migginot's line

Shaw kids

2009-03-06T13:59:00.004+08:00

a few days ago while stopped at traffic at Shaw, i saw a band of kids, no one older than 12 by my estimation. they had on hand a plastic bottle which they would sniff every once in a while. rugby. The biggest of the girls had very long legs. a couple security guards from nearby buildings were in pursuit of them. They ran, paused to sniff, ran some more, until they were out of my sight. My car moved forward a few yards and i saw her, leggy girl, caught. her eyes were hard.

i made a painting of them, but in it i brought out the innocence i'm sure is still there somewhere.

Shaw Kids
Acrylic on canvas
36" x 48"/ quezon city, march 2009

checking in

2009-02-25T15:50:00.004+08:00

I decided to resurrect this blog. Just checking in.

Julian's apology

2006-10-23T14:42:00.000+08:00

My son Jules ( he’s 13) pissed me off one time. I don’t remember the slight now—I think he was rude, somewhat. And I stopped talking to him. He experimented. Made noise, sat beside me as I watched TV, attempted small talk. I ignored him. I was saying, in my silence, you don’t deserve me right now. So he left. When he came back after a few minutes, he gave me my camera. He had taken a picture of something from the garden.

He knows what works.

A Palanca for Chinee

2006-10-20T09:05:00.000+08:00

October 19, 2006

My dear Chinee,

I don’t know much about Days, and I don’t know what it will do to you apart from giving you a serial number (Chinee, DWTL xxx). Maybe when you get back you will tell me. But then, you will just say, “It’s okay,” and will leave the rest to my imagination.

In a few weeks you will be 16. And I’m here unable to keep up with the changes (the transformations!)—in size, in temperament, in your attitude towards girls. (You used to say, “Girls, yuck!” Look at you now.) I used to be able to carry you with the strength of just one arm, and now I have to look up to see your eyes, and if I carried you, it will break my spine. You used to come to me for answers to your million questions about dinosaurs, airplanes, the life of bugs, and for the comfort of stories before sleep. Now you know enough to teach me things, too. Like Math, and how to move on the dance floor, which is “don’t!”

You have always been a joy to me. Of course I love you—love is the default mode of mothers, yes? But not just that. I genuinely like you. You are delightful—then, when you were a little boy who wondered so much about the world, and now, when you’re a giant and a lazy-ass dude with opinions.

When you were little, I used to whisper to your ear when you slept. I would say, “Mama’s home,” and you would smile, even in your sleep. And this is what I want you to remember today, and for all time. I am home. I am your home. What that means, Chi, is that there is a place where you can just come crashing in, whatever time, without conditions, without questions asked. That place is the softest corner of my heart, Chine. It belongs to you.

Mom

Geriatric Fashionista

2006-09-27T08:29:00.000+08:00

I’m not one who would take issue with a man’s fashion sense (or non-sense). If I see a man wear socks over his Birkenstocks, I would rationalize. It could be fungus. In which case I would feel a little sorry that he is unable to resolve whether to air out his toenails or keep them under wraps. But I would just as soon get back to minding my own personal conflicts. (They’re not about fashion, but they are many, and they’re a pain).

I might have quarreled with appropriateness in the past. My general position on dressing has been about wearing a proper dress for a proper occasion. This attitude was largely shaped by my experience of my grandfather on my mother’s side.

Lolo, even in his late seventies, was a very sharp dresser. He had a lot of decent clothes, suits and formal barongs that were remnants of his past social life. In the mornings he would emerge from upstairs all dressed up and looking spiffy (yes, often in a suit, necktie and all), and he would put on his short fit, pick up his cane, and walk out the door like a don. He was a good-looking man, and he carried his clothes very well. But at his age and circumstance, he had nowhere to go. It would have been nice, or less strange, if he went to church, but no. He insinuated his formal dress into the heat and chaos of the Pasig wet market, where I had no doubt he was a major fashion anomaly. I was in my early teens then, and he embarrassed me to death.

I can remember being somewhat of a fashion Mussolini almost 15 years ago, at my cousin’s wedding. It was a grand affair, very formal, and I had a new piña barong made for my then-husband. At the reception, when we were posing for pictures, I realized he was wearing his topsiders—brown and ratty beyond belief!— under his black dress pants. I felt my face turn red, then white, then red again as I forced a smile to the cameras. I knew I had laid out his black wingtips for him that afternoon. So when we got into the car going home, I attacked him with proper ferocity. “You pull that stunt on me again, and I’ll shoot you.”
Now I’m more of a liberal when it comes to dress. I guess when you’re older (and you’ve done 5 years of graduate school in UP Diliman) you get more tolerant. You learn to leave other people’s fashions alone. As long as one decently covers all that needs covering, I am not about to mind.

Nabby, one of my two best friends, will agree with me on this. She and I, we don’t much care what a man might wear as long as we don’t ever have to walk with him in a mall. Anna, the other best friend, feels differently—she takes other people’s fashion bloopers personally, like an affront. There is a man we know who wears nothing but Elvis couture (and coiffure). Anna takes one look at him and she wants to cry. I would tell her it might do her good to go up to him and compliment his belt buckle. She could eat a breakfast of fried egg and sinangag off of it— sure, it’s a bit too large—but hey, it’s stainless steel.

Conversations like this can turn outright goofy, and the hilarity distracts Anna, but ultimately she is little pacified. All three of us have a fine enough style sense, but Anna is an interior designer, and the pursuit of aesthetic correctness is her business. Nabby and I both have un-practiced psychology degrees, so while Anna grieves over a wrong belt, we speculate on the wearer’s unconscious instead.

You want to know a man’s history, his hang-ups, his conceits and neuroses, his hopes, his dreams and, oh God, his delusions? Watch his outfits.

Take my 70-year-old uncle who has lived in Canada for the more than 20 years. I’d visited with him in Toronto, where I found nothing the matter—very regular, nothing fancy—about the clothes he wore where he lived. But when he attended the funeral of his eldest brother in Nueva Ecija some years ago, he looked as if he had come from a rodeo, and he took my attention away from the dead and the grieving. Uncle D was wearing a black long sleeved silk shirt, black slim pants, black Stetson hat with matching cord around the chin. And with all that, a pair of brown cowboy boots. I turned to my mother and asked, “What’s the name of Lone Ranger—is it Tonto?” My mother just kept fanning herself (it was high noon, very hot). She wouldn’t look at her brother-in-law.

I’m not sure I have described this scene to my best friends. But next we have dinner, I will. One has to show a lot of flash to steal the show from the dead. There’s something there—why steal the show from the dead, duh? — for us to analyze.

We’ve long figured out my Lolo, the geriatric fashionista, God bless his soul.

In one of his trips to the market, (he walked, crossing two busy streets to get from San Nicolas to Kapasigan)—he was sideswiped by a speeding motorcycle. He landed on his butt first and then he hit his head. Someone took him home with his head in a bandage. His bones were not broken, but he was pretty shaken up.

He went downhill from there. He was slow to recover, and when he did, he could not walk to market anymore, and so his suits, to my relief, just hung uselessly in his closet. Everyday he would stand in front of the gate, waiting for someone to chat up. It was always a girl, and it was usually the teenaged Nabby. He would fish an old picture from his pocket and show it to her. In it, he was looking dapper in a dark suit. He told Nabby it was a big ceremony at the Luneta. He was presented a national award for his achievements in music; he was the best cornet player who ever lived.

The whole family was there that night with him. I was 8, and didn’t know what a cornet was, but there was popcorn. I suppose Lolo’s children were all sufficiently proud of him, but these things, no matter how grand, have a way of fading from memory. People forgot about it (I certainly did). But not him. And all the preening he did at the market, I realized much later, was to relive and reassert the glory of that night and let everyone know he had a big life. He wouldn’t let his star fade, and he did what he could. And if I knew then what I know now, I would have put him into a car and driven him to the wet market myself.
His name was Mariano Cruz. ✸

All whipped up

2006-09-20T06:42:00.000+08:00

I spend 30 hours of this weekend all by myself in bed, like a stone. I have no particular fever nor am I in any particular pain. But I spent most of the week playing badminton,—hard games, against men—and I am just tired of moving. Moving hurts. So here I am in bed, curtains drawn (so that it’s dark and dreary even at high noon), and I’m thinking of the assorted tortures these men subjected me to.

