particularly to the United States. You can still see remnants of this gilded age: the beautiful houses of Silay City and Bais City, even the famous “sugar houses” of Dumaguete, the small seaside mansions of Negrense landowners that line the Rizal Boulevard.
Families of more modest means—including mine—were also able to tap into this market with sizable landholdings devoted to the crop. Our plantation in Bayawan was named Hacienda Roca—after “Rosales Casocot”—and for many years, it sustained my family and catapulted it to the higher echelons of Bayawan society.
And then the United States ended its sugar quota in 1974, after which Ferdinand Marcos—only two years after declaring Martial Law in the country (and thus having the power of life and death over everyone, even rich hacenderos)—appointed cronies “to head a state-owned marketing and trading monopoly” of the sugar industry, writes Inday Espina-Varona for Licas News.
On paper, Marcos and his economic advisers argued that it was a necessary move, because “pervasive market failures were the root cause of the decline of the sugar industry”—this, according to a 2001 paper by Gerald Meier—and that in order to rescue the industry, “central coordination was crucial.” Marcos called for the government to replace the market “in order to stimulate the market development of the sugar industry.” He established the Philippine Sugar Commission or PHILSUCOM in 1976, as well as its trading subsidiary, the National Sugar Trading Corporation or NASUTRA, to do the job.
NASUTRA was given the sole power to buy and sell sugar, set prices paid to planters and millers, and purchase companies connected to the sugar industry. In May 1978, the Republic Planters Bank was established “to provide adequate and timely financing to the sugar industry.”
Except that this was all illusion, good only on paper: Marcos and his cronies never paid back the planters—including my family—for the sugar NASUTRA got from them. All the money went to the pockets of Marcos and his cronies.
Inday Espina-Varona further writes: “[Marcos and his cronies] robbed sugar planters, taking advantage of fluctuating global prices and drowning landowners in debt. That, coupled with centuries of irresponsible lifestyles and a feudal system that reserved land only for the rich, led to the collapse of the island’s economy.”
And then that financial disaster blew up into an even bigger one:
“On Negros’ vast plains, man—not nature—ushered in famine,” Inday Espina-Varona writes. “Almost 200,000 workers lost their jobs. Hacienda owners, facing bankruptcy, fled to the safety of cities, abandoning families that had served them for generations. Unemployed workers on paper enjoyed some social amelioration. Those who actually received this were the exception. Corrupt officials had siphoned off funds to personal coffers or to bankroll the extravagant habits of the dictator’s family. Farm labor flooded the cities to scrabble for work but there was little to be had.
“In trickles, and then streams of misery, children began arriving in hospitals with swollen bellies, stick limbs, and eyes that drooped or stared sightless from pain. Some were too weak to talk; many could not walk.”
Negros suddenly became known worldwide for its starving children. Some of you might still recall the 1980s campaign that screamed: “Feed the Hungry Children of Negros.” In the public grade school I attended in Dumaguete in the early 1980s—during the last years of the Marcos regime—I remember well what that entailed: being fed pospas every day during recess. I hated pospas.
The most infamous of these “hungry children of Negros” was a boy named Joel Abong whose skin-and-bone visage appeared “on the front pages of newspapers and the covers of magazine,” writes Inday Espina-Varona, who covered the ill-fated child’s last days.
A photo taken on 4 May 1985 by Kim Komenich of young malnutrition victim Joel Abong, which has become iconic of the situation in Negros during the 1980s.
She notes: “Joel had pneumonia and tuberculosis. He was brought in with bones so brittle doctors had to wrap padding around his limbs. Joel’s body was the size of a baby. Stringy hair the yellow-brown of severe malnutrition lay limp on a head that seemed grotesquely big. A rattling sound accompanied every breath. His father was one of those who had fled the cane fields. On an island where people joked about shoveling money from the ground, Joel’s family had literally starved. My mother headed that hospital’s pediatric department. She came home every night in a silent rage. Some nights she could hardly eat; food was a reminder of her patients. Doctors couldn’t save Joel. He was not alone.”
By 1985, ten percent of Negros’ children were suffering third-degree malnutrition, according to Dr. Violeta Gonzaga of La Salle College in Bacolod.
* * *
So, is this the “golden age” people talk about when they crow about the Marcos years? Years of starving children? Years of financial mismanagement? Years of lining the coffers of cronies while whole industries suffered?
But the bigger question has got to be this: how come we don’t know many of these things?
How come I had to dig deeper to understand where my family’s misfortune came from?
How come these things are not taught in our history classes—so much so that historical revisionism threatens to overwhelm us all?
And lastly: how come people have come to ignore how Marcos virtually raped our localities, our provinces, our regions—and believe instead YouTube and TikTok videos about “the glory years” of the dictator’s grip on power?
That last one came to me when I was chatting with Frank Cimatu, a writer/friend and journalist based in Baguio. We were talking over Messenger about the person who heckled Jillian Robredo as she went about a Baguio market on a campaign for her mother’s presidential run.
“Hirap kasi sa Benguet,” Frank told me. “Anlakas ng [he who must not be named].”
That took me aback.
