Magic circle

THE LITTLE cat crossing 29th Street looked it was about to go under a silver SUV when the vehicle slowed down. The cat reached the curb, unperturbed.

One cannot simply unsee roadkill. I still remember riding with my father and sister to school. In the 1970s, Mango Avenue in Cebu at 6 a.m. was a placid unspooling ribbon of asphalt outside the St. Theresa’s College.

And then a public utility jeepney roared down the opposite lane and hit a pack of dogs sniffing around on the street. One dog rolled in the gutter, a red banner tailing its hind legs, the keening more unendurable than the sight, still indelible all these decades.

Last Monday, the driver in the silver SUV was not speeding despite the morning rush. She or he slowed down, observing a rule observed by many motorists at the Bonifacio Global City (BGC) in Taguig, Manila to give way to the pedestrian. Even the four-legged ones.

The older son and I were sitting on a park bench at the Burgos Circle when the little cat crossed the street. The park is named after the patriot José Burgos, who, with fellow priests Mariano Gomez and Jacinto Zamora formed the Gomburza trio that died for espousing the equality of Indios and Spaniards during the Spanish Period.

Although members of the religious elite, they saw the discrimination of Filipinos, including the native clergy, and challenged the authorities to conduct reforms. In a mock trial, where their own lawyers testified against them, the priests were found guilty of stirring an uprising of workers at the Cavite Naval Yard. They died by garrote at the Bagumbayan, now the Luneta Park.

Against such history, is the Burgos Circle simply an enclave of the privileged? It IS surrounded by the headquarters of multinational firms, condominiums, and international chains of cafes and bars.

Yet, it is not only the moneyed or privileged benefitting from the Burgos Circle. Beneath its center island, the Burgos Park, is a retarding basin. Constructed at the initial phase of the BGC development, the P60-million retarding basin stores run-off during heavy rain, directing the floodwater to the creeks that empty into the Manila Bay.

The Burgos Park retarding basin is only one of two existing in Metro Manila, credited by the Department of Public Works and Highways as preventing the flooding of the EDSA and the Kalayaan Ave.

The Gomburza died proving that one can overcome the blinders imposed by class and privilege to fight for a just cause that benefits not only the people born sharing one’s circumstances and biases. One day in a park named after the patriot Burgos, I reflected how the Gomburza legacy lives on in our times.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 27, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Washi

SHE thought of herself as a washi housewife. Washi is the fancy paper favored by hobbyists decorating their journals in the YouTube videos she had been watching frequently.

In these scrapbooks, the washi is often just a strip holding down the corner of a cute cut-out. Sometimes, the hobbyist will stick a washi in a bare spot in the page, relieving it with the tape’s wash of color or delicate tracery.

In the Japanese pop culture of “kawaii,” washi tape, no matter how cute, stays at the periphery. Marginalia, she thought, applying it to herself.

If she didn’t live with him, she would be an absentee housewife. She knows she would rather read books than prepare meals and clean the place. Not that she minds the washing after meals. There is something inarguable and preordained about sluicing dirty dishes with water, soaping and rinsing, and drying them.

After she replaces the clean dishes in the racks, she takes a whiff of the plates’ sparkling expectancy, their readiness to be called again for the next meal, the subsequent dousing and purging.

When the cat gave birth last Tuesday, she counted it a blessing that he was gone the next day for a business trip. The cat was a stray that once brought her kittens and stayed. She gave birth to another litter but nested it elsewhere. She never saw that brood.

The thread of mewling she first heard while she was lost reading and trying to extricate herself from a writer arguing about sex, gender, and desire.

When she followed that keening to the box she had discarded after unpacking it of groceries, when she peered in and found the cat panting and the sleek, wet thing lying between her sopping hind legs, she panicked.

Her children were grown. Menopause was a thoughtless guest who promised to come but so far, had stayed away. Giving birth was hardly on her reading list, but she did what she thought the cat needed based on what she remembered from long ago: a bowl of water and food.

And an umbrella. It was near noon when the second thing slipped out and the third. When the cat finally emerged to drink the bowl dry, she took a break herself, feeling she had taken part in the cat and kittens’ passage.

The first evening she didn’t sleep well. After supper, many homeowners let their dogs out to run and pee. From the upstairs window, she watched the dogs bark and chase up and down their street, her fear coming and going with their baying.

At first light, she moved the box with the kittens to the kitchen where the grills prevented anything bigger than a cat from entering. The cat, clean and well-groomed again, re-entered the box. She stood outside, sleeplessness sluicing out all dreams of sparkling plates.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 20, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Crazies

I SUSPECT every neighborhood harbors a crazy cat person or two. In my street, that’s me.

