On Saturday Mornings and Sad Stories

   Yesterday's earthquake was long, the kind that you could use to show your Math teacher how minutes could be longer than a day, than a lifetime even. For the whole duration, I could not think of anything else but dying, and how painful this could be. 

   As my gaze fixed on the shaking glass of water on my desk, and the rest of my senses on the strange feeling of weightlessness, I had to tell myself that it was going to stop soon.  But it went on longer than the usual tremors I experience at work. Being on the 10th floor of a 30-story building did not help either. It's difficult to decide whether I should go down or up or just look for a sturdy table where I could crouch underneath. No food, no water, nothing that will help me survive should I get trapped.

   I thought, this is it. In a few minutes, I will be able to know what lies beyond existence.

   So, I was thinking about what is after death, and the irritating reality about how the country lags so far behind Japan in terms of buildings being able to withstand strong earthquakes. I am not even sure if architects and engineers in the country take into account the fact that the Philippines is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, and therefore, geology, among other things should be an integral part of constructing buildings.

   From there, my thoughts flit to the memories of my dog, Zev, who recently died because of an accident. She was on her way home, crossing the national road, when a car bumped into her. What is sadder is she had already been dead for 6 hours when I found out she had passed away. It was the very first thing I learned after getting up from bed to get breakfast. The village guard told me that she was still able to run from the road to the guard house, trying so very hard to get home. He actually saw her fall dead just a few meters away from him.
I wonder if that is what I would become, a sad story one Saturday morning. 

Zevrana, a few days old. She died 9 months later, 5 times bigger than this pup.

   I noticed that my desk was still moving on its own. The glass, half-filled with water, still shook. This is really it. I thought, this cannot be. This is not how I imagined myself exiting from the world. I still have a lot of things to tell my parents. I have not told my father how I broke the tip of the wild boar's tooth he gave me. I had it with me, then, but I thought it would not help me in any way, as the tip is chipped off. I should have gone home last Christmas to ask my Grandpa to perform the ritual of letting it suck blood from a rooster (Whatever that means). I looked at my palm questioningly. I believed I would live for very long. This line right over here supposedly says so. 

   Then the movement stopped.

   I stared at the glass for a minute or so, and it was very still. It was over! I was ready to feel relieved, but I stopped myself just before I could start. Relief is useless. This, now, is merely a consequence of what happened, and what did not. 

   I turned to my laptop instead.

Inbox (35).

   Those few minutes just got me busier for the rest of my day. I hoped the mails were nothing complicated, so I could go home in four hours. 

Hello, Vera!

Based on the initial report that IT sent me,...

Shooters

The last time the world turned around in a rather strange way was five years ago.
She downs the Jack Daniels and smiles.
It’s my turn. But the world is turning funny again.
There I am, showing the class how 1 could be equal to 2 through a careless use of a logical contradiction. She is still waiting.
My parents are both saying that it is all up to me. CHOICE...

     Think about it. We are not always able to choose. Do you understand me? I mean, you could be thinking of choosing to become a lawyer. However, could you choose to pass the bar exam? Could you choose to be rich and live a comfortable life of a student learning all this and that of lawyering- Miranda rights, reading nothing beyond what the law says…Hold on, I need to piss.
     I knew it. One way to tell that a bar is cheap is through its restroom. I held my breath for 40 seconds. I should stop smoking.

     I think I can’t do this. This drink may be smooth but it tastes really terrible. How could anyone enjoy this drink!

     "We are drinking hey! This is no place for rationalizing!". Oh great. She is telling me to shut off my brain. Oh shut up! Why don’t you ever rest?, I hiss at myself. It is this noise that prevents me from getting to that favorite spot I have in my mind. What was it? I can’t even remember.

     "It’s just a drink." She is saying something about destiny…

     He knows that in spite of the genial fronts that people display, they hate him. It is not even about familiarity blossoming into contempt. It is the first time they lay eyes on him, when they realize he is condemned to the gutters of being loathed. He is the personification of disgust, of everything detestable.
     Ah shrug them off! You should be you because that is who you want. If you live by the standards of others you don’t even care, then you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Humph! Putting on clothes not even yours. What, for show? If you think you could be better, then there are countless ways to leave the past and see what you can be in the name of love.

     We shake hands. "Thanks…ey get up! Ey!"

     "You ok?" I guess so. She says we had better get home. Five years back, I would have just tucked myself in bed. Now, I have to hail a cab and hope the driver wakes me up when we have arrived. I wish I could choose to say no to her, to them.
Really. CHOICE.
For one, I did choose to take the cab and not the bus.

Wild Boar's Tooth (Part 2)

I guess that is really how everything starts. Simple. 

Even the universe started with the simple causality of the center no longer being able to hold. The result? An explosion that fathered all the complexities we all know about life. 

I do not see why it should not be the same with love. It starts with facts, with something empirical. I see how water is being poured on to the rice pan and the sound it creates, then the warm glow of cinder causing the steam to rise from the pan. I, being the perceiver, complicates it to a degree that I could no longer grasp, then the aroma is the only thing that I can keep as the memory of this moment fades over time.

