No problem

CLIMBING presents no problem to Tigre, a marmalade stray whose favorite perch is the topmost shelf in the kitchen. On it is a still shiny pan, which the cat likes as a pillow when he slinks in for a midmorning nap.

When I rinse a cup, I automatically look up. The fallout, either from a dislodged pan or an oversleeping feline, would be hard to explain in a pithy epitaph.

Tigr considers all these as nonsense. Many a time, those lambent sulfurous orbs are trained on me just as I look up. Excuse me, is this your fur drifting in my tea? An answering yawn, if I am lucky, is all I get.

I accept that being alone is a condition for writing. And thinking often means talking to oneself because some ideas have to be hung out like clothes on a washline that have a lot of flapping around to do before they can be worn.

Still, it is no small comfort to seek out Tigr when the writing stutters. For him, there is no problem. When he scrubs our ankles with his madly purring visage, the husband asks aloud if he has picked up an ear infection and I wait with trepidation for my ankles to get nibbled.

The problem with humans is that to be human is not to be without a problem.

Tigr reminds me of John Puruntong, the beloved character played by Dolphy in the Ading Fernando-created sitcom, “John en Marsha,” which dominated Philippine television from the 1970s to the 1990s. John was television’s version of Juan dela Cruz who slept, too, on a dented pot, curled every night on a hard narrow bench in the family shanty.

John is loved by his family: Marsha, Nida Blanca’s jewel of a wife, who never nagged or envied the neighbors; daughter Shirley, spunky but loving, played by Maricel Soriano; and Dolphy’s son Rolly Quizon, who played reel son Rolly.

Marsha’s sinfully rich mother, Doña Delilah Jones, ruins the domestic harmony, constantly hectoring her son-in-law with the catchphrase, “Kaya ikaw, John, magsumikap ka (keep striving).”

Does John bite the bullet or bite off his monster MIL’s head? He does neither. Every weekly episode finds John browbeaten by Doña Delilah, who orders her maid, the screechy-voiced Matutina, to sweep the bills off the floor of her mansion and offers these to solve John’s problems.

John does not accept the money because he understands that the lack of money is a false problem. In portraying the Filipino who, with peace of mind, can sleep on a pillow of aluminum, Ading Fernando and Dolphy captured the nature of a conundrum, problematized by Plato and Martin Heidegger.

A problem does not merely counter “doxa” or common sense, writes Audrey Wasser. “In perplexing, problems disrupt our worn-out stories.”

Or, purrs Tigre, “no problem”.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 23, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Moving

TO READ is to be moved.

Yet, surveying the books remaining at home that have survived purges and “Hunger Games” (as a former student called those occasions when I gave away books to classes), two categories emerge, going by appearance: obelisks and sponge cakes.

Like cakes whipped from eggs and butter, these novels, comics, and illustrated books are soft all over, from cover to spine and page edges, obviously not just read but much reread. Sponge cakes open by habit to pages marked by pen and striking fancy, frowzy and matey from familiarity.

The obelisks are studies in dignity at first dusting, with nary a crease or dent. On second glance, I feel the pathos of holding a book I have barely read or even opened.

Read for instruction and rarely for pleasure, obelisks are untouched by obsession. I travel or ruminate in the toilet with sponge cakes; I require a table and a good light to open an obelisk’s pages and make notes. I take a sponge cake to bed; an obelisk puts me to sleep.

Physically moving books to outwit termites with a gusto for paper, I assembled the obelisks on a table, where they eyed me reproachfully like overaged babies still trapped in too tight christening suits.

Many of the obelisks are Filipiniana, a number on Cebuano studies. Nearly two decades ago, after editing an article written by Dr. Resil B. Mojares for the “Cebu Journalism and Journalists,” a magazine published during the Cebu Press Freedom Week, I left the newsroom and crossed over to the Cebuano Studies Center, then located at the P. del Rosario St. campus of the University of San Carlos.

I found his book, “Cebuano Literature,” continued reading his treatise on the symbiosis of Cebuano literature and journalism, and bought a copy of my own. Mojares was honored as a National Artist in 2018. His “pioneering work” surveying Cebuano writers and their milieu is now out of print, according to Dr. Hope Sabanpan-Yu, current Center director.

“There is an urgent need for enlarging the present critical awareness of vernacular literature in the Philippines,” writes Mojares. “… the Filipino, by virtue of an education weighted in favor of the assimilation of western culture, has found himself alienated from his native literature.”

Bought in 2002, my copy opened to a yellowed brochure of the San Carlos Publications; an official receipt for P65, the cost of a paperback copy in 2002; and a postcard of a central Kuala Lumpur bookshop discovered by S., guided by her inimitable nose for reading.

