The placid ones

THE BIBLICAL injunction to let sleeping dogs lie does not count on Udo, the family aspin (“asong Pinoy”).

When he first arrived about a decade ago, we lined a small box with the younger son’s unwashed shirt in an attempt to quiet him. He was given away from a litter of pups born from an unsupervised coupling between a Labrador and one of the local bitches.

During the drive from the dog farm in the south of Cebu to our home in the city, the black ball of fur ate and sniffled from my son’s lap. Except for the whites in his eyes, he was black all over. Black muzzle, black paws, black pools of misery reproaching those who tore him away from his mother’s side.

That was probably what made the superstitious stay away from him. All that presentiment of darkness.

Or perhaps it was just the noise that he made that first night. A low prolonged thread of keening that dogged and found us wherever we tried to escape in our small home. Thunder, rain, the dark, and sleeping alone made Udo notch his wailing even higher, seemingly beyond human endurance.

When he finally quietened down, we discovered he had overlong ears that flapped, twisted, and upended when he became engrossed: wolfing down pan de sal, chewing shoes, and sitting down with us for meals even though limbs and tail untidily spilled from chairs too quickly outgrown.

The puppy that once kept the whole household awake has become sedate in his senior years. Each time I come home, I find his long dark shadow almost always stretched on the floor, beside my chair.

He still rouses a shadow of the old friskiness when he hears the breakfast rustling of the bag containing hot pan de sal. But even before night has fallen, Udo is a dark comma curled beside our bed, sometimes snoring but no longer yipping puppy dreams.

One thing remains unchanged: a keen hearing in those silken socklike ears. Deep in sleep, he will suddenly leap up and bark in a frenzy when he hears what he alone can hear: someone familiar approaching our home and pushing, predictably minutes after he sounds off the alert, the rusty gate we have never been able to oil properly.

A dog they say ages seven times faster than humans. I doubt that. The disorder that makes one sleep longer than usual afflicts not just aging pets.

Every day, I take in the news. I follow the killings that take place daily, the bodies that go unremarked.

Occasionally, an odd detail catches the eye, a body swinging from the bridge greeting early risers. Or a child catching a bullet like a common cold.

The proverb to let sleeping dogs lie means to let things be. Rise only for the ones you love. That is what the family aspin does while I prefer the long sleep.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 28, 2019 edition of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Put to bed

ONCE upon a time, to “put to bed” in publishing meant to make content ready for printing.

That expression may fade away, in the wake of digital-led revolutions overtaking print. Recently, major academic publisher Pearson announced it will update more frequently the digital rather than the physical versions of its 1,500 academic titles.

A company official said this “digital tipping point” responds to the preference of the “Netflix and Spotify generation… to rent not own” their textbooks, reported the BBC.

Digital books are easier on the pocket and on the shoulders. Few students want to invest in an imported academic reference in paper format, which can command four or five figures in pesos. Students prefer to download free PDF copies of books or share e-copies within their networks.

Given the time it takes to write a book, submit to a publisher, review, and finally print and distribute the title, it makes more sense to consult journals, many of which are already on digital portals, rather than physical books for the latest in research. Digital books also have other add-ons not found in print, such as assessments for feedback, videos for a more interactive immersion into the subject, and other links.

A hybrid approach works best for now, with students using the resources at hand and making their own innovations. Borrowing physical books from the library but avoiding extra weight in their knapsacks, many students take photos of needed pages, an act of virtual self-service that is an advance from paying a vendor for photocopies.

When a reference I needed was not yet ready for circulation, I made the most of the room-use rights given by the librarian by taking photos of the pages with the smart phone I am still learning to use.

A linear manner of comprehension, nurtured by a lifetime of reading paper books, means I read from start to finish, turning a page from the right to the left side of the spread, and then flipping back the pages to reread. Add to these the marking of passages, jotting on the book’s margins, sticking of notes in the pages, and writing in a notebook with ruled lines.

These traditional survival skills are displaced in the flurry of scrolling, swiping, and metalink-clicking involved in ebook-reading. Persevering in reading the images of pages in a smart phone screen or an electronic tablet, I effectively put myself “to bed.”

Soft snores hardly herald a revolution. It will do for now as I cling for life to the coat- tails of the digital juggernaut.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 21, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Absent ones

WE are only as good as the way we treat the others we view as “lower” than us.

The Golden Rule is often interpreted as espousing the principle of reciprocity: treat others the way we want to be treated.

Yet, reciprocity implies a relationship between equals, as between person to person. The lens with which we “other” the sentient beings we judge to be essentially “different” from us—such as animals— does not only shift the planes that put us on unequal footing but also severs any link connecting us to them.

Nonviolence then, more than reciprocity, demands that we cause no harm, not even when we condescend to “be kind to animals”

In this altered state I left the Bohol Enchanted Zoological and Botanical Garden in the Poblacion of Bilar. I have visited enough zoos in this country to associate the experience with trepidation but cannot also resist the flutter of hope anticipating that the next animal “sanctuary” will turn out to be closer to Mahatma Gandhi’s vision that, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

V., our driver and guide, informed us that the facility was recently opened and is monitored by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources. The animals—civets, owls, lizards, monkeys, lemurs, tarsiers, butterflies, rabbits, guinea pigs, and a crocodile fish—are placed in enclosures that would have blended in the sprawling landscape of lush trees and brightly hued flowers and bushes were it not for two distractions: the cages and their disgruntled occupants.

