Taking the good and the bad

In safe company I sometimes kid my Papa that I can summarize my relationship with him and with Mama in a single sentence: All the bad in me I got from him; all the good in me I got from my mother.

Which is a massive misstatement, of course, but one laden with a few non-negotiable truths about the good and the bad that I inherited from Papa.

My love for words came from Papa. He is not averse to filching a book from his friends’ or children's shelves, reading and keeping it until you forget you ever had such a book. He is like a Rottweiler: he grabs a book and doesn’t let go even after gnashing of teeth. Before there were National bookstores or bookshops of previously owned books in Cebu, Papa already knew where to find those dumped by U.S. public libraries and middle schools.

Books were the priority. Our house, built in the ‘60s on Mama’s GSIS loan, had only two-and-a-half rooms for six growing kids. Space was limited, but my parents invested wholeheartedly in a library, on a mezzanine that overlooked the living room and the dining area. The library was bigger than my sister’s teeny-tiny half-of-a-room (I didn’t even have a room), with Britannica volumes that lined the shelves, Reader’s Digests since the ‘50s, and a huge atlas that was bigger than one of the windows. And books. Oh, the books. I know now that part of my almost manic stockpiling of (unread) books in my home is the need to recall the best part of my childhood. They are my one true link—sad, there is no other—to my father.

Papa thought and wrote in images; maybe that was why he could never find, even now, the words to tell us he loves us. (He gave me an awkward pat a few times.) When I needed assurance that he loved me, I should just have asked him to write me an image, instead of creating a card that began with If you truly loved me (I was only nine, and I never gave the card). He took great pleasure in language, and in my wedding, he took to the stage with much pleasure, piling on the audience the image of him and my mother riding into the sunset, and talking much about Will Durant. A philosopher.

In my junior year in law school, I wrote an impassioned plea for him to fund my extracurricular studies in French. Money was hard to come by—Papa worked for the local government, Mama was a public school teacher, one brother had just finished medicine, and yet another was finishing med proper—and he replied with the only letter I ever received from him, one I keep in my Happy Box. He wrote that if he were an outsider looking in on my life, he would give his eyeteeth to be my father.

He signed his letter not with his name or with Papa—he has lovely, elegant and extravagant penmanship, eruptions of his creativity—but with a drawing of his square glasses, the lines heavily etched onto the paper. I would often feel the ridges it had created on the other side. “I am old, decrepit,” he wrote.

He didn’t end his letter with the usual, familial complimentary close, Love or With love. He came from the old school where parents were strictly figures of authority. My eldest brother, Manoy Uriel, had told us, “Papa wants to be respected, not loved.” It was the same likeness I projected onto God—He was a Father, after all, and I used to cringe before Him, even in prayer. Jesus I can deal with, he was a brother, see; God, well, He had an iron hand. It took several years of patient loving from my uncle (my Papa Danny, my father’s younger brother) and from The Coach for me to accept that though all the power in the whole universe is God’s, still He has chosen to be tender. That though the Holy God should be the righteous judge of sin in me, He has chosen to love me, gently.

Oh, the gentleness I craved, for Papa had quicksilver moods, shifting always to his default mode: anger. I know how rage tastes. But I don’t know how it looks like: it has no color, not the red that angers the bull or the white heat that blinds. It has a burning that starts from between the shoulder blades that flares down in an instant to the palms, where it seeks release.

I’m now middle-aged, but there’s still this little girl in me who needs her father’s approval. Some years ago I sent Papa drafts of a few stories, needing the father-writer to affirm me at that crucial turn in my life when I spurned his and Mama's advice and took the road less traveled by. He never said anything.

Then I got an SMS from my sister, a year or so ago. Jan, she said, Papa wanted me to text you that he thinks your stories are good.

That almost beat the eyeteeth line.

I am now in my Mama’s house—we call it that even if they built it together, that’s another story—and I see my father struggle to remember if he already put sugar in his coffee. Sometimes he doesn’t know how to prepare instant-mix oatmeal anymore. He talks to me a lot, genuinely interested, and I wonder when I’ll have the guts to tell him I love him.