Or maybe, this is what I am doing now. I multiply the incomprehensible and elevate it to something poetic. There really was nothing romantic about my uncle's making coffee, then. It is just that now, I remember it distinctly to be a moment of joy.

But why?

That was just among the many things that happened in this litte village.

In the afternoon, just before taking the dreaded nap, I would usually sit at the balcony where I could see the river to the south and the other four houses to the north. It would always be a lazy afternoon. Almost everyone was out to the farm, either to till the land or to tend to the corns or maybe to harvest the crops. I would be alone with my grandmother or a cousin or two who had yet to have their afternoon naps.

The sun would have gone just past the sky's highest point, and I was still savoring what I just had for lunch. That would be either another vegetable or dried fish or something that grandpa brought from bukid (farm). It was not really difficult to take naps, but it was something that would not happen without my grandma telling me the importance of taking at least 2 hours of nap every afternoon. I did not understand why I would waste such time when there was so much fun to do outside. Besides, a few hours after the nap, I would be asleep again.

I still agree with my younger self up to now. When we die, we would be spending eternity as dead to the world as I was during those two-hour afternoon naps. But like I said, napping was not difficult if all you hear are the birds chirping, the rustling of leaves of the nearby trees. Sometimes, even, I think I could hear the river from the deep valley. As I closed my eyes, I would hear the distant conversations of some farmers passing by, or my Aunt Juanita yelling at her chickens, and the radio playing "Victims of Love", as it signaled the start of a drama program entitled, "Handumanan sa Usa ka Awit". In some cases, the DJ would play, "Love is Blind", and then she would start reading the love story of an avid listener. "Good afternoon to you, DJ and to your followers. It all started when..." She fell in love and got heartbroken.

Though I would have my afternoons unnecessarily shortened, I would be woken to the the delicious aroma of my grandmother's afternoon snack- grilled or steamed banana, bibingka, or lugaw. My cousins, Ramil, Gaga, Ludy, Dedet, Daylin and Rey would share the food with me if they had not invited me first to whatever food my aunts had prepared for them.

It was Christmas time, only it was something that would happen every day in Lower.

(To be continued)

Wild Boar's Tooth (Part 1)

This is not going to be about what I had for breakfast and how I rarely have it.

Just a few minutes ago, I was out there on the veranda trying to withstand the cold wind, smoking. I thought about a place that I would frequent as a child. This was in a remote town where people relied on farming to live, where my parents grew up. I thought about this place while trying to decide on whether I should just go back home and teach. It is difficult to understand how I would always be pulled into the memory of this beautiful town while I was in the middle of making a decision that would shape tomorrows in the most exciting yet frightful ways imaginable.

In the name of expediency, allow me to be a fallen leaf on a river that knows no bound, so I will go with the current and talk about this place.

From the city where I grew up, it takes 3 hours to get there. The jeepney (there weren't buses yet) would only get me as far as the last municipality (Pitogo), and from there, I would either walk or ride a horse, if I got lucky. Most of the time, it was a long walk to this beautiful town, which I would just call Lower (short for "Lower Panikian").

Back then, about 27 years ago, electricity was something that people were praying for, so that arriving late in Pitogo would mean an exciting hike in the dark to Lower. I was not aware of the dangers on the road, where rebels or soldiers were known to pass by after sunset. Yes, even soldiers were a threat. My folks had learned to live with this uncertainty, and they had done it so well that I thought of the hike nothing but fun.

I remember I would be given my own sulo- a torch made of dried coconut leaves tied together. I particularly liked this, as its light would never die out. I only had to wave it in the air when the fire went out, and it would be lit again. It has been many years since I last saw something like this.

Lower is a very quiet (I was tempted to say peaceful, but I would be inconsistent later when I talk about armed men) place, almost serene. I remember four houses in the village besides my grandparents': Aunt Juanita's, Aunt Annie's, Lolo Publing's, and another relative's house. They are about fifty steps apart from each other. Lola's (as we call grandmother in Filipino) place is at the highest point, with front and back yards covered with bermudagrass. Though this house is bigger than the rest in the village, it is still standing on stilts. The space under the house is used to store farming tools, chickens, corn and a rice grinder (a simple machinery that you push and pull to mill rice).

To get to the other houses, I would be running down a small hill, amidst coconut and Talisay trees. I would do this after breakfast, so I could invite my cousins to play hide and seek or to climb trees; my favorite is the Batilis tree at the back of my grandparents' house, overlooking a deep valley and a small river.

If I wanted to have some casava, I would go up the mountain where my uncle Titing is. I remember him having a lot of this root crop. He would cook some for me and my cousins, and allow us to have half a cup of some coffee they got from the "Sentro", a bigger town. 

It was fascinating to observe how the coffee was prepared. First, he would put some water into the rice pan that he would place on three rocks, and using the ember of some dried, fallen branches to boil the water. Then he would put the powdered coffee, then some sugar. The smell always brought a smile.

This is how I fell in love with coffee.