Well, I asked for it. These are A-level players, many notches above my game, and I really have no business playing against them. They are men, they’re young and aerodynamic, and they play like devils. But I told them to bring it on, no mercy, and so they whipped me. And here I am.

I tell a friend I am seriously fatigued, and she worries that it is no longer healthy exercise, what i do. And she’s right. But that’s precisely the point of my playing hard all week: I am not out for exercise anymore; I am out for war. Not against men—or women, for that matter—but against my mind, which shifts to panic mode whenever I play competitively. I get scared. I get into a mode of semi-paralysis, and I’m there with my fingers gripping my racket hard while shuttlecocks land on my nose. It’s like stage fright.

At my age (and physical composition), I don’t aspire to raise my game to A-levels anymore. I’m a happy C-minus, what with my now defective spare parts. i made a bad pivot three months ago , and my right knee swelled so that it looked like an overripe melon. I went to a sports doctor. He tinkered with it, gave my little kneecaps a few shakes, and said patella-something and prescribed an anti-inflammatory drug, which I took, and a rehab program, which I didn’t. I just kept on playing until one day I attempted to lunge and my knees locked and I felt a small explosion in my joint. I went to a different orthopedic doctor (because I can’t tell the first one I defied his orders) who will not tell me anything until, he insisted, I got an MRI. And after the MRI? I asked. “We’ll see if we need to operate,” he said. So then, I remembered my mother, who, at 84, suffered pain in the knees. She took an MRI like a good patient, went through a knee-replacement operation, and died. That’s too expensive. I went to a sporting goods store and bought four knee braces (they get sweat-soaked) for a few hundred pesos each.

I play a decent C-minus level, but only in the safe company of friends. I am what they might call a strong player, even, because i am tall and can do a mean drive every now and then. But take me to a real match and I’m like a desiccated tree on the court. Two years ago, my friend Tini was absolutely traumatized by our 5-0 performance in a tournament. I was not. I was laughing. I had humor going for me, and I would have written a hilarious account of that painful humiliation and sent it to the tournament e-group had it not been for the bruised feelings of Tini, which I took to account. Then, again, in July this year, I joined another tournament with the same results: 4 losses, no wins. “Don’t we get a medal for that?” I asked, grinning. But in August, when a pair of nine-year-olds—my goodness, they’re as high as our waists, barely—beat me and Racquel to a pulp, I said, no more eggs for me. This is it. I want to win. Not the whole freaking tournament, darn it, but one set. Just one set.

As it happens, there is going to be a tournament among neighbors in Ayala Heights where I live. I’m playing mixed doubles with my friend Pancho as my partner, and I am determined to win us a game. I figure that if I just play within myself, within my real game, I will be all right. I just have to watch the mind, see that it does not go to that place where I become a virtual tree on the court with my feet firmly rooted on the Taraflex. And that’s why I played with the best of them last week—a kind of desensitization of my nerves. They really gave it to me, these men. They whacked and dropped and jump-smashed and sent shuttlecocks zinging like bullets past my ear (I got good at ducking them, is all). I was all over the place keeping the play alive, the wind going out of me, feeling a mix of pride and oppression with every pass across the net. Feeling good.

But now, of course, this. I am dead weight. Something tells me that after the friendly neighborhood tournament, I will settle peacefully on my writing desk and set my knee up comfortably on a stool where it belongs. Maybe.

Fact of the Day

2006-07-12T10:44:00.000+08:00

The Philippine Star
July 12, 2006

Running 500-plus days now, an online magazine for men—askmen.com—has been publishing daily factoids for its male readers. This one springs at me: One in three male motorists pick their nose while driving.

A third of the male population is a staggering number—that’s whole a lot of noses being picked along the highways of the world! But I am not about to argue with fact. I know that a lot of men think themselves as capable of incomparable poise, especially at a wheel with German initials on it, and there is a woman to his right, wearing a little black dress. But when they stare at the road ahead for too long, their minds wander; and when their minds wander, their fingers go for the nearest available hole. They don’t know what they are doing until it’s too late. A man I caught with his finger in his nostril was shaken from his stupor when I asked, “Did you get it?”

So now I know that one in three men do that. But I don’t think this bit of statistic is meant to enrich the male IQ (or mine); what I think it offers a man is consolation, so that every time he finds his fingers probing his skull while stopped at a red light, he knows he’s not alone.

Fact for the day is not always about men directly, but about things that are apparently of interest to them, like Fact No. 514: There is a 6-foot-high stone monument dedicated to Popeye in Crystal City, Texas; Fact No. 525: It takes about 15 to 20 minutes to walk around the Pentagon once; Fact No. 517: If you place a small amount of liquor on a scorpion, it'll instantly go mad and sting itself to death; and Fact no. 528: The "G" in g-string stands for "groin." There are also statistics that somehow implicate men, like Fact No. 516: There are more Ford F-series trucks in the world than there are Australians. You know who buy these Ford trucks and why. Fact No. 327 says, in Sparta during the 4th century, men over 20 were required by law to eat 2 pounds of meat a day. It was supposed to make them brave. This is pure nostalgia. The only place two pounds of meat can bring a man to these days is the operating table, for a heart bypass. The modern man drives a Ford truck for bravery, an especially gutsy thing to do in these days of inflated gas prices, and when a man’s badge of courage is the credit card he charges his Shell Velocity to.

Speaking of Shell, let me digress a bit by telling you that my nephew who works for this company (his name: Jen’s Husband) treated us to a night of Sitti at the Tavern in Greenbelt last week. I had been invited previously by my Saturday Group buddy Bads Convocar to listen to Sitti but hadn’t had the chance to take him up on his offer. Jen’s Husband and Bads had told me that Sitti plays bossa nova, and so I was expecting a low but full-bodied voice like Astrud Gilberto or Lisa Ono. Sitti’s voice is several pitches higher, and when she trills her notes, the sound she makes is a mix of wild bird and chipmunk—the kind of sound that one might hear in some rainforest: it gets your attention and makes you forget your girlfriend’s name. But the best thing I like about her (she is 22, and a graduate of Business Economics in UP) is the look on her face when she sings. It’s as if she knows something funny, and she’s not telling. My guess is, she knows that her alluring hip-swing and shimmy does wonders to the economics of her (singing) business, and (therefore?) men are funny. But that’s just a guess. What was more mesmerizing to me was that Jen’s Husband paid for my Tequila Rose and calamari, and I’m wildly grateful.

But back to askmen.com. It seems to be an earnest enterprise of giving men information on all that they need to know. There are the usual sections, like Power and Money, Sexuality, the Indianapolis Grand Prix Guide; the 99 Most Desirable Women, even a Men’s Horoscope. Some articles are really doozies: Disgusting Foods You Should Eat; How to Get Rid of Houseguests; How to Hypnotize Someone. And there is a special section called Outside Content, which seems to be the male counterpart of soul and spirit stuff on Oprah.com. Recent articles include How Zombies Work; How Exorcism Works; How Brain Death Works. I can imagine how brain death might happen, but I don’t see how brain death might work. One of these days I might actually read those articles.

The most hilarious part of the whole magazine is Doctor Love, who answers love and sexuality questions sent in by readers. Doctor Love has also written a book called The System, which he is now selling online via askmen.com for $99. A quickie blurb says it all: How many times have you taken a woman out three times, spent well over $100, and now she doesn't even remember your name? With my coaching program, this will become a thing of the past. My program saves you time and money—and it protects your heart. This one-time investment in your happiness literally pays for itself. So what have you got to win?

What have you got to win, indeed.