“Even with the Chico Dam controversy and the murder of Macli-ing Dulag?” I asked.
[Historical aside: In 1973, a year after Martial Law was declared, the Marcos regime proposed the Chico River Dam Project, a hydroelectric power generation project involving the Chico river system that encompassed the regions of Cordillera and Cagayan Valley—without consulting the lumads in the area. Locals, notably the Kalinga people, resisted fiercely because of the project’s threat to their residences, livelihood, and culture—and the project was soon after shelved in the 1980s after public outrage in the wake of the murder of opposition leader Macli-ing Dulag. It is now considered a landmark case study concerning ancestral domain issues in the Philippines.]
“Clueless,” Frank said. “Even Sagada is hati.”
I thought back to what Marcos did to Negros in the 1970s—and I blinked from the sheer exhaustion I felt after realizing that even people from a land that has been raped [or threatened with it, as was the case of the Cordilleras] could still be so enamored by the son of that rapist, someone who insists to this day that no rape ever happened.
* * *
I doubt my mother—who is now 89 years old—still chases fanciful dreams of a return to the old splendor she enjoyed in Bayawan in the gilded age. I know she has come to a place of peace, having come to a reckoning with that past and the immediate catastrophe that followed it that saw her destitute and that saw her struggle so hard to feed her family [although she still managed to put through six sons studying at the very expensive Silliman University]. The hardship ultimately strengthened her, and for that she is grateful.
But to forgive Marcos and what he had wrought?
Never.
Labels: dumaguete, family, life, Marcos, Martial Law, negros, politics
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, July 03, 2021
2:16 AM |
Vaccine Envy
BORIS SV VIA GETTY IMAGES
It didn’t really set in, even right around March, when the national government started mobilizing its excruciatingly slow vaccination program and announced several categories of prioritization, with the first to get the jab being those in the A1 category—the frontline health workers.
We were magnanimous in our agreement, there was righteousness in our conviction that these people were very deserving in being prioritized.
“These people are our heroes in this pandemic,” we said. “They need the added protection of vaccination in the still ongoing fight against the coronavirus. They are in the forefront of that battle.”
And so when we began to see our doctor friends and our nurse friends start posting their “bakuna selfies” on Facebook and Instagram. We sighed with some indiscernible longing still without a name, but applauded anyway. We knew there was a battle not just against a virus, but also against massive misinformation—we’d hear of too many people casting doubts on the efficacy of vaccines that they felt were “too rushed” in their production and were adamant about sitting out this campaign for achieving herd immunity—and so we felt that these photos of health workers grinning under their face masks and showing off biceps with the telltale mark of band-aids could be helpful ammunition in convincing the doubtful and the undecided that when their turn should come, they must opt for vaccination.
We knew what we needed ultimately:
peace of mind.
When the A2 category—senior citizens aged 60 years old and above—came in the next round of prioritization, we heaved sighs of relief. We began to think of beloved family—our elderly mothers and fathers, our grandmothers and grandfathers, and the rest of our kin of that specific age range—and we thought it was indeed time for them to be properly protected, or at least given the necessary shield to counteract the deadliest outcomes of the disease.
“The vaccine is not a cure,” we began to say. “You can still get the coronavirus even when fully vaccinated. The vaccine only helps in preventing you from suffering from the most adverse symptoms of the coronavirus, and most of all, from dying from the disease.”
This was our pitch to our elderly—and to most of the rest as well, given that we now existed in a precarious time when anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists had gained some unfortunate ground in convincing many to be very afraid of this medical remedy from disease.
I told a friend, when COVID-19 was surging in deadly earnestness in Dumaguete in late May and into June: “It’s the peace of mind I want with the vaccine. It’s so difficult to get out into the world knowing that anytime and anywhere you could get infected—and in turn, infect everyone you come in contact with.”
What I wanted was
peace of mind.
That sentiment came dressed in constant dread: that I could be an asymptomatic carrier of the virus, and unknowingly infect someone I love with it—and who in turn could somehow become one of those fatal statistics we’d hear only as numbers without names.
This was why—when I could help it—I forbade myself from getting in close contact with people close to me. In the past year and a half of the pandemic, I barely saw my mother in her house somewhere in Bantayan. She was 86 years old, still quite active and lucid for her years—but her age was a vulnerability the acuteness of which had only sharpened in our pandemic times.
After the pandemic began in February, she would frequently text me: “
’Ga, I miss you.” Or: “
’Ga, I love you.” Or: “’
Ga, gaunsa man ka? Ako ra usa sige sa balay.” It did not take enough to read between the lines: the pandemic had made us isolated from each other, especially from our loved ones, but the only proper way to deal with it was still separation.
For six months, I did not see her. Once, during a morning walk sometime in August last year—and sometime after we both celebrated our shared birthday—I could not help but follow my feet to her driveway and to her front door: in her bedroom where she was already awake doing her morning prayers and devotion, I hugged her like I had never hugged her before. All my precautions melted away in that instant.
But there was also this: after that reunion, I felt enormously guilty. What if, by visiting her, I invited unknowingly the coronavirus in her midst? It was a terrible thought that gnawed at me—and I waited with bated breath the next few days for messages I did not wish to come. (Gladly, no such messages came.)