Overbooked

My boy, the Polymath, and my girl, Sandra—writers that they are—married six months ago in a library. Tears, hugs, a botched kiss, laughter, a gangster hat, good wine, fantastic pesto, poetry from Vim Nadera, the word for the day from Neil Garcia (“vicissitudes,” and everybody had to use the word in his or her toast to the couple)—such a beautiful wedding.

With the union comes a merger of books: each one probably having about a thousand books each.

So they gave away books they have multiple copies of—good ones!—to the guests, with a special Paul & Sandra bookmark sandwiched in the pages. One book for every guest. But which to choose? There was Ondaatje, Calvino, Loorie Moore, David Foster Wallace, Hornby, Rushdie, Byatt, whew. You gotta make a decision, quick, because while the rest of the guests were lining up to get food, the writers were already circling the pile of books. As soon as it was considered, well, appropriate, we snatched the books we like. Paul gave me the blessing to get a lot, yeah, plus Paul and Sandra’s choice for me (Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain—which I still have to open, sorry, sweeties).

We, of course, knew that we hardly have the time to read our loot. “This is greed,” Butch Guerrero said, with his horde tucked safely away in a corner. We were shameless. (Now, six months later, I am merely midway into Midnight’s Children. Love it. Hate my schedule.)

For the godparents, Paul and Sandra gave a beautiful Parker pen.

Mine is engraved Ninang Janet.

You've been ninang-ed!

I was just 35 when I was first slapped with a wedding ninang assignment. I thought, Yikes, me a godmother? Like those with the wildly poofy bouffant dyed the wrong shade of brown and in a one-size-fits-all suman gown made of piña? Me? (And here I thought I had sufficiently covered my wrinkles with night cream.)

Alas, I couldn't say no, can't even think it, not without my mother's doomsday prophecy that it is bad luck to reject a ninang invitation. I should've asked her who would earn the bad luck: me or the couple?

Besides, I love the couple, especially the groom, my nephew Jimi, who's now finishing his orthopedics residency, and there was no saying no. No.

So I lost weight and bought a stunning gown--too stunning, said my brother's friend, who chided me for wearing a dress more lavish that those of the entire entourage combined. Heck, I was determined to look "too young to be a ninang."

But something in me is probably ninang-like because since then I've had six ninang assignments in the last five years: three from Jo's side and three from mine.

I've manufactured enough equanimity to find the humor in all this, as well as gained the requisite weight and wrinkles for the job. (Yes, dear, that's why this blog post has no photographs.)

I'm changing my night cream.

Return of the Fellowship

Months after we bonded at the UP National Writers Workshop in 2003, a bunch of the fellows met up at our house. I am their Mudra, designated mother goddess, which only means, really, that I am responsible for stocking enough food and drink on my table and cleaning up after their mess. (And, yeah, I am way older than they are.)

Jay Fernando, one of two beautiful writers who facilitated the workshop, had predicted that our post-workshop camaraderie would last only so long; we had been tight, true, but he said the fellowship would wane.

He was right, in a way. Some of us formed deeper attachments and some stalwarts could be counted on to attend get-togethers, but through the years it became harder to gather warm bodies. Our yahoogroups conversations have dwindled to a trickle.

I miss my kids. I read about them a lot, in their blogs and in others', where they and their work are praised. I am proud of them and their achievements and accolades, as if theirs were my own.

I'm thinking of mustering the brood again, just to catch up. I'm hoping this post on that Octoberfest at our house will help rekindle the fellowship.


That night we played Taboo 'til kingdom come—you know, that game where you're supposed to describe the word to your teammates but there are some terms that are taboo, words you cannot use. No gestures or actions allowed.


Here are snippets of our game:



Kristian Cordero (trying to describe the word PLATINUM): This is better than gold!

Rebecca Khan (shouting): Sex!

* * *

U Eliserio: This is what I'll never find!

Gelo Suarez : LOVE!!! [True enough, the word was LOVE!]

* * *

U Eliserio (describing SADDLE to his teammates): Assholder!! Assholder!!

His teammates (confused, of course): Chair?

U (getting more incensed and raising his palms to cup the air): Assholder!! Assholder!!