Every enclosure has a marker of information worth reading. The Cebuano interjection of “ay, kagwang!,” expressing displeasure or insult, refers to the Philippine flying lemur or Philippine colugo. Feeding and sleeping high up in the trees, the lemur is the object of many human misconceptions, mistaken for the mythical “aswang,” which preys on the unborn, perhaps because it hunts by night and sleeps by day, with upright head.

Ensconced in high branches, the facility’s two lemurs, unreachable and invisible in their resemblance to shriveled jackfruits, may have been the most fortunate of the inmates. The “cutest” attracting the most attention from us—the sleeping civets and the tarsiers, both nocturnal and arboreal—were curled and perched where they were within our importunate attention and pitiless smart phones.

Standing apart from the cage of tarsiers and the photo-frenzy, I noticed a forlorn pool. There was no marker, just fallen leaves, mossy pebbles, and two brown sticks. Or water snakes. Or maybe not.

To survive, animals shut us out. Or must learn to.


(mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 14, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Different

HOW many types of “friendly” are out there?

Crisscrossing Manila and Cebu, I picked up a new word: “checkpoint friendly”. I had to Google to understand why airport inspection personnel have shifted their interest from my clothing to my gadgets.

A laptop can hide a bomb, confirms the search. The Transportation Security Administration advises that carrying laptops in a “checkpoint friendly bag” with a “butterfly style, tri fold style, or sleeve style” speeds up the airport checking process.

Just when I choose shoes that are easy to slip on and refrain from using a belt, airport security personnel no longer demand that I remove my jacket, shoes, and belt before undergoing the electronic and manual checks.

Recently, I had to take out a laptop and notebook from a tote and put these in separate trays. On another occasion, the person manning the scanner and a colleague discussed lengthily the image of the same tote before the latter requested me to open the bag and remove for closer inspection two pouches containing the gadgets’ accessories.

Peering at my purple MacBook Air power cord, the officer asked me what it was. Irony is the last thing I expect from the bureaucracy. I answered: my friend crocheted this for me, referring to the yarn in shifting shades of purple that Y. devoted her weekend to in covering the white-coated loops.

Both men looked back at me. Crochet hooks or knitting needles? I wondered suddenly, seeing Y. work with her hands: driving motorcycles, cleaning them, painting, cleaning her brushes, crocheting…

Then I remembered that Y. loops and ties the yarn by hand. She joked then I was so obsessed with keeping my year-old cord white and clean, she would make it easier when I reentered the university as a graduate student.

Indeed, in the library where other students’ cords of white and black are snaking on the floor, mine is the only purple serpent. An undergraduate once asked me where I purchased my cord. Because this was a library and not an airport and I was facing a fellow admirer of art and not security authorities, I smiled and remembered Y.’s hands and their movements as she sent me off with waves of purple.

“they taught me different is wrong,” Ani DiFranco sings in her poem, “My IQ”. In the airport, I took another look again inside my bag and saw the notebooks and pens I bought as gifts to encourage two friends to write.

“'cause silence/ is violence/ in women and poor people,” writes DiFranco in the same poem. “'cause every tool is a weapon -/ if you hold it right.”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 7, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Discomfort women

WE never see her. For many students at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman, the restaurants at the Ang Bahay ng Alumni are too pricey for gobbled down meals. This hub, though, becomes a favorite when folks are celebrating a reunion, the turning in of the final paper or just one’s grip on day-to-day sanity.

Rushing past her, many of us hardly glance. Distractions are not just of the intimate, academic or ruminative kinds; the Bahay ng Alumni is just one node in the campus network of art and history.

The whole school is a people’s museum, where any citizen can freely enter and gaze at the works of National Artists and creatives sans titles. In this treasury, it is understandable to overlook the “Alma Mater,” the 1996 sculpture of a woman offering a wreath to visitors entering the lobby of The Home of the Alumni.

Created by National Artist for Sculpture Napoleon Abueva in homage to UP, the “Alma Mater” is frequently left out in online posts extolling the bounteous legacy in Diliman. It was only during the fifth year of my studies that I spared her a moment of curiosity—who is she?— when my friend M. and I asked a security guard to take our photo at the lobby.

Both of us are inept at taking a selfie but we looked around for a hallmark for our reunion, perennially postponed by the disruptions afflicting working women who are also wives and mothers.

That shot of our beaming beneath the bronze woman was shared by M. on social media, but my scrutiny of the “Alma Mater” only came six months after the taking of the photo I have mentally captioned as “Tulo ka Babaye (three women)”.

I was in the cemetery in Cebu, visiting my father, when a family friend stopped to chat. He beamed when he said their youngest child recently graduated.

Son, he told this child in Cebuano, as your mother and I don’t have a daughter and you have no job yet, I will use you as a daughter. Please wash the dishes.

T. and his wife put all their sons through college from what they earned in “maintaining” the graves of several families in the cemetery. T. is no stranger to manual labor nor to the cooperation needed for partners to raise a family. Yet, why would he put a gender to housework with no pay or recompense?

Abueva’s works invite a meditation to break expectations, from the iconic “Risen/Dead Christ” at the Parish of Holy Sacrifice in UPD to the quietly subversive “Alma Mater”. The term in Latin literally means “generous mother” or someone who nourishes.

Those invisibles behind countless hot meals, ironed clothes, and enlightened minds are gendered by social edict. Can we finally see her only when she breaks out of these comfort zones?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 30, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”