On to more facts— No. 435: Mouse sex only lasts five seconds. It’s curious what this little rodent factoid is doing in a men’s magazine. Are they saying, as Steinbeck did, that this is true of mice and men? Or do the writers and readers of askmen.com think it important that a man knows how many crucial seconds separate him from a mouse? Well, let the men answer that. What I know for sure —and these I also got from their archive of daily facts—is that (Fact No. 547) 40% of women have hurled footwear at a man. I do not know if I would throw a shoe at a man, but I sure as hell would at a mouse, if I found one in my bedroom. ✰

Boys to Men

2006-07-05T11:51:00.000+08:00

The Philippine Star
July 5, 2006

A friend of mine, a fine writer, flew business class for the first time and had a miserable time of it. He wanted to raise his feet to get more comfortable in the unfamiliar largeness of the seat, but didn’t know which buttons to press. And rather than embarrass himself by asking the pretty flight attendant how to raise the footstool, he just ordered a cocktail and thought of all the people he had ever known, including his mother, whom he wished were there to ask the question for him.

He is not unlike my son Julian. We were having dinner at Dencio’s in Capitol Hills recently and he needed another shot of soda, for which he was afraid to ask the waitress, whose name was Dhei, and who was very pretty. I want another can of Sprite, he told me. You ask, I said. No, you ask, he said. He is very stubborn and would much rather suffer a dry dinner without the benefit of Sprite to push his lumpia down his throat.

My friend in business class was not too happy. He suffered catalepsy and that kept him widely awake. At the hotel after the flight, he consulted his oracle at Google on the fine mechanics of plane seats so that on the return trip he might confidently raise his foot while he enjoyed his drink, after which he might recline the seat and snore like a businessman.

There is an intimation of a boy in every man, and if woman were to keep her humor about her, she is likely to see a boy peeking from behind a man’s necktie on a bright morning, and sometimes he is scared.

My boy Miguel, who is 15 and in junior high school, tells me he is now a man. Since when? I don’t know if there is a precise moment when a boy, previously full of sweet incidents and devilish pranks, becomes a man. I’m not sure it really happens at all, except in their minds. I think at some point their bodies are invaded by some bacteria called testosterone and they are maimed for life, the macho little boys. They grow hair, shoot up like weeds and begin to have drives that make them dream of girls that are not their mothers. But by essence and by design, they remain what they were born as: boys.

There is this brilliant CEO I know, a pillar in the world of business. He is rather small of physique and is perfectly comfortable on coach seats and peanuts, and so he trades his company-paid business class tickets for two of coach. That way, he gets to where he needs to go while keeping in his suit pocket a promise of another trip, which is free and taken leisurely in some future summer. I doubt that his busy schedule affords him many summer vacations, but I’m sure the happy prospect of a quick getaway to a distant adventure keeps him sharp and alert in the boardroom, knowing that he is ahead. It makes him as happy as my brother Rico was in the old days when his pockets were jingling with jolens and around his neck was a thick lei of rubber bands, a hot currency among boys his age at the time.

My brother Ver, be he in first, business or economy class, would pretend not to know how to flush the cabin toilet just so he could chat up a stewardess. He is tall and handsome, and he is bound to tell her a funny story, which, along with his smile, will leave her bewildered and charmed at 35,000 feet. Ver takes after my Lolo, who, at 80, stood by the gate of our home with a brand new anahaw fan that he was ready to give any hot woman who happened by. My lolo was never on a plane, which is a shame, because it would have made him burningly happy to have a girl in uniform straighten his seat up for him just before take-off and offer him a choice of chicken or beef for lunch. He would have in turn offered her an anahaw with his logo, the number 8, printed on it.

There is a sweetness embedded in boys, manifest from the time they first present Mommy with a kalachuchi from the garden. Miguel, even when he was Batman, presented me with all sorts of flowers he picked up on the way to the playground. And what do you know, this last Valentine’s, he bought two dozen red roses that he sent not to me, but to a girl from Assumption (she probably thinks, too, that she has found herself a “man”).

I don’t know about Julian. When he was four and we were living in California, he prowled the yard for long hours in the spring, collecting worms. One afternoon he presented me with a bottle full of them dead and alive. When I screamed, his eyes saddened, dimmed for a little while, until he realized he had uncovered my wildest fear, and he brightened up as if he had discovered the secret of life. ❊

One Man at a Time

2006-06-28T10:59:00.000+08:00

Philippine STAR, June 28, 2006

The danger of writing about men—for a writer who is not a man— is in exposing the men one has known, and if that is not trouble, I don’t know what is.

I don’t dare to profess any general opinion of men, anyway, apart maybe from saying that they have the power to make me dizzy, which is no form of judgment one way or another, because any manner of things done with or by with men—too much to eat, too much wine, spirited laughter, long car trips, too much huffing and puffing, pregnancy—can give me dizzy spells. Beyond that, I make no conclusions. To say, for example, that men are dorks would be like saying that dogs are Labradors, which is wrong, because I have a poodle, his name is Fluffutus (nickname, Fluffy), and he is as dog as can be. I don’t want to say, as some people certainly do, that men are pigs. In my father’s hometown in Nueva Ecija, pigs are what my aunts feed lovingly every day, and then slit the throats of and roast at the pit when we visit at fiesta.

I had a classmate in graduate school, a married woman with children, who said emphatically that men are stupid. She said it with such conviction that I almost believed her. But no. There are some stupid men out there, certainly, but surely not all men are. Some men of great accomplishments are clueless about little things. I once texted the phrase “nyek nyok” to a man in his 60’s, in response to something he said that I didn’t quite agree with. He came back with, “What strange sound was that?” The young turk from UP from whom I had picked up that expression might find my older friend’s question preposterous, but there you are.

I used to think one thing of men: they were knights in shining armors. Once,—this was very long ago—I sat with the boy of my dreams along the cliffs of Loyola Heights, watching the light fade on the Marikina Valley below, when he, whose voice I was dizzyingly in love with, sang me a song. “Born free,” he crooned, “as free as a window…” He was not kidding! I was 19 years old, dizzy with laughter. Had I the sense to figure that a man who sees nothing amiss about being born free as a window might well not know where to get metal polish to shine an armor with, I would have jumped off that cliff, pronto. But what did I know?

I suppose my mother’s stories of her wartime romance with my father gave me my funny ideas about men in shining armors. While there is no doubt in my mind that my father was that brave and intelligent and clear-thinking knight to my mother, I guess it was wrong to suppose—or expect—that all men would be like him. Some men are heroes, while others are—well, they’re just not. I learned that the hard way.

A few years after that, I met another man, at work. We would go together to the company’s glass plant in Cavite, he on the wheel and I plastered to the door of the car by my own internal centrifugal force. He would chase after the chickens that were crossing the road and ask, “You want chicken for dinner?” I laughed at him and thought, men are funny, until one day, there where no chickens and he just asked, “You want dinner?” I pretended not to hear. Finally, he turned into a real knight, whose armor was a midnight blue sports car bought for him by his dad. I had gone to Cavite alone on assignment and a storm hit and I was stranded. Despite the storm, he drove alone from Makati on that dangerous night for the sole purpose of picking me up and bringing me home to Quezon City. Now, that made me dizzy with gratitude and all other strange emotions. We had dinners together for the next 12 years—years and years of dizzying surprises, pleasures, annoyances, travels, fights and making up.

When we broke up finally, I suffered vertigo, a dizziness that earned the official stamp of a doctor, who said I had something the matter with my inner ear and that I might be dizzy, now and then, for the rest of my life.

Although my personal sample size (of men, what else?) is quite limited, I have, from my official role as quack psychotherapist to my girl friends, accumulated a lot of man-stories, and I have come to believe, after having known this disturbance called men, that women should look at one man at a time—individually, for each has his own definition, each his own package of mystery and wonder and accumulated trouble. That is, if we care to put our precious analytical and emotional attention to them. (And I don’t know that we have to necessarily.)

Right now I take the men I meet as they are, one man at a time. In any event, I have my dizzy pills and a firm resolve to jump off the cliff exactly when I must.

Missing Children

2006-05-09T09:27:00.000+08:00

with aunts, uncles and cousins in California

with kisa's roommate, Alex.

