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

Pls! Flash the bowl after using*

Ahh, Cebu.

Home.

Where I can sleep for more than ten hours without a headache.

Where all bets are off when it comes to all things salty or fatty: danggit, real chicharon attached to tambok, and lechon that doesn't rely on Mang Tomas for flavor.

Where I don't have to rein in my accent, and I can speak BisDak: forcefully, loudly, in truncated syllables and hardened vowels.

Where our version of learning is to poke fun at our own grammatical errors.


* Comment posted by jued keigh at Himantayon.com
** Photo by jorg3, posted at Himantayon.com

"Pure, unadulterated Cebuano"

It hurts to laugh.

While most of my stitches are healing well, the hole on my right, through which a pipe drained blood and liquid for four days, still gapes and throbs. When I sneeze I anchor my tummy in with my hands, afraid that the force might hurl my insides through the gauze. Rising in the morning is a major production: I slowly maneuver to my left, slip an elbow underneath, secure my right palm on the bed, and lift myself up by degrees. It does not help that The Coach keeps our bedroom Siberia-cold (I have to burrow under three covers!); my joints are all stiff, and much of my body refuses to wake.

But.

I cannot help but check out Himantayon for my regular fix of laugh-out-loud Cebuano humor. The term himantayon means—geez, now how on earth do I translate that? (Me, with my clumsy Tagalog.) A pakialamero is more of a meddler and a busybody. A himantayon—from the word bantay—is more circumspect and subtle in his or her snooping, though no less heedful or alert or even catty, though never malevolent. A glamorous gossip, how 'bout that?

(Help, I am floundering. It's like explaining the mechanics of labyog and kumbayot.)

Anyway, this site, which I discovered through fellow Cebuano Isolde Amante's*, celebrates all things BisDak—that's Bisayang Dako or "Big Bisaya," literally, though that translation fails at capturing the self-jest that can be at times droll or comical or tongue-in-cheek or farcical or downright clownish.

I love it. It's home. And I'll read it if it kills me.



* If you crave good fiction, check out Isolde's Dance, deservedly a winner at the 2000 Palancas.