I’d see her again on Christmas on the most forlorn
noche buena ever. I’d see her again on the second day of January. Once on February. And then much later, sometime in March. And with the end of every visit, again the gnawing guilt would come. For the longest time, I wished she could at least get vaccinated. For her sake, and for my peace of mind.
And so when the A2 category’s turn came in the prioritization call, I asked my brother Dennis to fill in her registration for vaccination from the Dumaguete City Health Office—and we waited. And waited. And waited. Day after day after day, I’d see pictorial posts of senior citizens I knew who were getting their first doses, and then, after two weeks, their second.
Still, there was no call for my elderly mother.
Friends began to worry with me.
But what else was there to do except wait?
I already knew about the precarious supply of vaccines allotted each local government unit. (“How come they are already doing A4s in Siquijor?” The answer: All LGUs are allocated the same number of vaccine doses, and it is easier for smaller communities to race through the vaccination program compared to bigger LGUs, like Dumaguete.) I already knew about the procedural bottleneck the local city health office was facing. (“How come it took me hours to wait in line for my vaccination?” The answer: Protocols take time to settle in like clockwork—and our health workers are overstretched.) And I could not blame people enmeshed in a national system that was flawed in the first place. Yet my own understanding of all these felt too intellectual, too theoretical—and my own emotive concern for my mother felt more immediate, more impatient.
And then, on June 14, my brother messaged me: “Mama is in Pulantubig getting her first dose.”
“Send me pics!” I immediately texted back.
He soon sent a flood of pictures of my grey-haired mother, in face shield and face mask, wearing a teal ensemble that meshed well with the teal color of her monobloc chair. I saw her getting attended to by a health worker, injection in hand. It was the perfect picture for rejoicing, for relief.
Peace of mind.
And then things began to change quickly when the A3 category—persons with comorbidities not otherwise included in the preceding categories—was announced. Suddenly we were seeing Facebook posts of people we knew (high school classmates, former lovers, office mates), some even younger than us, getting their “
bakuna selfies”—and the same persistent question hang over our heads like a taunt: “What comorbidity does this person even have?” Comorbidities meant having heart disease, kidney disease, bronchial asthma, immunodeficiency, cancer, diabetes mellitus, and hypertension—and then we began hearing stories of people getting doctors they knew to issue them bogus medical certificates to claim one thing or other in the name of getting into that A3 list.
That was when “vaccine envy” set in for real—when we began to realize the system could be gamed, and here we were, still waiting for our call to come, our patience running thin, our anxiety running high.
No peace of mind.
On June 28, in the midst of a pandemic twist that saw the coronavirus spewing off deadly variants—Alpha [first detected in the United Kingdom], Beta [first detected in South Africa], Gamma [first detected in the United States but initially identified in travelers from Brazil], and what seemed worst of all: Delta [first detected in India]—the World Health Organization, via its Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, took to task the richer counties of the world who were hoarding vaccines and who were now slowly opening up their societies and even vaccinating young people who were not at great risk from COVID-19—while the poorest countries still lacked doses they needed to stem their ravaged health systems. Ghebreyesus, an Ethiopian, called the neglect a global failure: “Our world is failing. As the global community we are failing,” he told a news conference. “I mean that attitude has to be a thing of the past. The problem now is a supply problem. Just give us the vaccines.”
Ghebreyesus continued: “The difference is between the haves and the have nots, which is now completely exposing the unfairness of our world—the injustice, the inequality, let’s face it.”
This is “vaccine envy” at play at the highest levels.
On the ground, it looks like this:
You seeing photos of friends in New York watching A Quiet Place Part II in a movie theater.
Friends in Los Angeles having their first brunch with other friends in a restaurant.
Friends in Washington, D.C. visiting the houses of their friends, reconnecting old bonds laggard from disuse.
Friends in Toronto attending an actual graduation.
People in Wimbledon watching professional tennis without face masks on.
Friends visiting museums in Chicago.
Friends attending the Cannes Film Festival.
Live late night talk shows on TV with full audiences.
The photos go on and on, a whole litany of unfairness.
There were no “likes” or “loves” for these Facebook posts from me—and I realized I was seething from a jealousy that felt rabid. I found myself catching my breath, steeling myself from feeling too much, and assuaging myself with a promise that felt suddenly hollow: “Patience,” I’d tell myself. “Your turn will come.”
But it felt severely unfair that there were parts of the world already enjoying life like it was back in the old normal—while the rest of it,
of us, still tiptoe about in caution and social distancing, still grieve of new deaths, still wait for some reprieve to come.
We waited, and we waited, and we waited.
Friends sometimes would message me: “Have you gotten your call from the City Health Office yet?”
“No, not yet,” I’d reply.
“Check your phone constantly.”
“I do!”
We waited, and we waited, and we waited.
No peace of mind just yet.
Then on a Friday afternoon, July 2, while I was settling into my office chair and readying to tackle work after a hearty lunch of Jo’s Chicken Inato, an unlisted number suddenly rang on my cellphone. When I answered hello, a voice boomed back at me: “Is this Sir Ian Casocot?”