* * *

U (describing FINGER): F**k you! F**k you!

Gelo: Whaaat?

U: This is what you use when you F**k you! F**k you!

* * *

Me (describing POEM): This is what Gelo writes!

Eleanor Reposar: Poetry?

Someone (I forgot who): Trash?

* * *

U (nagmamarunong, after Gelo found it difficult to describe SALMON): Dapat sinabi mo, Gelo, "Blank Rushdie."

S.O.H.O.

Most of the time I work at S.O.H.O.—Small Office, Home Office.

I don't receive 13th month pay or health insurance or a sack of rice. I have no Kris Kringle during Christmas. I miss the jump-up-and-down joy over non-working holidays that suddenly sprout during the week. I buy my own stapler, envelopes and toner. I pick up stray paper clips because, hey, when you're paying for your office supplies those clips can dent the budget. I suffer the commute and long lines to file my income tax, get a cedula, claim registered mail, photocopy documents, pay my IBP dues. I'm my own janitor when the cup of coffee crashes to the floor.

Before I junked law for writing, I had my own secretary to spurn cold calls, make restaurant reservations, assign a messenger to pay my credit card bills, tally my expenses, or find a spare safety pin while I frantically hold on a skirt that unraveled. I had the entire office machinery and budget behind me, so smoothly run and accommodating that even golf lessons (over which I chose diving instead) or Japanese language lessons (Bengoshi desu!) came for free.

I should've had a harder time adjusting to going solo.

I didn't.

I love working from home.

I avoid office politics, run-ins with colleagues, and the obligatory participation in some ghastly Christmas party program. I am allowed to deduct certain expenses from my gross income and lower my taxes. I can drop anything I'm doing when The Coach needs me. And when I'm gnashing my teeth editing a particularly horrendous article, I take a break without guilt: TV, a story, a household chore, a trip to the grocery or the Starbucks hidden inside Cybergate.

I don't have to wake up too early (read: before noon). The most of traffic I encounter is when the sounds of altercating drivers below intrude into my reading or when the turtle pace of cars lining the Guadalupe Bridge catches my eye.

Tackling emails in my nightshirt, without having to brush my hair or teeth, is also pretty neat.

When I crave company, I log onto Twitter to check what my friends are doing. It's my version of the chatter around the water cooler: consultants decrying their clients, new music discovered, reading junkies finishing a book, a touchscreen eee PC being sold.

Every now and then, friends come over to the house and work—fellow freelancers who share a procrastination gene. The mood is relaxed, even with the doom of deadlines, and we put up our feet. It is like working with officemates you are fond of. (There is no such word in American English, but, yeah, I’m not about to edit that.)

Rest

I'm on forced rest—a happy conspiracy between The Coach and my OB-gyne to ensure the success of our baby program, launched this month to mounting pressure from the family and the clamor of well-meaning friends (and a maternal instinct kicking waaay this late, Julia Roberts be darned). I am to avoid any possible stressor. I try not to bother with crumbs that fall from the table or remember a beloved niece’s unplanned pregnancy. I have license to laze.

But what the hey. Hotwired in my system is a happy-go-lucky stress lever. It activates even when I am happy or on a vacation. It takes a lot for me to keep still. (I, of course, prefer to call it ebullience.)

I hate working; ergo, in my mind, I am not a workaholic. So when my writer-friend Sandra sent me an email from Korea on how God desires me for me to rest, it jarred me, but only a bit. A workaholic, I thought, is one who enjoys working hard and long hours. I don’t. A workaholic is compulsive. I’m not.

But friends—the good ones—they don’t let us get away with specious arguments. Germaine staged an intervention in her apartment last year.

“You’re a workaholic,” she said.

“No, I’m not.” I said. “I just always have a lot of work.”

Silence. And then laughter: much of it incredulous, much of it from me.

The thing is I feel guilty when I rest. I feel guilty when I’m not productive. Mix that with unrelenting slothfulness and a massive dose of procrastination (perhaps arising from perfectionism?), and we’ve got a Janet waiting to explode.