Julian, 13; Ina, 21; Chinee,15; Kisa, 23, in Orlando, Florida, May 2006

Once upon a time these people stuck to me like leeches. I was out of their sight for a minute and they wailed. Kisa would phone me at work to tell me we were out of toilet paper, crying, not about the tissue, i knew as much. By late afternoon, she would feel it’s been too long away from me. Ina was tougher. She would watch me leave for work with the saddest eyes, but no tears. She kept herself busy with projects at home—turning the living room upside down, going up the attic to tinker with my mementos, banging her forehead onto a post so that Kisa would then have a reason—a good one—to summon me back. Chinee we had to bring all over the place to see cows and roosters before we could leave for work. Julian had tricks. When he saw me dressed, he would rush into my closet to find my silk housedress (the one in psychedelic colors, just that one) and hand it to me. Change, he would say, meaning, stay home. He would hide the car keys in the most unusual places—under the hamper, inside the case of The Fox and the Hound VHS tape. Once, he locked himself in a car in the garage, and the rest of them had to call me. Come home now, Mom, we can’t get Julian out of the car.

Every summer we travelled, from when Ina was the baby. When Julian was a year old, he didn’t care for the rides. He wanted water. He splashed about in the fountains of Epcot, Disney, Universal, lucky to have a mother like me who let him.

Now they are out there, travelling without me, and have, it seems, a fine time of it. Without Mom. Oh no. But look— in those links between their bodies, in all that affection they hold for each other, that’s where I am.

2006-04-23T08:46:00.000+08:00

The Marvelous Marbylous

2006-04-15T15:29:00.000+08:00

One of our first exchanges went like this:
Me: (to the fiction class, explaining a detail in my story): Oh, the puppy? She made it bato.
Marby: Ano kamo? She made it "bato?" You mean she threw it? Ba't hindi mo kaya tagalugin na lang?

She's TIGAS, like this.

It must have been six, seven weeks into the class. But it was only then I realized that I could like her. She cuts the bull.

We found a common ground in cigarettes—out at the parking lot, at workshop breaks, between classes, we smoked, and we ate things.

She was always late—or almost late—coming to class every week. She was commuting from way South, always huffing and puffing at the door. It was a tiny classroom—actually just the professor's office—with uncomfortable seating.She sat like this, for the most part.

(That's Liza Magtoto hamming it up with her in Baguio).

Her face doesn't hide anything—she's always "all there."

She's even a girlie-gurl sometimes (not too often; only in safe company).

Once, someone broke her heart, and I held pieces of it for her as she tried (oh, the tears!) to put it back together.

But she recovers beautifully from anything.

We have fun working together—
We pretend to take it seriously.

Everybody likes Marby. She's queen bee, see.

She tries to convince me that someday my dream of wearing short skirts will come true.In Baguio we share closet and bed. She thinks my bras are puny; she says I whack her in the face in my sleep.

Marby, just so you know, this is my way of paying you back for the miswa massacre in Iloilo. This is a nice thing (it's not madali, I almost bato my laptop). BAYAD NA KO.

Unemployment Line

2006-04-14T08:23:00.000+08:00

These girls (KC, Marge, Pam, and Ina) I watched grow from snot-nosed "sumshen" girls to this. For that, I get to join their parties (it's my haus kasi) where they teach me to dance (it's more slinking than dancing, to me) and have me drink aquamarine and hot pink stuff that Marge mixes up in the kitchen (one sip and I'm tipsy, what IS that?). In the morning they are sprawled unconscious in the lanai and I tiptoe my way around, looking for my cigarettes.

Voodoo Night in Del's Kitchen

2006-04-14T07:58:00.000+08:00

Ralph does divination-by-MMS on Jimmy Abad as kibitzers (Jing and me on the schizophrenia card: "He doesn't know whether he's German or English!") have strawberry shortcake. Red wine for credulity and Marlboros for a cloud of mystery.

More of Baguio's Best

2006-04-13T23:27:00.000+08:00

Before we leave the UP Writers Workshop in Baguio altogether, let me share some more pictures with you (the captions may not match the sequence of the pix so please figure out what’s what):

1. Every workshop needs “angels”, and that’s three of us right there—me the videographer, poet Ralph Galan the accountant, and fictionist Marby Villaceran the GRO.

2. New National Artist for Literature Bien Lumbera shows us which school he prefers to be associated with.

3. Poet Joel Toledo was another of the workshop’s live wires.

4. Three “yabang boys” and one “yabang girl” of the Philippine Literary Arts Council—Butch Dalisay, Jimmy Abad, Jing Hidalgo, and Charlson Ong.

5. The other “yabang boy”, poet and Chancellor Ricky de Ungria, here being taped by me at a special reading of Rio Alma’s poetry.

Cool Guy Lourd

2006-04-11T11:14:00.000+08:00

Lourd de Veyra says:

“What I look for in poetry is an uneasy kind of energy. An energy that is already beyond the configuration of words and then assumes a density that is akin to music.

“At the heart of it all is jazz. Jazz, the manipulation of breath— the unleashing of breath, the holding of breath, the destruction of breath.

“My exposure to the poetry of Ginsberg and Kerouac opened me up to the world of possibilities. And I am obsessed with the idea of ‘possibility’. ‘Possibility’ is what art is all about. It is the constant wrestling with forms, styles, and structures. It is the idea that something better is always out there. It is about discontent. It is about discontent with the safe, the middling, the accepted, and the acceptable."

Cool guy. Whatta voice.

Brokeback in Baguio

2006-04-06T10:26:00.000+08:00

We’re up here in Baguio for the annual Writers Workshop of the UP Institute of Creative Writing. No, I’m not here as a fellow (did that in 2001) but as a documentarist/videographer, which means I get to stand behind a digicam between smoking breaks, capturing all the tears shed (there’s been quite a lot), Jimmy Abad’s impish gesticulations, Charlson Ong’s wry asides, and Butch Dalisay’s unseasonably bronchitic baritone.

But we’re all having fun, none more than the fellows themselves—two of them (Joel Toledo and Lourd de Veyra) here seen horsing around, a la Brokeback Mountain, during a break from the sessions at Pines View Hotel.

And there’s me on the job, and off it in Del Tolentino’s fabulously tasteful home on Mirador Hill.

Inawinkle's Graduation

2006-03-27T22:29:00.000+08:00

Lunch with Marby

2006-03-17T14:30:00.000+08:00

Here's a couple of shots from my lunch with my great friend Marby--soon to be my boss at the UP Writers Workshop in Baguio. Can't wait to get there!

Sunset, March 9

2006-03-09T18:34:00.000+08:00

LANDSCAPE II
Carlos Angeles

Sun in the knifed horizon bleeds the sky,
Spilling a peacock stain upon the sands,
Across some murdered rocks refused to die.
It is your absence touches my sad hands
Blinded like flags in the wreck of air.

And catacombs of cloud enshroud the cool
And calm involvement of the darkened plains,
The stunted mourners here: and here, a full
And universal tenderness which drains
The sucked and golden breath of sky,
comes bare.

Now, while the dark basins the void of space,
Some sudden crickets, ambushing me near,
Discover vowels of your whispered face
And subtly cry. I touch your absence here
Remembering the speeches of your hair.

And How They've Grown

2006-03-01T14:36:00.000+08:00

Six years hence...

A Summer Evening

2006-02-27T23:44:00.000+08:00

A vignette from April 2000

I was surprised to find the garden awash with light when I got home. It was most unusual and it alarmed me. These garden lights were unkind to my electric bill and were usually switched off unless something was up. The last time I turned them on was New Year’s Eve. I had wanted the garden to look festive while I lay half-conscious in bed, watching millennium shows on TV. I drove into the driveway tonight and found something was indeed up: a tent, in the middle of the garden. Before I could make sense of it, Julian, my seven-year-old, flew out of the tent flap and announced, “We’re sleeping here tonight!”

My shoulders dropped. Tonight of all nights, I thought. The air was hot and sticky and heavy. Not even a slight breeze blew. The outdoors offered no relief whatever, even at evening, as the full heat of summer was upon us like a thick blanket.

Julian glistened with sweat but the heat was not on his mind. He was thinking ‘camping.’ He took hold of my hand and led me toward the tent for a look-see.

“You must be the GRO,” I said.

“What’s a GRO?”

“’Means you’re this cool guy who welcomes guests,” I said, squeezing his sticky hand.