“Yes?”
“This is the Dumaguete City Health Office.”
Continued here…
Labels: coronavirus, dumaguete, family, life, vaccine
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Monday, June 14, 2021
3:39 PM |
Mom Gets Her First Jab Today
I'm so happy! Towards peace of mind, here we go.
Labels: coronavirus, dumaguete, family, life
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Tuesday, April 20, 2021
7:50 PM |
Claveria-ized
This is Governor General
Narciso Claveria y Zaldua, the one responsible for the Hispanization of most of our surnames in the Philippines, courtesy of the
Catalogo Alfabetico de Apellidos, implemented by the
Claveria Decree of 1849. It imposed control on the population via naming, thus erasing the native conventions of naming.
But the catalogue also contained pre-approved "native names" for families to choose from. I searched for my obviously non-Spanish surname to see if it's there, and the closest I could find was "Casocoy," which makes me wonder: Did my Boholano ancestors get their name from the catalogue? And did they eventually misspell it with a "T" over the ensuing decades?
You can find the catalogue
here.
Labels: family, history, names, philippine history
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Sunday, February 07, 2021
My niece caught me trying to hammer out a short story today. Gave it a good go, but I’m currently stuck.Labels: family, life, writing
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Friday, January 01, 2021
8:14 AM |
New Year Morn, New Year Mom
Woke up early today, after good sleep, to see the first sunrise of the year off Piapi Beach. I have not done this since the year 2000, but what compelled me was the urgency of its symbolism: to embrace the new that's to come after a hellish year. Besides I wanted to start the year walking; the sunrise would be a good rest stop. Waiting for the sky to brighten in the horizon, I meditated, I prayed. And then when things were bright enough around 6 AM, I continued on my regular route, and followed my feet to mother's house in Bantayan, surprising her with my visit. We prayed for the New Year, and then we had breakfast, where I made her do this pose:
Happy New Year, everyone!
Labels: family, life, new year
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Friday, December 25, 2020
12:00 PM |
Two Unplanned Noche Buenas
I had no plans to do
noche buena for Christmas this year. This pandemic year has upended all expected things—and while I have not seen my family in months, I also had no wish to be in close range with them, indoors, and trust in fate to keep us safe and in check, health-wise. My mother was nearing 90, a demographic of some concern, and I felt keenly for her well-being—and so when my brother Dennis texted me the details of our Christmas dinner—"Be here by 5:45 PM"—I was ready to ignore the invitation, and keep to an inchoate wish to stay in the confines of my little apartment, eat what I could find in my refrigerator, and do some lonesome chilling with Netflix.
But the s.o. dropped by around 5 PM, full of cheer and love, and wanted to know what I was doing Christmas Eve. "I don't want you to be alone," he said.
Something in his voice, in his genuine care for my welfare, touched me profoundly, and I found myself asking for a lift to my brother's house in Pulantubig, as well as a promise he'd pick me up at 8 PM so I could join his own family for their midnight Christmas
salubong feast.
So I had my family, and my s.o.'s family, for Christmas company—a bittersweet turn of events that makes me think deep about the depths of love, the frailties of life, and the chance we give ourselves for slivers of happiness.
Labels: christmas, family, holidays, life, love
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Monday, August 17, 2020
2:12 PM |
My Mother Turns 88
Happy birthday, mom! It's also my mother's birthday today. She turns a gracious 88, and has plans to reach a hundred.
Labels: birthday, family
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Wednesday, July 29, 2020
10:00 AM |
The Film Meme No. 95
[95th of 100]. Time is gold. We have been told this since we were young and malleable enough to learn maxims -- but this one is true, and gets even truer as we grow older. Spending time with people you love -- friends and family -- is a gift: there's just no other way we can best show appreciation for others except by being there for them. I know this, but I also know I'm a big transgressor of this. There's just something in me that wants to hide from the world; it is part of the same shadow that makes me believe I am alone and have no one. It's a lie, of course -- but it does keep me from spending time with people I love, like my mother. I think of these things sharply after watching once more this 1953 masterpiece from Yasujiro Ozu, whose films stir with so much tumult under such pristine surfaces. They're mostly about domestic misgivings that threaten to erupt, but are eased away by gentle talk and subtly measured misdirections. Sometimes the result is tragic, sometimes somebody keen enough to be honest does speak up -- but almost all ends in the resignation that proclaims, "Isn't life disappointing?" Ozu's answer is a gentle nod, and a push that says, "Let's live anyway." This is perhaps an understandable response to post-War Japanese realities. Like Leo McCarey's
Make Way for Tomorrow [1937] before it, a Hollywood film which galvanised Japanese audiences and inspired screenwriter Kogo Noda to do a loose adaptation, Ozu's most acclaimed film [it is regularly touted as one of the best films ever made] is designed to not just be a heartbreaking tearjerker, it's also a rebuke to the shortcomings of children with regards the welfare of elderly parents. [And in doing so, it also makes a case of indicting changing contemporary mores.] Here we meet a couple in the twilight of their lives. They live in Onomichi in Hiroshima Prefecture, quite a long distance from the capital. They have five children -- two who live in Tokyo: Kōichi, now a doctor, and Shige, now a beautician; one who lives in nearby Osaka: Keizō, a journalist; one lives at home with them: Kyōko, a student; and one who is presumed dead in World War II, but his wife Noriko, who also lives in Tokyo, remains loyal to her in-laws, eschewing remarriage for personal reasons. The couple, Shūkichi and Tomi, are excited to go on an extended trip to Tokyo to see their children -- but the trip proves a disappointment, although they are careful not to criticise. They find that, despite superficial shows of excitement, their children find their visit an unwanted intrusion into their busy lives. They find quick ways to pawn them off: booking them on a disappointing stay in a cheap resort in Atami, or making their sister-in-law Noriko entertain them in their stead, which Noriko does with aplomb and with genuine care for her in-laws. The ending is a tragedy where no one learns their lessons, except for the youngest, Kyōko, who calls her siblings "selfish" -- but not to their faces. It is Noriko who remains the truest of them all, but also one with the most practical view of the situation. To Kyōko's outrage, she responds with what seems like wisdom culled from life's disappointments: "As children get older, they drift away from their parents ... They have their own lives to look after ... I may become like that, in spite of myself." She believes this, but her action belies her view -- because she never drifts away, and she never stops caring, even for people who are not even her real parents. It all makes me feel guilty: my mother lives only a kilometer away from me, but I rarely see her, ascribing it all to "being busy." Such a lie. I hope I'm brave enough to call my own bullshit, and spend time the way it's meant to be spent: in the company of people I love. What's the film?