I get my guilt from my mother, whose love language is service. She has borne much of the burden for the family, and there is never time for her, for us, much less for rest. Six children on a schoolteacher’s salary meant there was much to do, much to finish. Her busyness told me: if she stops, the house, our home, our family, will fall apart.

The laziness is all my own, a shortcoming that has hardened into an attitude because I was, growing up, pretty much left to my own devices. “Suma nimo,” my mother would say whenever I asked permission. It’s up to you—appealing to one’s maturity, one’s discretion—you decide. I guess I decided to be lazy, to not exert myself. It was easier, fun, that way. I was a child. I still am, that way.

The perfectionism—the fear of failing—I suffered from my father. Papa, a closet writer, has elegant, extravagant handwriting, with the curlicues and whorls of his letters all set in a flourish. Mama’s writing was neat and coordinated, like that of a schoolteacher who knew she was meant to be one. There was such a tenderness to her letters. I was ten when my father asked me to write in a card meant for my uncle in Marikina. My writing was still finding its place, my hand unsteady in its youth. He took one look at what I wrote, clucked, and said, “Kabati nimo’g agi!” Your handwriting is awful.

Three years ago I finally understood it was around that time I stopped writing the stories and poems I started when I was seven. I didn’t plan on stopping. I didn’t even realize I did. And I had forgotten that incident. It took me twenty-four years to return to that first love, to acknowledge it as such. I am glad I rediscovered writing, though now I still struggle to allow myself to fail. (I thank Joseph Chilton Pearce who said, “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”)

The beauty of God’s love—which I discover in fresher, very real ways each day—is that it allows me to see myself the way He does, unsullied by my own unforgiving eyes or those of my parents. I don’t have to do anything to merit His grace. I give Him joy, just as I am, and there is nothing I can do to add to or take away from that incomprehensible, all-encompassing love. I do not need to perform for Him.

It is true, what Sandra sent my way last year, that God does want me to rest, not just from my labors, but also from my mixed-up conceptions of what I ought to be and what I ought to do. To cut the ties of a past that can torment the present, I pray in the Spirit to break the yoke of guilt, burden-bearing, laziness and perfectionism I find in myself. I forgive myself—are we not often tougher on ourselves than on others?—even for the ways I responded to negative things in my life, and those who allowed those things in my life.

And I will rest.





The lovely cartoon is by the talented and inspiring Inkygirl.

Just like that

Writing here feels strange. I'm not the same person I was since my last post.

How to explain?

My closest friend in law school died on a Wednesday late September. Or a Thursday. We're still not sure when. I rushed to the hotel where she was discovered, but I couldn't go up to her room to help identify the body. I didn't want to remember her steeped in blood and in what looked like signs of struggle. Three days later, ABS-CBN would flash scenes of her and the lacerations, the tangled sheets, the knife, the cord, the cutter, the duct tape. And I couldn't look away. It had been a year since I saw her last, and in the mess of the moment, all I could think of was if her left shoulder was still higher than her right.

We shared the same name. We imposed the same acid test for our dates: their inner thighs must not rub against each other and they must know how to kiss. (Alas, The Coach had cornered me early in my life, so I never had the opportunity to try out the test.) We created our own vocabulary, like twins, and earmarked certain legal provisions (Article 25, Civil Code, on “thoughtless extravagance in expenses for pleasure”; Article 247, Revised Penal Code, on crimes of passion)—it was one of the ways to survive law school. In the summers between semesters, she in Manila and I in Cebu, we wrote each other 20-page letters, back when there was no email or easy access to computers. Then we started working, and this time we shared summers. Each January we'd bring out our Filofaxes, plot the holidays, save money, and on all long weekends we'd hie off somewhere, often to the beach where she’d swim and I’d dive. Even when I married we still kept to a few of our yearly jaunts.

We were easy with the term best friend, back when it didn't seem to require too much of each other. Somewhere along the way, the term sounded high-schoolish, uncertain, like a trend that didn’t catch up with the times. Our differences—did they multiply? were they there in the first place?—caught up with us: she couldn’t understand what she called my “extra long good faith,” and I couldn’t understand why she frowned, hard, when applying her makeup.