Inside, we found the architect and chief builder, my nine-year old Miguel. He was laying out our winter-proof sleeping bags on the floor, the final act of what must have been, for him, hard labor. Sweat blobs the size of Buddha beads dotted his face, adding character to his grin. “Try it, Mom,” he said, and I lay down on the heavy flannel.

I thought of their father. He had been the proud foreman and cheerleader when this tent was pitched last. 1997. We had been on high ground, in the cold mountains of Wyoming. These sleeping bags had kept us snug and warm against the dark and the unknown. But he would have shot this idea right down, had he been here still. He was a man of little humor about the heat. He had no tolerance for even room temperature. He had installed a two-ton airconditioner in the masters’ bedroom, which he kept at full blast all night. “It’s like Siberia in here,” I had often complained. Come to think of it, many of our bedroom arguments had been about the cold. But the memory of arguments—or even conversations—seemed like a distant life now. I had not seen his face in two years, except in sudden flashes, through Miguel’s eyes, through Julian’s smile. Like tonight, in the tent.

“Isn’t this a great idea, Mom?” Miguel asked. Miguel was the beloved of his father, and he returned it in full measure. When he was three, he said he didn’t want to grow up because that would mean Papa would get old and then die. It was his childhood monster, the thought of losing his Dad.

“Fabulous!” I cheered. I had forgotten the heat, too. I liked it when the children got creative and I made it a point to go along with their projects. Two days ago, Ina brought up the idea of fish. Ina is my second child, almost 16; lives on the couch at the foot of my bed and sees UFOs. She said, “Mom, why don’t we buy fishes?” In no time, the boys were at it, too: “Yeah, Mom, let’s get fishes.”

“Fish, not fishes,” Kisa said, setting them straight. Kisa, my eldest, was going to college in June and had gotten the hang of mass nouns. Upon hearing that she had passed at the Ateneo, I started to lecture her on how passing the entrance exams and staying on as a student were two different things altogether. But she said, “Let’s just savor the moment, Mom,” so I stopped myself and just said, “Congratulations.” I had since been giving the lecture in small installments whenever I got the chance.

“Mom, please, can we buy some fish?” they said in turns.

I approved the purchase on condition that they pay with their own money. Together they raised P80 in small bills and P365 in coins. I took their money and gave them a P500 bill and sent them out into the world. Julian wanted piranhas; Miguel, hammerhead sharks.

They came back from the shop with a good-sized fish tank, a filter, and some chemicals, but no fish. They didn’t have any money left for even a small guppy, but the task—the confusion—of where and how to set up the aquarium entertained them for the afternoon.

And so today, the tent. After dinner, we all trooped out and we lay there, all five of us, whiling away the time, waiting for sleep.

“Hey look, Mom,” Miguel said, “I brought my cell phone so we can call Manang if we want something.”

“Guess what Ina did today, Mom,” said Kisa. “She boiled water and put her head over the stove.”

“That’s ‘cause I was steaming the avocado treatment on my hair, duh!” Ina said.

“Ina, that’s so Sylvia Plath-ish,” I said.

“Who’s Sylvia Platish?” they ask.

“A woman who put her head in the oven,” I said.

“To treat her hair?” Ina asked, already feeling vindicated.

“Maybe. But she died,” I said.

“Yu-huck!” said Kisa.

“Oh Mom, Timmy said his Lolo has oldtimer’s disease,” said Ina.

“What did you say?” I asked. I reached for her hair and ran my fingers through it.

“Is he going to die?” asked Miguel.

“Don’t put your head over the stove again, Ina,” I said.

Miguel is not very comfortable with the idea of separations, of losing his loves. “Does Lola have oldtimer’s disease, Mom?”

“Not if she can still say ‘Al-zhei-mers,’ I said, after which I tell them what I knew about Alzheimer’s, which was not much beyond how it was spelled.

Kisa got a phone call and didn’t come back. Ina and Miguel soon followed her into the house, with vanilla ice cream as their pretext. In the end, it was only Julian and me left in the tent. We took turns fanning each other with an old wedding give-away.

“I love you, Jules.”

“I love you more, Mom.”

“We’re the tough ones, right?” I said. “We’re the only ones who will actually stay here all night, right?”

It was already late. Around us the crickets were in full song, lamenting the heat. My thoughts were in my bedroom, in the cool of the air-con, but I kept them to myself, knowing I would not budge, for Julian.

“Mom?” he said after a while. “Why don’t we just wake up early and then come back, so they will think we slept here?”

With that, we took our leave of the steaming tent and walked quietly, hand in hand, back to the house.

The Villa Romana

2006-02-27T23:35:00.000+08:00

This piece celebrates a memorable place in which a memorable writers' workshop occurred for me a few years ago.

An hour before the trip I took Bonamine to fight motion sickness, as the last time I rode an air conditioned bus, I barfed my insides out, and that wasn’t nice. The pill made me comfortably woozy, and the maroon curtain, drawn to block the bright sunshine outside—the funereal mood of it—quieted me. Somewhere along Valenzuela, Bulacan, I fell asleep to the steady, high-pitched lament of Eddie Peregrina on the radio. I awoke only twice during the entire trip: in Luisita, Tarlac, for lunch at Max’s, and somewhere along the La Union highway, when the bus stopped next to a roadside toilet. It reeked of a year’s collection of travelers’ urine. I stepped out into the thick heat and smoked a cigarette. When I woke up again, we were on the driveway of the Villa Romana, on Ambuklao Road in Baguio, where I would stay, along with other writers of various make, for two whole weeks.

It was a bright Sunday afternoon, made brighter by the grand expectations the twenty writing fellows had in their eyes, like stars. I was last down the steep stone steps leading to the rooms, as I had more luggage than I could carry, and had to scout around for a bellhop. There wasn’t any, but I found someone, a lanky man, young and brisk, and nimble of foot on the steep stairs with my wardrobe in his hands. I couldn’t keep step with him, as I felt like I was going to keel over and land on my face if I went any faster. I was to find out later that he was the hotel’s all around runner, and I saw him many times during my stay in Villa Romana, always on the run.

My room turned out to be on the lowest level, a few yards from the cliff, where the ground disappeared without warning. If one got too wound up and gained momentum down the slope, one could overstep onto the edge and fly. It looked dangerous, but beautiful. Pine trees, their needles upturned and green with hope, made up the foreground. The majesty of blue-green mountains lay solid in the background, with the sky framing it, like a bright picture. The air was thin, not quite cold, but clean and smooth as you breathed it in.

Across from our room—cottage, if you will—was a circular arrangement of rocks made into seats complete with reclined back rests. At the center was a fire pit, and I immediately thought of nightly bonfires, with perhaps a poet or two reading from their books under the stars.

I went into my room, where my four roommates sat, dazed and confused by strange people in a strange room. There were two bunk beds against two walls, between them a foot of space. A double mattress bed floated at the foot of one of the bunks, its side against the wall. Two cabinets, tall and without doors, were at either sides of the door-less entry to the bathroom. On the right side was the toilet; on the left, the shower enclosure. Along the middle was a lavatory the size of a notebook, with a tiny faucet that didn’t work. It was dark all about the room, dank and musty. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned for a long while. The sheets had seen brighter days; they limply hugged the mattresses, looking tired and unwashed.

“Well, so who gets what?” I said, by way of introducing myself. They gave me the bed, which embarrassed and delighted me both, and I thought it proper to offer to rotate with the rest of them. We ended up firmly bonded with our beds at the end of the week, and thought it too much trouble to have to move. So I hogged the only comfortable bed there was without further guilt. I also suggested we made a schedule for the use of the bath, as our workshop sessions started at 8:00, and I thought two people should bathe at night in order smoothen the traffic. Kathy, the sultry young fictionist who took the upper left bunk, offered to take the night schedule, as did Beth, a feisty poet from UST, who took the lower bunk on the right. I said I was going last in the morning, after Patty and Jenny, but I seriously doubted it. I had other bathrooms in mind.

We unpacked, put our clothes on the open shelves and made the usual excuses for our miscalculations—some said they packed too much, others, too little. My clothes and shoes and books and laptop took the most closet space, but I kept my embarrassment to myself. Before we were done, the rain began to fall, and darkness fell over the Villa Romana and stayed a few days.