For the introduction to this meme, read
here.
Labels: family, film
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Sunday, October 15, 2017
Should I call this "a weekend of cinematic siblings -- a love/hate story"? Because it does feel that way, and with no deliberate design on my part.
But it was interesting to see Noah Baumbach's
The Meyerowitz Stories on a Saturday and then Cathy Garcia-Molina's
Seven Sundays on a, well, Sunday -- and see two stories that perfectly parallel each other, and yet be so culturally distinct, be so colored by their own directorial sensibilities. [But let's not talk about the ending of Seven Sundays, a racist miscalculation disguised as a comic bit.] Both films feature adult siblings at odds with each other and yet still remain irrevocably bonded by blood. And then, when forced to be together because of a sick father, their unsaid recriminations boil over but depicted with sly humor and surprising tenderness. Tenderness is important.
From Baumbauch, my take-away was more philosophical, even artistic. From Molina, perhaps because she knows what makes a Filipino moviegoer tick, my take was more visceral, immediate, and emotional. By God, I tried hard to remain above it all, to disregard the conventional manipulations of this Star Cinema confection -- but I was truly a mess when the film was through with me. And I don't think I was alone in that regard: the theater I was in was filled with people suddenly made quiet with contemplation for their own familial misdeeds. (It's Ozu's
Tokyo Story with more hope.)
For who among us there in the darkened theater could not identify in ways with the travails of the Bonifacio family onscreen? Who among us do not delude ourselves constantly into thinking we're too busy to see an aging parent at least for the weekend? Who among us do not harbor resentments for being ignored, for being belittled, for being "used" by kin? I finished
The Meyerowitz Stories with the pleasure of having my brain stimulated. I finished
Seven Sundays emotionally adrift, but in a good way, sending me off on a contemplative mood that made me ask what else I can do to make up for all the "pagkukulang" I have for the family.
Preferably over crispy pata, or Rebisco biscuits, to the soundtrack of Apo Hiking Society singing "Batang-Bata Ka Pa."
Labels: family, film, life, review
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Tuesday, November 11, 2014
11:23 PM |
Fathers Who Lie
Two weeks ago, in one of my current depression's pendulum swing towards the dark side, I found myself dealing with the ongoing search for recuperation (and some urgent things-to-do) in the relative comfort of the old family home somewhere in Bantayan, away from my own apartment in Tubod, which I had abandoned for a week or so, all unplanned. Self-eviction seemed the wisest choice at the time. I spent a night at a hotel, and then found myself drifting back to live with my mother, who couldn't be happier: she had not seen me in two months, and she was complaining.
Well, I thought,
here's me: you'll have all of me for a few days. Just spending all those hours and days away from the rest of the world, alone in my old perfectly air-conditioned bedroom -- with no cellphone, with no social media, with no wifi -- seemed necessary, I thought then, if I were to stay any saner. Days like that, one turns to books and to movies to occupy one's mind, after it has run the full gamut of introspection and has had enough of self-psychoanalysis. I found myself reading Alison Bechdel's seminal
Fun Home.
I've met Ms. Bechdel during a talk she gave in Iowa City a few years ago. While I have always loved her art, I surprised myself for not having read any of her books. And
Fun Home is her acclaimed sophomore graphic novel effort which detailed her coming out as a lesbian -- which, she found out, was somehow intricately linked to her growing up in a funeral home (the "fun home" of the title, which is also deliciously ambiguous in symbolism, given how the story unspools) in a Midwestern town that bordered a forest. Growing up in that home meant living under the tortured although gilded lie of a life her own father lived. He was an exacting, not exactly warm figure, who challenged young Alison's intellect -- and who was curiously fastidious about cultivating a lifestyle that made their house look like a page from an interior design magazine -- all antique, all intricate. And thus she begins to tell her father's story, which finally would involve an admission from her own mother that she had been living with a closeted gay man all those years -- a broken man whose death by being run over by a truck might not truly be "accidental."