Her leaving was sudden—what leaving isn’t? But this, this was all for the wrong reasons, reasons I could’ve gauged had we been in each other’s lives the last year, extending our communication beyond texting and calls and gifts left with the lobby guards. Perhaps I wouldn’t have understood—I still don’t—but I would’ve at least been there.

I'm still saying goodbye, and haven't found the words for it.

Beyond the X's and the O's

My shirt today read Marvelous Maroons, though my boys were anything but. They not only lacked Martin Reyes (downed by fever) and Magi Sison (downed by immaturity leading to a metacarpal fracture; heck, figure that out), they also were short on heft, height, composure, rebounding, and, it seems, the will to win.

They were missing lay-ups, three-pointers, and uncontested shots. They weren't passing the ball, their motion offense had no motion, and they weren't rebounding. Ateneo looked stellar in comparison, what with 30 rebounds more than UP had.

It should've been less of an uneven match: Even if UP is still rebuilding a team with its nine rookies, Ateneo also suffers the loss of three key players. To its credit, Ateneo does not play as if it were, as it is, handicapped, at least compared with other teams. Some say Ateneo might reach the Final Four, but would not be a serious contender. But don't tell that to the Ateneo: It wouldn't matter and they wouldn't care; those boys on the other side of Katipunan play with spirit and a big heart. I admire them for that.

It is true, what Coach Mark Jomalesa said to the boys yesterday, that when playing against the Ateneo, what matters more than the X's and the O's is energy and intensity—both of which were nowhere near the boys’ game today.

The Coach couldn't attend the game; he had an entire staff to run after his supervisor called in sick. He did his best, though; leaving his post, he went to the next-door sari-sari with a small TV set but no electricity. There was a generator, and The Coach, desperate, forked over money for someone to buy gasoline to power the generator. And so he was able to witness the massacre.

I write this at the Lavazza Caffe Espresso at The Fort, where the coaches have gone after dinner at Kaiseki to recover from the shocking 24-point loss.

This Sunday my boys will meet the powerhouse NU, with its formidable Asoro and Lingao-lingao. I'll be there with my Marvelous Maroons shirt, and hope it'll make a difference.

Half an hour

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "What would be the use of immortality to a person who cannot use well a half an hour?"

I barely have time now, what with the demands of work and my rather imprudent decision to watch the game against Ateneo this afternoon at the oh-so-far Ninoy Aquino Stadium, but I choose to waste this half-hour to talk about my Maroons boys, never mind immortality.

We received quite a walloping last Saturday, the "luck" of the 777 having gone to the La Salle Archers, the best team money can buy. The DLSU boys were more efficient, clearly in command, hungry for the win after sitting out an entire year for conduct unbecoming of La Salle brothers—hence this year's UAAP motto: Honesty through sports.

My boys, rookies and sophomores, were overwhelmed by La Salle's patented full-court pressure. Migs de Asis wasn't defending, the boys weren't moving in offense, the rebounding was almost nil, and many were just feeling their way in the collegiate court.

Now with Magi Sison's untimely injury that'll sideline him for a month—he fractured his hand in a scuffle with a Team B player, dagnabbit—I wonder how my boys will fare against the Blue Eagles, particularly if Chris Tiu gets his 3-point groove back and Ford Arao is all warmed up, like diesel.

I'm anxious enough to not be satisfied with watching the game on TV and to brave the rains to see my boys, even while The Coach could not attend today's game, his Air 21 work getting in the way of what his heart truly desires.

Off to the stadium I go. I would like to sit near the UP alum whom I sat in front of last Saturday. Stinging from an impending loss, what could a UPian do but heckle? This man was purple and green in his prose. I was listening to his colorful commentary the entire game. He'd taunt the foreign-denominated La Salle team: "Pabiling isang Maienhoffer with cheese! With french fries, please!" And of course with a name like Atkins, a player would get a ribbing about his diet.

My half-hour's up.

My withness

With his helter-skelter sched, The Coach hardly has time for TV, but these days he'd gladly lose sleep over Commander in Chief. Tonight, after the segment where Mac Allen's mother still mourned for a husband long gone, The Coach hugged me and asked, "Will you miss me if I die?" I would, definitely, infinitely, and sprung on him the same question, almost flippantly, wanting to see if he'd give me a proper eulogy.