It was muggy all week, and cold—colder than I ever remembered Baguio to be. We had winter weather for days, which were alternately a joy and a pain. It rained most nights, depriving the bonfire pit of the warm, poetic flames I thought it deserved. On our free hours, the most rabid fans of the ukay-ukay braved the storm to hunt for designer bargains downtown while I sneaked to the Country Club to take nice warm baths and sit at the veranda with a cup of salabat. Most nights I spent quietly on my bed reading, making sure I didn’t get too close to the wall which rained (cried?) on its own. I spent nights out on the town, too, in Brewyard, Spirits and John Hay.

And then it cleared. The rains left us, but not the cold. Thick fog crept on us at all hours of the day, obscuring the mountains and softening the edges of things, making everything look romantic. The nights came alive with chatter and song, and morning bells became necessary to drag sleepy fellows into the session hall at 8:00. People were late. People came disheveled, straight out of bed. People, they said, began to fall in love. They missed breakfast.

The Villa Romana is run by Maela, a petite woman with long dark hair and a deep raspy voice. She is an artist, and her tie-dye paintings, the size of parachutes, grace the walls and ceilings of the session hall. She tends to the many species of plants and flowers all around the compound, including one with flowers of soft blue, lovely to look at, even in the rain. She opens up the living room of the main house for our use, which is the only part of the compound at street level. It is beautifully furnished, the décor eclectic, with some very interesting art pieces, old and new, tastefully arranged all about. In the evenings it is very cozy, with many yellow lamps setting off a warm glow about the interior. It is Old-Worldish, very comfortable, and I fell asleep on the couch one night as I waited for the rain to stop. Up there, I felt like a poor cousin from down below, where accommodations are poor and shabby and the ambiance bleak.

Yet, there is a charm about the place, largely due to its location, which is on very high ground on a mountainside. It gives its visitors a long and expansive view of a distant mountain range and sky, particularly from the long veranda that runs the stretch of the session hall. And the mist! At night most especially, it gets so low and dense; it lends an almost surreal quality to the atmosphere.

The view, too, is to the east, and on clear days, Jenny and I stood at the edge of the world and watched the sun come up and color everything gold.

One morning, two of the other girls came to see our room and cried. “It’s not fair,” they said, “your room is way too nice.” I wanted to cry for them, too, sight of their room unseen. How could anything be worse than this, I thought. In the afternoon, I went to see their place, which was two levels up in the larger building, laid out dormitory style. They had to share two bathrooms with twelve men, who slept in the rooms next to theirs. I regarded these girls differently—with a mix of pity and admiration—after seeing what they had been cheerfully putting up with.

I was sitting outside one night, right next to the cliff, when I suddenly became aware that a cold, quiet mist had begun to shroud everything in a flimsy blanket of gray air. The pine trees, once solid silhouettes against the pale light, became mere hints and I didn’t know for sure if they were still there. Everywhere I looked was the sight of mist descending, and it felt as if I were afloat. It was deathly quiet but for the faint tinkling of chimes in the distance. I looked up and saw the light of too many stars, stark against the dark expanse of sky. It was what I would call a writer’s night: enchanting, inspiring, fleeting. Rare.

Villa Romana can use some repairs and has a lot to improve on its housekeeping program. Its multi-level layout, its maze of steep stairs, leaves the faint of heart (or lungs, such as I am) breathless and grasping for handrails, which aren’t there. I will still stay at the Country Club the next time I go to Baguio, but I won’t mind visiting Villa Romana one more time, if only to sit there, along the rim of the cliff, and bathe in the evening mist again.

Coming Home

2006-02-27T14:56:00.000+08:00

This was published by Newsbreak Magazine in September 2001, and while my life may have changed again in many ways since then, the urge to make art hasn't.

Since my premature retirement from corporate life four years ago, I have been called many names, many of them unflattering to me. My shift from business executive to freelance writer is, to many people in my circle, not a clear-headed decision, and many of them still wait for the fog to lift so I can get back to where (they think) I belong.

My corporate life began in the summer of 1981, when I did my practicum with the Human Resources department of a large bank in Makati. By the late 80’s I had moved to the manufacturing industry, and there I stayed until, in 1997, after having been CEO for more than five years, I left.

I wouldn’t say that my time at work—15 uninterrupted years—had been unhappy, or unsatisfactory. The first few years were comfortable, as work involved human resources, something I was adequately prepared for, my degree being Psychology on the industrial track. It was at the point where I ventured into overall management, involving finance, sales and marketing, and operations, that work became challenging, more difficult mentally and physically. But because of that precisely, there was never a dull day and never a dull year.

But through all those years, I was looking out the corporate window into the world of letters that seemed to me a greener, happier place. I had been reading and writing ever since I learned how, and my life-long fantasy had been of myself hunched over a desk, writing a book. Reading the haunting prose of Toni Morrison and Amy Tan, and the exquisite wit of EB White and John Updike made want to get into the act and whip up lines of my own.

In hindsight, perhaps the many conveniences and comforts of a high-paying career—reading time in chauffeur-driven cars that brought me to and from work, the many interesting people, from the laborers in factories to the most powerful men in business I met at conferences here and all over the world, the reading and writing time afforded by the coterie of household help, travel to many amazing places in the world—only built up the once latent desire into an active ambition that would slowly eat me up and push me out of financially solid ground and into the thin air of writing and literature.

Towards the end of 1995, I took to locking myself up in my office after lunch, and, having instructed my secretary to hold my calls, I drafted essays on my computer. Else, I read the next many pages of the novel I put away with reluctance in the morning as I arrived at the office. I had also by then told many people of my burning desire to write. Even then, it didn’t sit well with any of them. Corporate entrepreneurial types, such as my Chinese husband, dismissed my artistic aspirations as female frivolity, or worse, stupidity. My husband told me then, in no uncertain terms, that he would not take it well and would hold me in very low regard if I gave in to my wild ambitions. But I held fast to my dream, writing every little memo, email or business proposal meticulously, as if it were to appear in the newspapers the next day. And for a while, I thought that was all the writing I would ever do.

In late 1996, amid the rash of crime in the country, I personally declared Manila as no longer a safe place for my children, and I moved to the States, putting my career on hold indefinitely. My marriage did not survive the year I spent away, and although it was a most painful experience, I consoled myself with the knowledge that my career decisions were now all mine to make.

I quit my job and looked around for a desk on which to write.

I came back to Manila and gave my Anne Klein suits away. I didn’t know where or how to begin writing, and the first year was riddled with false starts. I thought all I needed was an office and I promptly signed a year’s lease for a fifth-floor room with a view of the mountains of Montalban, where I spent many productive but confused hours. I knew I wasn’t doing right, but I didn’t know what it was I was doing wrong, and my head started to hurt. So I thought of hiring a private editor, who was to charge me the arm I was using to write and the leg (or two) that brought me to the elevator.

I decided instead to go to creative writing school. I knew it would be a slow and rigorous process, but there was a place I wanted to be, and this was the right, if roundabout, path.

This was when I heard people call me many variations of “insane”. How could I, they said, give up all that I had trained and worked for, a career that gave me and my family financial security and start, at this late age, from scratch?

But that’s their take. The freelance writer’s life is fine, and when I set the last sentence on a piece, or when I see my words in print, my spirit lifts in a way it has never done before. I don’t look out the window to other pastures any more; my eyes are trained right up front, on the computer screen, my eyes caught in pleasant attention to the piece at hand.

I have yet to see the equivalent of what I used to make in a week for all the sleepless weeks and months I have spent writing—a fact that, I must admit, rather makes family and friends right about calling me crazy. But my take on the matter is, I’m home.

Grumpy Old Men

2006-01-27T22:01:00.000+08:00

I am laughing my head off. National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin, with his growling voice, is—well, growling.

“Alas seis, Ahh said. Alas tres?, he said. ‘Alas seis!’ aah shouted back at him. ‘Ano? Alas dos?’ Whoa! I wanted to get into the demn tellaphow and strrrangow him.”

This is Nick Joaquin’s account of his telephone conversation with another brilliant Filipino writer, Gregorio Brillantes, who, bless him, arranged this meeting for my sake. I sit between them now, in the lanai of Joaquin’s house in San Juan, and I double over with laughter.