I love Ms. Bechdel's intricately told tale that combines stories of small town life with stories about the love for books, while going over such issues as homosexuality, suicide, and pedophilia. And for some reason, without meaning to at all (there was no design!), I found myself watching Andrew Jarecki's powerful documentary
Capturing the Friedmans (2003) right after.
Here was another tale of a broken American family, although one that goes even darker than Ms. Bechdel's own confessions. Compared to what happens to the Friedman family, Ms. Bechdel's story would seem so vanilla. Consider Jarecki's account. On the surface, the Friedmans seemed to be a perfect upper-middle-class Jewish family living in posh Long Island. The father, Arnold, is a respected teacher in the community who is known to give private computer lessons at home with his son Jesse. There are two other sons, and the mother is the typical American housewife -- if somewhat excluded from the bond her husband makes with her sons. And then their lives are turned upside down when a chance arrest of Mr. Friedman over the possession of child pornography leads to a bigger charge: that he and his son Jesse has been molesting generations of young boys in their computer classes in the basement.
The documentary is a gimlet-eyed consideration of the madness that ensued and that soon engulfed their town. Jarecki takes to task, without somehow blatantly editorialising, the unbelievable clumsiness of police procedures, the unfairness of the trial that followed, and the crucifixion by the media that further stirred things to a tempest that proved irrevocably destructive. In the face of all these, we get a family bent on videotaping everything -- filming their lives seemed to be their grand project -- and so we have a film that is somehow "enriched" with factual footage, including that of relationships blowing apart as the family witnesses the inevitability of it being torn to pieces.
All families have secrets. Not all fathers are saints.
I thought about my own family, and quietly acknowledge the skeletons in our closets we have not even begun to excavate.
Labels: books, documentaries, family, film, issues, queer
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Friday, August 29, 2014
9:02 PM |
Reminders for Life
Haruki Murakami once said something that rings true for me, and perhaps for anyone else who has battled the blues constantly in their lives. I call it the "blues," a common term, to give what I feel a softer conception: and yet to be honest, what I am talking about is a colourless, tremolous darkness with fangs. My comrades-in-arms who know this darkness intimately know that the only way to persevere -- if one can persevere at all -- is to let the frightful darkness run its course, like a fever, like a storm, like the awesome anger of catastrophes. It is not something you can tell yourself to snap out of, as if the mind is a puppet on strings and willpower is the cure. Willpower is a puny figure in the face of this darkness. And so, here is that Murakami quote: “And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
August has been such a storm. It has been such a storm without reason, but it took me by surprise, and coddled me like a rabid dog. My dear friend Elle called it my "birthday blues," and perhaps it was so -- but it was just darkness for me.
And only now do I feel that darkness' tentacles release my mind little by little. Today most especially. Everything is clearer again, and I can see colour. And I behold all these with a tinge of sadness, which is the only way I can behold joy.
Today had started like just any ordinary day gripped in paralysis, the quiet kind that mistakes desperation for breathing. I can't even recall much what I did today. Did I wake up early? I did, but the bed refused to let me go until the middle of the day. Did I have lunch? I must have. But it was a late lunch, I am sure of this, and I had hurried along to KRI to sate pangs of hunger so intense I was practically sweating. The details of the day became sharper by then. I had some chicken dish, I am sure of that. And coffee. And by 4:30 PM, I found my feet leading me to the Udarbe Memorial Chapel in campus, to be with Margie and the Udarbe family as they commemorated the first anniversary of Dr. Proceso Udarbe's passing on. And while I sat in the very last seat of the back row of that chapel, I found Dr. Noriel Capulong's powerful message for the memorial service so touching, I found myself almost crying. It was as if I could feel Tito Proc's kind hands reaching out to me, penetrating the walls of the bowels of my own darkness, and telling me it was all right. Dr. Capulong talked about Tito Proc as somebody who persevered through so many trials and triumphs in life without much need for credit. Tito Proc found the uncelebrated, unacknowledged unfolding of him trying to become a leader at the most crucial times to be a blessing. I have been thinking about this for a year now, this necessity to lie low but to continue working for the dreams that you have -- and Dr. Capulong's recollection of Tito Proc's quiet courage only gave my rumination some solid foundation. And for that I am thankful.
And then I went to see Philip Noyce's adaptation of Lois Lowry's
The Giver at Robinson's. It was not an important movie, but I found that its heart, like the beloved book, was in the right place. And it made me think about the importance of looking, and looking deep and seeing what's beyond. I think I have forgotten to do this in recent days -- no, months. It was important to be reminded of this again.
And so I tell myself: Always be grateful, Ian. And always be kind. And always be quiet when you can. And look. Look with the intensity of a beholder of some beloved. And be grateful. Be grateful above all for being loved.