But now as he sleeps and the night is moonless, I am unnerved. What is life without this beautiful man, one who is—to borrow from Kate Knapp Johnson's Meadow—"my withness, my here"?

In the first years of our marriage, I would sometimes wake in the darkness, and not hearing The Coach's breathing above the hum of the air conditioner—he is not one to snore unless exhausted—I would slide my head down from my pillow to catch the silhouette of his chest against the muted light that filters through the curtains. I would monitor the rise and fall of his breathing, and only when so assured could I go back to sleep.

Many years of everydays calmed me, lulled me to thinking that together is a forever word. Until tonight.


Otherwise
Jane Kenyon

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach. It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.



from Otherwise, 1996
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota

Fast and furious

For fast fiction with a zing, check out Blagador's micro-fiction, which he arranged using black-and-white photos. The Polymath is one of my "kids"; I have an entire brood of writers who call me Mum, Mudra or Madder—a name I earned because I was, dagnabbit, the oldest among the fellows of two national workshops I attended. I'd like to think that I and my house are a safe haven to them; many of my kids have come or stayed over to chat, read, eat, borrow books, watch TV, or, yeah, even to iron a shirt.

I'm as proud as any mum.

A writer's writ

My flights to and from Cebu last year were often delayed, once by as long as four hours. Sometimes I arrive a little after midnight.

I'm not too fazed by such delays or when I'm in a long-haul flight. Maybe it's because nowadays I'm rarely in a hurry to go somewhere—the wonderful trade-off when I junked my power suits and took up writing. I work at home, in my own space at my own time (which, alas, also means I shoulder my own health care, withhold my own taxes, and forgo 13th month pay).

The delays give me pockets of time to surf or write—I am rarely without Samwise, my usually dirty iBook—or to read (what's the use of scrimping on clothes to buy books if you don't carry one with you all the time?), or more recently to blog, using my trusty Tungsten, inherited from my dear friend Jon (the Tungsten looks bedraggled after five years, but still works beautifully).

I also love solitude (I didn't always, but have grown to love my own quiet times). And I don't mind being exiled to my own devices.

That's the beauty of writing. It's "work" we can do almost anywhere. A pen, paper, or, if one is lucky, a laptop with battery juiced to full.

Many of us writers are always writing: when we look at someone, we are more likely subconsciously storing in our mind how the neon lights play against his pallid skin, blue and pink against his forearm, or how the corners of her mouth twitch when she lies.

Perhaps writers look at life differently. Part of us often step back and catalog an event taking place. Our being “in the moment” is lived thrice: once, when it happens; twice, when remembered; thrice, when reduced to words.

Vignette

That's it. Time to sleep now. After wasting precious time on HBO's Nanny McPhee, I finally have something that strings together the mandatory five words: shoes, discover, murder, subterranean, compatibility.


And what do you know—I actually had fun.

I was snug in my bed, dreaming of a world without clocks, when a call girl who lived down on the tenth floor was helping her American lover commit suicide before dawn. Not really sure if she’s a call girl or he was American; to my neighbors on whom I eavesdropped while we were crammed in the elevator, every Caucasian is an American and every American’s dark-skinned companion with a harsh accent is a prostitute. The roving security guard had discovered the American’s leather shoes littered behind the building, one shoe on the pavement, the other lounging atop a parked car’s hood. A resident had opened his window to throw out a cigarette butt, and saw the body sprawled on the roof of the next-door warehouse that was our only line of defense against the sight and stench of the Pasig. The woman had shown the police his suicide note. She said all she did was help push him through the narrow window. His heft could barely squeeze through the steel frame, and she had heaved and strained at the effort.

If we were still talking to each other, you’d tell me assisted suicide is nonetheless punishable, like homicide or murder. Seventeen years out of law school, and you still cannot get over your Juris Doctor. Esq. remains appended to your name, perhaps now more of a consolation when no man has given you his name to use.