It is hard to hold the labels at bay for persons who not only love cats but will fight for them. Doesn’t “crazy” apply when a neighbor’s Chow wanders into our yard and zooms in on the pellets left out for the street cats and I growl and spit until the interloper backtracks with puffy tail tucked in between its puffy hind legs?

In the eyes of homeowners living next to the crazy cat person, the label is more than justified. One day, our neighbor asked me who I had been arguing with the other night.

The husband was away on a trip so I wondered if I had been talking aloud again with my dissertation. Then I remembered Whitey showing up while I was washing dishes.

Whitey is the alpha tom cat in my street. He is not one of the regular feral cats who stop and dine at our place. Whenever I spot his still white figure at the porch, I feel, from his unblinking ochre stare, that he only deigns to check out our hut under his vassalage. It is only lately that he growls at me but always from a distance.

The night he turned up, I was shocked by the bleeding spots on his head. Did someone try to scalp you, Cat? I asked.

Whitey yowled, a yammer that reminded me of bolts, screws, and nails jumbling inside that once unsullied, still handsome head. I listened and replied: Well, I hope you took away something of their own, too.

To my neighbor, I explained that I asked Whitey why he had suddenly gone bald. And the cat told me it was none of my business.

It is no surprise that I have the shortest of chats with humans and longer ones with cats.

To homeowners who only see cats as unending messes to clean up after and drive off, the neighbor who feeds and shelters cats is part of the problem. Unlike with dogs, those paragons of domesticity, guarding one’s home and community cannot be delegated to such mercurial creatures.

I agree. Cats are good for crazies. When a cat sees you, it sees what is lurking behind that façade of ordinariness and respectability. Between the person tethered to routine for sanity and the free soul that comes and goes when it wills, there is a connection that can only be traversed by pussyfooting.

Or by Bing Crosby. Famous for warbling the classic “White Christmas,” he said, “Unless we make Christmas an occasion to share our blessings, all the snow in Alaska won’t make it ‘white’.”

My favorite of his holiday songs is “Christmas is A-comin’,” which has these lines: “When I’m feeling blue, when I’m feeling low/ I start to think about the happiest man I know/… If you haven’t got a friendly cat may God bless you!”



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

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

Note to a detainee

I AM awful with my biases. For instance, I think dogs are virtue incarnate and cats are all wiles.

Every night, brushing my teeth before going to bed, I hear the clinking of the chained dog of our neighbor. I have never seen this dog. I have seen the other dogs owned by our neighbor but not this particular dog.

Yet, this unseen dog is more real to me as a character than the other dogs I sometimes see chasing each other or dozing in our neighbor’s porch. When I was gingerly brushing the sore gums cushioning a wisdom tooth the dentist had scraped until all my toes and more had curled from the tension, I talked to the dog in my head, soothing it as it dragged its chain from one spot to another in that cramped space beyond our kitchen windows.

Who would put a dog in chains to guard a washing machine, a clothesline, and a family of birds that raise a racket every morning in their nest beneath the eaves? The neighbor we share a wall with.

Sometimes, I tell the dog his is not such a tough job. He could be sniffing for hot meat or banned drugs without any hope of retiring on a government pension. He could be dodging mean cretins on meaner streets. He could be padding around in nappies, tutus or some such indignity.

Every time, that softly chinking chain always overpowers the alibis I line up in the kitchen window like imaginary biscuits I toss down to the dog I cannot see but I can hear. I think all dogs should be free to run, explore with their nose, roll in the dirt, and make those disgusting mini-pools with their lolling tongues.

My sister’s late dog had very short legs. Whatever the season, my sister woke early to carry out Sonny because her bladder became full to bursting overnight but she could not run fast enough to reach the backdoor without accident.

I never asked my sister why she didn’t let Sonny just sleep in the garden. Or why she and her daughters take Angel, the dog that came after Sonny, to the park to sniff and meet other dogs.

Rescued and fostered for a while with a family that kept other dogs, Angel had to adjust to being the only dog when she joined my sister and her daughters. She buried bones all over my sister’s lawn, hiding her hoard from imaginary rivals.

Perhaps missing the other dogs she burrowed with in her foster home, Angel slept on the pile of still warm, spun-dried clothes my sister spent her Sunday afternoon folding. When you name after an angel a dog that comes to you with unknown baggage, you have a bottomless store of optimism that all dogs go to heaven.

Meanwhile, hang in there, comrade beyond the wall.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 6, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”