Labels: family, film, friends, life, quotes
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Sunday, June 17, 2012
3:32 PM |
In the Name of the Father
My father, who died when I was 21, made many sacrifices in his life in the name of integrity. When I was young, and quite stupid, I never understood that, and I think he died a sad, misunderstood man. And now it’s too late for me to tell him I love him. (Love. In the present tense, as it should always be.)Labels: family, life, memories
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Saturday, June 18, 2011
2:55 PM |
My Father in a Measure of Memory
Years ago, I was asked by the writers Gémino H. Abad and Alfred Yuson to submit to an anthology of poetry about fathers and fatherhood in the aptly titled
Father Poems (Anvil, 2004). That project, I think, was timed for a Father’s Day release.
The assignment sounded simple—write about your father—but what I had to struggle with, at least initially, was the sudden uncomfortable confrontation of remembering. And remembering is an act fraught with both reconciliation and recounting of past hurts and disappointments—all the dramas any ordinary family is capable of making.
I knew I was not exactly my father’s son. I say that in the sense of familial intimacy. For the longest time, when I was growing up, he was estranged to me, first geographically, and later on, before he died when I was turning 20, emotionally. He was a distant old man who seemed to me possessed by some dark gravity, and I had no patience to understand his tantrums, why he was the way he was, or what was going on in his mind when he would wake up very early every morning and go around the house while we were still sleeping. Was he measuring out, in the dark and bluish light of dawn, what he had made of life? Did he feel that we were disappointed with him—this man who was once young and vibrant and ambitious and wealthy, but who was finally beaten down by strange circumstances to become, perhaps to his own estimation, a shadow? I was a young man in the twilight of his years, and the young never know any better about the varieties of human experience: I only knew the depths of my own narcissistic apathy and the shared disappointments I could not even begin to chart. My father’s name was Fermin. I carry that name, too. It felt then like a burden—like I was yoked to this man whom I could not understand.
Years later, I would write a short story about him titled “The Hero of the Snore Tango” (available now in my short story collection published by the University of the Philippines Press titled
Beautiful Accidents) and the first few paragraphs of that story constitute something which I have yanked from reality.
I wrote:
When Father died, the family rose to play its parts as kin bereaved with loss, but rehearsed in its grieving. There was no crying, no fretful skirmishes with acknowledging tragedy—we all knew his days had to end some time. We had played his death scene each in our minds all too frequently, in variations of muted drama. I had imagined elaborations of quiet dark dawns and bursts of hysterics—the way Tagalog movies paint us all.
But it all finally came to this: a hurried waking nudge from Mother one early morning, and one sentence fraught with subdued disconsolation:
"’Gâ," she said, "Papa’s not snoring."
We hurried to his room and there he was in bed, mouth slightly open and with eyes closed, his skin already clammy to the touch.
"He’s not breathing," I said, feeling no pulse.
"Is he dead?" Mother asked.
"He’s dead."
"Why don’t you—I don’t know—why don’t you give him CPR, or something?"
"He’s dead."
The rest was my attempt in fiction to understand the man, albeit belatedly. And in retrospect, I think I have. In my growing years, I now understand the unforeseen skirmishes life brings you that can indeed cripple one’s spirit—and I know he must have fought hard and long for honor, for respect, for love.
But I did not understand yet fully all these that afternoon when I got the invitation to write poetry about him. I remember looking at the emailed invitation for what seemed like a long time, and then I sat down in front of a rented computer terminal at Scooby’s San Jose St. and wrote the following:
Because, father, there was no chance to believe
In the impossible: the freshly-dug earth, now
Your home, was mute as was usual, turning away
Even the last howl of mourners coming near.
Their black grieving did not understand, as we did, that
Ties which bound could come loose as the grass that
Would feast on your memory six feet above could, as
Ground swallowed-in the digging for mortal remains.
We are told, as the funeral flowers wilted in the sun, that
Memories should be immortal, but we prayed for no ghosts.
The dead should not speak. We prayed, instead: father, we
Forgive you, for you have sinned. And the burial
Became growing silence as we soon dispersed for lives spent
In battled reflections, the muteness of years bearing down
On children struggling to forget by the bottom of
Beer bottles, or the occasional want for punish. Soon, we
Come, year by year, to some bidding, somehow,
For holy days kept precise—that last excuse—to
Listen to some eternal knell your spirit might tell.
Our candles now burn low to capture some
Semblance of closing, the way the ghostly smoke
Wisp among flowers, down to the carabao grass kept
Trim. We wait, and we wait. And life and silence
Become memories built on flimsy hopes, as they must,
To resound to a kind of winged believing.
And then we learn persistence, by the passing
Of days, that even the living must learn to reclaim
Their dead, to Live, to now close
The prayers with which we can finally love
Our dearly departed.
Imperfect poetry from a fictionist. But still. I think I wrote those lines in white heat, although the poem that originally poured from me is a little different now, after random nights spent revising lines, changing one word or four. What has not changed is the ambiguity I still sometimes feel about the man. But that has mellowed. Life itself has taught me how to understand the man.
And yet I know now that I do love this man despite his frailties. He was human. He was me. In my life he continues to live, and I know I must carry on if I want his memory to live on.