So subterranean of the inamorata, you’d sniff. That is so you. You have to use words mangled beyond recognition when there are other terms more imaginative for those you do not wish to associate with: troglodytes, hoi polloi, the great unwashed. Once, you mispronounced Worcestershire to the waiter, and I wanted to correct you like I did when you confused unconscious with subconscious, but I didn’t, and suggested you get ketchup instead. It was then I knew for sure I was no longer your friend.

It wasn’t a question of compatibility. We share the same seamstress, the same distaste for the thin, pinched voice of CSI Miami’s Emily Procter, the same acid test for our dates. I am halfway deaf in my left ear and you in your right so when we couldn’t catch the dialogue on TV, we’d lean forward and demand in unison: What?!

The eleventh hour

Oh, the weight of a million things to finish by the day's end.

In a week chock-full of chores, today was an exhibit of fraught multitasking: While keeping an eye out on the pasta sauce simmering to my right, I was washing dishes and studying Dean Alfar's The Dragon in the Bell published in this week's Philippines Free Press. My copy of Free Press was spreadeagled above the sink, two laundry clips pinning it away from the splash of dishwater. Dean's story is up for discussion in my fiction class tomorrow, for which I also need to read another story (gah, must breathe) and submit a vignette that should contain these words: discover, subterranean, shoes, compatibility, and murder. And, just so there's no pressure or anything, our venerable teacher Butch Dalisay requires that we write "fiction that matters."

So.

The food's all done and waiting for The Coach, the kitchen floor's mopped free of stray garlic peel and tomato sauce, and the house is being aired out of the smell of anchovies.

I'm closeted in our bedroom, the curtains swept to the side so I can look out to the skyline for those times when I need inspiration for the vignette. The TV's turned on so I won't feel like I'm missing out on today's Law and Order. My fingers are poised over the QWERTYs.

Several long gazes at the skyline later, I still don't have a clue how to string the five words together. (It's the subterranean that's killing me.)

What was it that Butch said last week? "Fiction: Do it well. Do it honestly."

Well, here I am, honest to the bone, and I remain bereft of a workable plot. So I blog. Particularly about what Janet Burroway said of the paradox of least wanting to do what we most want to do: "We are in love with words except when we have to face them."

This difficulty is my fault, of course. My writing muscles have stultified from disuse.

According to Burroway, "The habit of mind that produces stories is a habit and can be cultivated, so that the more and the longer you write, the less likely you are to run out of ideas." Writing, she says, is mind-farming: "You have to plow, plant, weed, and hope for growing weather. Why a seed turns into a plant is something you are never going to understand, and the only relevant response to it is gratitude. You may be proud, however, of having plowed."

Time, then, to dig through the dirt. I will remember the poet William Stafford's advice to his students to "write to their lowest standard."

Struck by lightning

Much could be said about Jack's Ridge: how this resort and restaurant complex high up in Shrine Hills, Matina, was once a Japanese outpost in World War II; how it had been under water before the sea retreated and left clams on the mountaintops; how the coffee shop, they say, fails to produce brews as spectacular as the Ridge's view of the city and Davao Gulf.


But all that is overshadowed by what Jack's Ridge had given me.



I was taking photos of the moon "riding on ghostly skies" when lightning flashed low on the horizon as I pressed the shutter.




It gave me this:

Poetry, by hook or by crook

I took to reading—and truly enjoying—poetry rather late in life. Away from the classroom.

To me there are three kinds of poems: those I can enjoy without creating another frown line; those I revel in for their sound, sense and sensuousness; and the many that make me think I should just stick to fiction.

(Of course there is the obligatory Rilke and Neruda*, every other yuppie's must-have poetry for brown nosing or bluff sophistication. The rule in cocktail conversations: When all else fails, bluff.)

I wonder if, when I struggle over poetry, I am one of those Billy Collins mourns over in his Introduction to Poetry:


But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means


I'm still scratching my head over some portions of Whitman's Song of Myself. Some time ago I downloaded his poetry into my iPod, and I probably looked funny frowning in concentration inside the crowded MRT coach, his words pouring into me, and I barely hanging on to the pole and my sanity.

* A lifetime ago, drowned in heretofores and Know All Men By These Presents, I thought Neruda was a friend of my cousin Aris when my cousin’s poetry referred to Neruda's Tonight I Can Write The Saddest Lines. Oh, the shame.