Then Nick growls at me. “Don’t loff,” he shouts in my ear. “Aah’m maaad!”

I laugh harder.

***

Greg and I arrive alas seis, sharp. The sky is darker than it should be, with clouds that promise rain and thunder, and I take a moment to look at the façade of the house—home of a national treasure, where some of the greatest Philippine literature of the last forty years was made. It is painted all over in dark, hideous green.

There is no doorbell, but a few mild shakes of the green iron gate by Greg attract the quick attention of a boy of about 20, in shorts, who lets us in without question. A small brown dog, looking like a mix of chihuahua and dachshund, shiny and frisky, makes a fuss over our arrival. We are in the lanai—what was a garage, made into a living space—after just a few steps from the gate.

The house and its austere furnishings remind me of my childhood home in Pasig. The furniture is evidently ‘60s, with spare and simple lines: wooden coffee table, small and without carving, L-shaped sala set and straight-backed armchairs re-covered in pale green leatherette, matching the pale-green walls.

The boy runs upstairs to call Nick, and I peek into the sala, where I find two more young men watching television from a small portable set perched atop a cabinet console TV, the kind I remember watching Heckle and Jeckle on—very 1960s, apparently no longer working, but fitting well with the rest of the furniture and the house. Beside it on a low table, like a dangling modifier, a metallic-silver karaoke stereo sticks out of the whole retro statement. The indoor sofa is covered with the same material in pale red. In the dining room is a large wooden table with no chairs.

Unable to get an invitation to come in from the men, I shift my attention to what are hanging all over the walls of the veranda. There are large faded pictures of the Virgin Mary by the entrance, an impasto abstract painting in dark colors on a side wall, a 1997 Land Bank calendar with Nick Joaquin in several happy poses; many more pictures, old posters and oil and pastel portraits of Nick Joaquin.

I am looking at a laminated Panorama cover that featured Lolita Rodriguez, Charito Solis and a much-younger Nick on the cover when Nick himself appears, dressed in a robe of pale green with pale bamboo prints. A silk handkerchief hangs from the sash around his thin waist.

“What iss this all abow?” he barks at Greg and me.

I smell my father’s pomade on his hair when I kiss him. “Darling,” he says as he gives me a hug, “who are yew?”

***

Butch Dalisay, writer and professor of English at the University of the Philippines, says that he has to be introduced to Nick Joaquin every time they meet, which, in the many years Dalisay has been writing, has happened many times over. “He doesn’t, for some reason, ever remember me,” Butch complains.

It therefore does not bother me that Nick doesn’t remember me either, though we met and spent a night drinking together with Greg and Billy Lacaba, his literary agent and friend of long standing, ten months ago at the home of Mrs. Narita Gonzalez and later at the Sulo restaurant. I recall that night vividly, because in the middle of a conversation with Billy, he fell asleep, and my jaw dropped to the marble floors of the Sulo lobby. Billy and Greg paid no heed to it, and continued to drink and chat while Nick snored aloud beside us. About an hour later, Nick suddenly burst into boisterous song, hopelessly out of key but to the beat of the piano music, and I spilled my beer on my dress in fright.

The night before Nick interviewed the columnist and TV host Randy David about EDSA 3, Billy Lacaba faxed a list of things to expect from Joaquin. “One of them,” Randy says, “was ‘Don’t be offended if he falls asleep’.” Billy later explained to David that Nick fell asleep while interviewing Jovito Salonga and Billy thought it best to forewarn his interviewees thereafter. Randy says his interview lasted six hours, with what seemed to be cases and cases of beer, and he was afraid neither of them made sense halfway through. The article came out in Graphic magazine a few weeks later, which, according to Randy himself, was brilliantly and accurately written.

***

Nick now offers us beer, and when we accept, he barks for them. One of his boys produces three cold bottles of Beer na Beer and an unopened pack of white table napkins. He puts them on the bare coffee table.

Greg complains. He wonders why there is no San Miguel beer.

“I drink this at home, I drink San Miguel elsewhere, to divide my culture,” Nick says.

“Wala ka bang pulutan, Nick?” Greg says.

“Whoa!” Nick roars. The man is 84, and he has the vocal cords of a twenty-year old. “Where do ya think ya are, the Holiday Inn?” Within minutes, his attendant comes out with plates of tapa, hotdogs and toast bread.

“Come on, Darling,” he tells me in sing-song voice, “have some tapa—it’s geeewd. It’s real steak. I have it fow bwekfast.”

Greg and Nick work together at the Graphic publications, Nick being the editor-in-chief and Greg, who is 15 years younger, the literary editor. They go a long way, back to the 70’s when they first became colleagues at the Free Press. On Christmas mornings, Nick, Greg and Greg’s wife Lourdes, a professor of Spanish at the UP, go to Mass together and have lunch at Nick’s home. Tonight, when the boy tells Nick, “Nandiyan na yung matanda, may kasamang babae,” he thinks it is Lourdes with Greg, and, he says, he expected to have a casserole of callos awaiting him downstairs.

“Ano’ng sabi mo?” asks Greg, whose hearing aid couldn’t quite translate the slurred and heavily accented speech of Nick.

“Everything in your body is failing! Your eyes, your ears—you should die!” he tells Greg, his eyes twinkling with affection.

***

“I’ll tell you who Nick’s girlfriends are,” Greg tells me while Nick listens with seeming indifference. “One of them is Virgie Moreno.”

“Oooow, aah love Virgie Moreynow,” Nick confirms. And then his face darkens as he remembers that he is mad at her. He and Virgie Moreno had a lot of beer to drink one night and together they signed a document, what they thought was to recommend the former Senator Leticia Shahani to head the National Commission for Culture for Arts (NCCA).

“Shahani is my friend. She took care of me when I was in New Yowk,” Nick says. Nick signed the document without reading it. He found out later that the document he signed wasn’t so much a recommendation of Shahani as a trashing of Jaime Laya and Virgilio Almario, the incumbent administrators, who are his very close friends.

“And then I saw Laya and Almario at the staging of my Pinoy Agonistes,” he says, “and I didn’t know where to hide.”

Then, without pause, he asks if I have watched the play. I say no.

“Then wha are yew doing in mah house?” he growls.

***

The home of Narita Gonzalez was where I first met Nick Joaquin. It was the occasion of the late NVM ’s birthday, coincidentally the awarding ceremony of the first-ever NVM Award for Fiction. Nick Joaquin was guest of honor, there to deliver the keynote speech.

He was wearing a vintage green sweater and slim pants the color of silverfish. He refused to speak despite the pleas of many people, including Narita, NVM’s widow. I was beside Nick Joaquin all the while, staring in awe of the man, the celebrated genius, who was, to my horror, throwing a tantrum in public.

Greg Brillantes appealed to him. “Come on, Nick, just say a few words.”

“Wha should I?” he barked.

“Just do this for NVM,” continued Greg.

“Wha should I do anything for Ien Viyem?” People were tense, but no one more than I, standing as I was right beside him and Greg.

“Because, Nick,” Greg said, his face serious, “he’s dead.”

***

I bring out a dilapidated copy of Tropical Gothic, an anthology of Nick Joaquin’s short stories, and I ask him to sign it for me. He says it’s his favorite book, and Greg proceeds to read him the titles of his stories, which include, among others, “May Day Eve,” “Summer Solstice” and The Woman Who Had Two Navels. He lets out a long, happy sigh as Greg recites each title, like a father being presented his children, each one treasured and beloved.

He writes on the book, “For dear Migs, Happy reading, Nick”— the most unassuming dedication I ever got from any writer.

“‘Candido’s Apocalypse’ (the first title in the collection) is the greatest Filipino short story ever written,” Nick says. “Have you read it?” he asks me.

I haven’t—not yet—but I say yes, after which I quickly excuse myself to go to the toilet. He directs me upstairs.

The bathroom is as spare as the rest of the house, with chipped white tiles, the size and shape of which I no longer see in the market. There is a large mirror above the washbowl. On a shelf is a black comb beside two small plastic jars of Tancho pomade. I remember my father, who would have been 76, and I smile.