There is a picture of him that I keep on my work table at home. It is a photograph in sepia with white borders. He is a young man there—hair slicked back, face impassive but fierce and handsome, collared shirt carefully pressed—and I am struck by the fact that I very much look like him. That photograph keeps me grounded, and makes me remember that love is real, and that it can endure and even blossom even beyond death.
Father, wherever you are, I salute you.
Labels: family, fiction, holidays, memories, poetry
[1] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, June 05, 2011
9:16 PM |
The Moments in The Hours
I have been thinking a lot about Virginia Woolf lately, for some reason. But only in the most random of ways. I'd be listening to Cesar Ruiz Aquino talking about the modernists, for example, and he'd mention the Bloomsbury Group -- although apparently he does not think much about Woolf herself. I'd be reading a literary blog and I'd come across an argument about who was the better modernist writer, Woolf or James Joyce? I'd be walking one morning down a street in Dumaguete, and I'd see a woman with a bouquet of flowers in her arms, waiting for a tricycle, and I'd think: "How very Mrs. Dalloway." And then I'd remember those days in the late 1990s when I'd sit in the grass somewhere in Tokyo and I'd read the perplexing book about the minutiae of a day in a sad woman's life. (I miss and envy those days.) I'd skim through YouTube and stumble on Tilda Swinton playing the gender-bending title character of
Orlando, based on Woolf's elaborate "love letter" of a novel to Vita Sackville-West. Sometimes, I'd go around the house and stumble on my copy of Michael Cunningham's
The Hours -- and I would tell myself: I have not seen Stephen Daldry's 2002 film adaptation for almost a decade now. When it first came out, I remember that it left me cold -- and I wondered: after having lived the life I've lived since then, will it find new resonance in me?
Yesterday, finally, I found in Facebook a link to
this article by Cunningham in
The Guardian. It felt as if the universe was compelling me to do something about this.
Today, unlike Mrs. Dalloway, I woke up quite late. But thoughtful, conscious of the minutes. I still managed to wring out a good day out of this Sunday which involved the readings of essays by Octavio Paz and F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ralph Ellison and such. There were sudden encounters and talks with a couple of friends. There was a walk around town under the wicked June half moon. There was the "unveiling" of a new art installation of
tamawos -- mythical elementals -- off the Boulevard. And then I went home to watch
The Hours.
It moved me afresh, and I think I understand this film much more now, being able now to see the depths of each of these women's unhappiness without a center -- Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore's Laura Brown, and Meryl Streep's Clarissa Vaughan. Sometimes the years do that: they make you see things your own youth cannot comprehend. What is life after ordinary madness and adult compromises? How does one deal with the sorrows of being trapped in a place you have no wish to be in, even when it includes the love of so many people? How does one recognize happiness, or does that recognition only come in hindsight?
There is a scene in
The Hours between Meryl Streep's Clarissa and Claire Danes' Julia Vaughan that underscores for me something that I have been trying to understand and come to terms with recently -- like a belated answer or explanation to some of the things I am doing, and yet have found no way to explain. In this scene, Clarissa is preparing for a dinner party for a great poet friend, and her encounter with him early in the day has left her devastated -- but also thoughtful. She has been crying since then, and then her daughter Julia enters, and asks her if she is all right. They retire to the bedroom and then they start to talk...
Clarissa Vaughan: ... If you say to me, "When were you happy...?"
Julia Vaughan: Mom...
Clarissa Vaughan: ... Tell me the moment you were happiest...
Julia Vaughan: I know ... I know, it was years ago.
Clarissa Vaughan: Yeah.
Julia Vaughan: All you're saying is, you were once young.
Clarissa Vaughan: (Smiles and laughs.) I remember one morning, getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself, so this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more.
(Both laugh.) Never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning, it was happiness. It was The Moment. Right then.
And I understood, and suddenly I so wished that when I was much younger someone had taken me by the shoulders, shook me, and told me: "Live every bit of these moments. You are young. When you're older, these things will define every bit of what you will remember to be happy." Then again, when we were younger, did we ever listen? Alas, no. Youth is too preoccupied with what it thinks is the singularity of its angst. "You don't understand," we all say. But of course we soon understand that they
understood. Because we've all been there.
But I am thinking more about my mother, actually. She is in her mid-70s. She's in L.A., and because of her age, she can't really move around so much because she tires out easily even when she tries to be brave about it. And sometimes I ask myself:
what made her wait for so long to see the world? When she was in her teens, she made
tira-tira to sell just so she could escape the stifling smallness of Bayawan town, where she was born, and dared go to evil Cebu, where, she was warned by her spinster aunts, she was likely to be "devoured." But she did it. She was so brave then -- and then not much else. She married. She stopped the dream of becoming a nurse. She married, and she had children.
Was it us? Was it the task of bringing up six boys? Was she happy?
Am I overreading The Hours?
Labels: books, family, film, life, love, quotes, writers
[1] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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Years ago, I was asked by the writers Gémino H. Abad and Alfred Yuson to submit to an anthology of poetry about fathers and fatherhood in the aptly titled Father Poems (Anvil, 2004). That project, I think, was timed for a Father’s Day release.