** Photo borrowed from someone else's site in one of my Net trawling trips. Can't remember whose, unfortunately.

Babel

Sleepy little town—that’s how a Davaoeño describes Panabo. If you consider the staggering kindness of strangers (they carry your bag, ply you with food, offer their homes), how most businesses revolve around the marketplace, and how a hefty pork barbecue costs only P10, then perhaps, yes, Panabo is one sleepy little town, never mind its designation as a city of Davao del Norte.

Its noise, however, is another matter.

Here on my side of Panabo, at the Women’s Resource Center, I am in the middle of the market square. While many tricycles have abandoned the streets and most stalls have put up their boards, a videoke, a jukebox, and a set of oversized speakers on a pedicab all fight for airspace with the Bingo game set up in the quadrangle.

The videoke singer relentlessly scrambles after the lyrics of If You Tell Me You Love Me, but not with My Way; he knows his way around that tune. (Yeah, a videoke isn’t a videoke without the obligatory My Way). The pedicab speakers provide the bass: you cannot hear much else beyond it. And the jukebox, well, there must be a surfeit of coins in Panabo; the poor machine has no rest.

Yet nothing beats the Bingo man.

To fill up the wide-open space, the Bingo man doesn’t just call out the numbers. He cups the microphone with both hands—lest some of his words escape further amplification—and singsongs into it, stringing the syllables in a lilting chain, like the ShoeMart salesladies of yore: GEE FORty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven (pause, wheeze), GEE forty-SEven-forty-seven-forty-seven-forty-seven (pause, wheeze), and then a final triumphant GEE FORty-SEHHHven! He pronounces G the Cebuano way: DJEE. As he jiggles the plastic genie bottle of tiles, he hoists it over his head and brings it down roundhouse in a wide turn—yet another art form—and he cracks jokes, makes some announcements, calls out to passersby. Still in the same singsong.

I am glad for the clamor. Makes me feel safe. In this trip to Panabo for a CIDA book project, I am alone in a nursery of a daycare facility. A lone metal bed has turned it into my makeshift sleeping quarters. I am surrounded by gargantuan comic-book and fairytale characters painted on the walls: Garfield (too orange), Snoopy (pretty good), and Tweety Bird (with a disproportionate, stretched torso).

The surrounding noise stops me from gazing too often at this creepy rendition of Snow White near the foot of my bed.

Windoze

If you take an A320 plane, say, bound for Davao like I did yesterday, and you ask the Cebu Pacific guy behind the desk to give you a window seat—so you can get a better view of this fair city particularly if, like me, this is only your second visit there since 1991—and he assigns you to Seat 26F much too cheerfully, beware.

Not only is Seat 26F the last of the tail end, it also has no windows.


Hmpf.

I want. I need!

Night person that I am, mornings can be excruciating, especially when my doctors have not allowed any coffee in my system since October 2003 (alas, I can no longer remember how my Americanos taste).

These babies from Bim Bam Banana are what I need.

Smother is mother with an attitude

My mother—bless her—thinks that I, at 40, am still a baby who needs pampering. (I am.) She thinks I am too thin (I wish), and has someone buy me beef rice from Dimsum Break for early afternoon merienda: beef, peas and shrimp piled over rice and drowned in MSG-rich sauce. "Eat, eat," she urges, and waits as I chew. She prepares for my return to Cebu the only way she knows how: she feeds me.

One of the characters in a story I have yet to rework carries after my mother. Perhaps it is true, what they say, that all fiction is in some ways autobiographical:

"Mama at seventy-eight years has survived a war, eloping at eighteen, working through three miscarriages, selling tocino on the side to raise tuition for seven children, a stroke, a heart attack, kidney stones, diabetes, a recidivist philandering husband. From all these she was shielded by her crusade that nothing bad—nothing—will happen to her brood. She believes in the Family; there is little redemption outside it. The world can change governments, another Mexican soap opera would invade television, roads are given new names, but my mother would not know or care. She has the public schoolteacher’s simple convictions that are renewed every time she feeds us."

—from Home, a work in progress