On my way back, I pass a room lined wall-to-wall with books. An easy chair in dark leather stands facing the side of the room that is beyond my view, beside it a small round table. It is tempting, but I mind my manners and keep out of the room.

***

No one had any success in making Nick speak for NVM that afternoon. Narita Gonzalez gave up, and sulked in the distance. Someone then thought of giving him a bottle of beer to brighten his mood, and, like magic, he loosened up. After his last swig, Billy Lacaba and Greg Brillantes escorted him to the stage, where the waiting crowd gave him a wild round of applause.

He stood at the podium for a moment—I was watching him from the side of the stage—and then fished out a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket. It was his speech, three pages long, written in eloquent, Joaquinesque prose, a moving tribute to the life and work of NVM , delivered beautifully in the fading light.

***

Nick suddenly remembers reading Butch Dalisay’s column in the Philippine Star that morning about Cole Porter songs. Butch had mentioned Nick in the article, saying he, Nick, has his own version of Porter’s “You’re the Top.”

“So you know Butch Dalisay, after all,” I ask him.

“Oooof course I kneow him,” he says.

“Did you read Dalisay’s articles on F. Sionil Jose?” Greg asks.

“Ahh luv every word uv it,” Nick says.

When Greg disappears for longer than usual on his trip to the toilet, Nick yells at him from downstairs. “He’s stealing my books. I wouldn’t put that beyond him,” he tells me. In the same breath, he sends one of the boys to check if the man was all right. “I will kill him if he dies in my bathroom!” he roars.

We wait longer for Greg. Meanwhile, Nick sings to me his version of “You’re the Top”, and repeats it, slowly now, for me to take down for Butch Dalisay.

Greg returns with a bunch of books. “Wha did ahh tell yew?” Nick asks me, as he rises to take a leak a few feet away, drowning a potted plant.

***

Nick Joaquin looks very well at 84. There is hardly a wrinkle on his thin, tight face. “I don’t take myself seriously anymoe. I could go anytime now, and there will be nothing, nothing, nothing. So, who cares?”

At 8:00, he sends us away. “Go howm! Get outta here.” It has been raining for the last hour, and Greg has had one bottle too many.

I kiss him, and he hugs me again. “Darling, it was such a pleasure to spend the evening with you,” he says. “Don’t ride with this old man, Socorro. He is buh-lind.” They shake hands.

I give Greg a grateful hug and walk over to my car, dizzy with beer and the affections of old men.

Like Mom

2006-01-27T21:13:00.000+08:00

I wrote this essay too long ago, it has become fiction.

One afternoon my son Julian raises me a high-five and says, “Hello, fellow writer!” Hmm. I return his five rather tentatively, unable yet to figure out how he left home that morning a schoolboy and came back a writer. (I am not even comfortable calling myself a writer, but never mind me.) “I joined the Blue Horn,” he says.

I see.

I know the Blue Horn—the magazine publication of Grades Two and Three of his school. My older son Miguel, who is two years ahead of Julian, has taken it home a few times. It is many pages of kids’ drawings, doodles, puzzles and lists, with the contributors’ bylines bigger and bolder than their work. Blue Horn is printed in blue (eagle blood!) ink, and it looks and reads just like it is: a magazine produced entirely by eight- and nine-year olds. It’s a fun read and has a wacky layout; the kids’ works appear in their original form, half of them unreadable, all of them charming.

Julian, after attending his first Blue Horn meeting, is feeling mighty important. His acceptance to the club brings him to the happy conclusion that he is now a writer. “Like Mom.”

Every one of my four kids was “like Mom” at one time.

Kisa wanted to be a Mom—like Mom-- when she was a little girl. She watched me closely and asked a thousand Whys as I bathed and changed her baby sister. She would later mother her own babies, dozens of them, each one blond and blue-eyed, with the body of a sexy (though plastic) woman. Later, when she was nine, she looked up at the sky and became a future astronomer. She was into telescopes until a neighbor named Jason caught her eye. She wrote him a letter and called him on the phone. She soon forgot about him and took a liking to drums. That, until she fell in love with Prince William. Kisa is 19 now, and is taking up European Studies. She seems to want to work in Paris later on, but she’s had a boy named Alex visiting her almost everyday for two years now, so I tell her all the complaints and distresses of motherhood, as I would rather she fall deep into her study of Europe first before she thinks, again, of being a Mom like Mom.

My daughter Regina doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up, but is doing the rounds of college entrance exams, just in case something comes up after her graduation from high school in March. She grew up while I worked as president of a corporation, and for a while, she wanted to be one, too. She liked to take the living room apart and make an executive office out of cushions and throw pillows and piles and piles of kalat, on which she signed her approvals (she approved everything). Later, she got tired of her presidency and began to design and build homes--out of the same living room fluff, except that it now included curtains and rugs and drawers. She had moved from princess to president to architect to Alicia Silverstone to telephone repairwoman throughout her 16 years. On Tuesday nights, she is a lawyer like Ally McBeal, but I have a feeling she has retained some of her old fantasy, for she racks up cell and land phone bills like she was president of PLDT.

When I took up painting three years ago, Miguel was seven and still into crayons. He was an easy target, and was soon setting up his own easel beside mine. He was, for a while, an artist like Mom. He had a good drawing hand, and could do a mean anime impression, but landscapes and the endless apples and bananas of still life soon bored him. He spends most of his time now on the computer, where he is either a virtual war general, an excellent strategist on Red Alert, or a gun-wielding commando on Counterstrike. He no longer wants to be like Mom. He now thinks in billions of pesos and maintains that he will be a business executive, like his dad, when the time comes.

Now Julian. He is eight, and has been many things in his short life. When he was four, he was a worm collector. He walked the entire length of the garden every day in the spring--we were living in California--and gathered all the worms he could find. He almost killed me when he, grinning like he held the secret of life in his hands, presented me with a jarful of worms, dead and alive. He learned two lessons from this phase: there is a bounty of worms after a spring rain, and worms make Mom ugly and mean and “screamy”.

Until last year, he was the future president of the United States. He intended to give fifty dollars to all the poor people, and long live America. I have nothing against him being another George Washington, but I am glad for his recent shift, as I think I am better disposed to help him manage the agreement between noun and verb than between the Houses of Congress, never mind that he promises I will be First Lady.

So now he is a writer like Mom.

Since I took on a writing job, I have been glued to my computer, writing day and night, weekends included. I start in the early morning, and, if I’m lucky, I am in bed by midnight with a smile on my face and a finished draft in my documents folder. But that’s rare. More usually I would still be at it at two in the morning, drowsy and cross-eyed and wanting to scream. At this time my brain hangs and after staring at the screen for a half hour, I give up for the night and crawl into bed. Unable to sleep, I think of all the things I have ever known, including deadlines and how nice and easy my life would have been had I not inflicted myself (what was I thinking?) with the business of writing.

But I don’t tell Julian these things.

I tell him it is great to be a writer. It is fun, I say, to think of heroes and villains and put them against each other to make one good story. I tell him it is fun to think of words and how to put them together to make the reader laugh or cry.

One day, Julian writes a story about a boy named Paolo who “lives way out of town, on the sides of mountains.” I rave at his phrasing and rhythm. Paolo, he writes, is smart, because he knows to look for moss on tree trunks when he is lost, knowing that moss grew on the north sides of trees. Incredible concept! I say, and he smiles like he just won a two-week TV pass. “But one day, he got lost and couldn’t find moss.” Good, solid problem, I tell him.

He insists I give an all-out review. I pick out the best stuff, like, “he ran and ran and ran” and “An echoing voice said, ‘I’m here’,” and “he realized that when it rains, the man appears somewhere in the forest.” Nice touch.

He is, indeed, a writer, I say, and a very good one.

Our afternoon goes well, two writers talking shop and hailing the merits of their noble profession while having hotdogs and pan de sal. And then, he says, “Now that I am a writer, could you buy me a laptop?”

Oh, gee, can Mom-the-writer afford that? So I think to myself, “This, too, will pass.” And soon, I hope. After all, these children do change their minds all the time—just like Mom.

kissy

2006-01-27T21:04:00.000+08:00

i miss.