A deep lateral crease mars the face of the Father of Cebuano Letters, Vicente Sotto, on the cover of my copy. Even in 2002, despite my unknowing, reading about the Cebuano already moved me.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in the June 16, 2019 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Paper trail

PAPER’S time is nearly over. When I hold today’s thinner, narrower newspapers, whenever I encounter the academic jargon for newspapers and magazines printed on paper (“legacy media”), when my search for notebooks on Ebay and Marketplace cascades photos of gadgets, I accept the inevitable: paper will be jettisoned for other things bright and new.

Yet, paper is a kindred creature. When I recently came home to clean and clear after two years of being away, I realized that about a third of our household is made up of paper. Paper occupies space, attracts the most unrelenting pests, and traps dust, dog hair, and cat fur. Paper is the bane of virtuous housekeepers.

Such a surfeit of flaws hardly explains why paper is addictive. I find it nearly impossible to throw away paper. Can you take a photo of the sheet a son scribbled on in kindergarten, store the image as data in the Cloud, and deposit in a trash can that yellowing slip with ragged edges, misspelling, and the glimmerings of a young person emerging into his voice? One might as well consign love to oblivion.

Paper releases, along with dust motes and a mini-colony of silverfish, expression. Recently at the University of San Carlos Cebuano Studies Center, I spent a day going through the card catalogue, not the online public access catalogue that inventories the linked libraries in an institution but the old-fashioned cabinet with wooden trays holding index cards containing bibliographic information. Plus all shades and slants of librarians’ scribbling.

I first searched using key words but then shifted to alphabetical trawling. And that was how, in between Abac-Azne and Ga-Kyzyl, I stumbled on Epifania Labrada Magallon’s 1977 list of Cebuano antonyms and pseudonyms and John Wolff’s 1967 paper on the history of the dialect of Camotes Island.

In Greek, Latin, French, and English, the anonym is a person “without a name”. A pseudonym is a “false name” used by a writer. What was it about publication in prewar newspapers that drove Cebuanas to hide behind anonyms and pseudonyms but released their souls?

And remembering how Camotes village women once code-switched to Cebuano Visayan from Porohanon or Camotes Visayan, described as a combination of Cebuano, Waray, Boholano, and Ilonggo, when addressing visitors from Cebu City, I reflected how Wolff “put on paper” and articulated beyond ignoring and forgetting the cultural imperialism with which mother tongues drown and silence “minor” dialects with their discrete and irreplaceable history and stories.

Digital is king, but every time, I choose to follow paper trails.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 9, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Sip, steep & muse

IN these caffeinated times, a café is not just about the coffee. Going to a reunion with an old friend, I asked my son to write down the instructions for the fruit and herbal infusions I consider to be healthier and less confusing than the labyrinthine complexities one has to hurdle to get a cup of coffee these days.

When I was an AM radio intern in the 1990s, Danny, the reporter mentoring me on shoe-leather field reporting, always started our street-roving by parking our rattletrap “mobile” on the gutter so we could hop out and slide into a bench always kept free for Danny, radio man, local celebrity, and sweet bear with a sweet tooth for sweet coffee.

That summer was hell. Writing in Cebuano was hell. Reporting on air was hell. What redeemed that time was the coffee-and-fried egg Danny and I shared in his favorite sidewalk café: a tiny table covered with a flower-patterned plastic sheet, topped by a flower-patterned “thermos” and cut-glass containers of instant coffee grains reused to hold instant coffee, the poison of choice for early risers, security guards, office workers, reporters, and ulcer-prone interns trawling to meet the day’s quota of stories.

While the vendor’s children and grandchildren shrieked bathing on the sidewalk and skinny cats with interrogator eyes unblinkingly followed our every move, Danny made our coffee, first putting a spoon in the glass so the steaming water from the flowered flask wouldn’t crack the glass (a Danny trick) and dumping sinful amounts of coffee grains and then condensed milk as an afterthought or atonement.

He left the swirling to me because, being Danny, he was in the thick of things: monitoring the news blaring from the parked radio “mobile,” talking to other regulars, pulling the shirt over his gut (we were a tight fit in that tiny bench), hollering to the kids about not missing the flag ceremony, pulling down the shirt again, and drowning his sunny side ups in his Danny signature coffee, “black as hell, strong as death, sweet as love” (an old Turkish proverb used by essayist Matthew Green to describe eighteenth-century coffee served in London coffeehouses). And, yeah, coaching me without stinting on the coffee.

In the mall café, I got out my phone to show the barista the instructions my older son typed for a healthy fruit-infused drink: “no water, no syrup, just pulp, less ice.”

My tongue, picking up a phantom sweetish-queasy taste of egg yolk and coffee lodged behind a tooth, betrayed me. When I gave the order, I asked for extra pumps of syrup and cream in remembrance of a mentor who spared nothing to shore up a young person’s lack of faith.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 2, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, "Matamata"