Tomatoes

TOMATOES change color, even these store-bought ones. I can eat raw the ripe ones with fried “bolinao (anchovies)” for meal after meal. Waiting for the hard green irregular spheres to turn pliant and mushy, I am aware of not just shunting aside the querulous insistence of appetite or imperative command of hunger.

A subtle exhibitionist, every tomato bides its pace, clinging to its swirls of sunset yellow before suffusing into orange and flaming finally into bright shiny red.

The “tomati” in Nahuatl or Aztec, spoken by the ancients in Mexico, gave birth to the “tomate” of the Spanish colonizers and then the “tomato” of the English imperialists.

Though much co-opted, the tomato dares one to stereotype. Botanists regard the tomato as a fruit; nutritionists, a vegetable. I am grateful that farmers just have the common sense to raise it.

I take after my mother in munching green tomatoes dipped in a little salt. I know Ma will never want to try fried green tomatoes or meet the oddballs in Fanny Flagg’s 1987 novel, “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café”.

Yet, when it is safe to go home, I will bring her my secondhand copy so she can make the acquaintance of Idgie and Ruth, Evelyn and Ninnie. God willing, when Mama turns 81 this year the coronavirus disease will just be another scourge, like the homophobia, racism, and ageism that people take on, dip in a little salt, and lick.

One or two of the best tomatoes I have set aside, dried in the sun, and planted. Summer is best for tomatoes because there is no rain to dislodge the buds and flowers. The most beautiful name for the tomato is given by the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “ripened flower ovary”.

The earth is also an ovary, sex, uterus. We live amongst birds and in their nesting and migrating, their droppings result in seedlings cropping up in odd places. Tomato seeds, like the future sun worshippers that these will become, are germinating in the ash-mixed soil from our compost pile that faces the sun.

Three months ago, the ash wafted from the Taal Volcano eruption made breathing difficult. Freed from the sulfur that evaporated and darkened by rain, decaying leaf, and organic rot, the ash makes the soil richer, better for our small garden.

For now, the seeds in their reused coffee cups of soil are invisible, quarantined in their dark earthy wombs. Soaking up the sun and just enough water, the invisible will have presence one day.

From quarantine to harvest, the tomato holds out this promise.

"Don't give up before the miracle happens," wrote Fanny Flagg.



Ripening. Tomatoes after two weeks of enhanced community quarantine. Silang, 29 March 2020



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 29, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Nests

HALF of the mahogany trees growing beyond the fence have started their summer ritual: shedding leaves.

Silhouetted against the half-finished high structure abandoned after last Tuesday’s imposition of the enhanced community quarantine in Luzon are bare branches festooned with the sprigs of young leaves and seed pods.

Sweeping the fallen leaves into some semblance of order, I look for bird’s nests. I saved two from previous summers: leaves and twigs joined by a yellowish substance the birds spit and sculpt into wondrous panniers.

My search for nests are paused at times by a neighbor hollering a greeting. Suspended from reporting to work, more residents have taken an interest in sweeping the streets, fixing the house, and noticing neighbors.

Social distancing has replaced the protective masks we once wore while clearing Taal ashfall from gutters and sidewalks. Better than any navigation software app is this neighborly exchange of which side roads to take for a quick run to a pharmacy or grocery and which checkpoints absolutely prohibit entry.

Meals to cook, children to distract, telephone conferences to join. The new normal has begun to seep into the old routines. Online, friends and family continue with updates. The new coronavirus (Covid-19) comes up first in the thread but quickly merges with and becomes submerged in the banter.

“Monggos (mung bean)” topped the online conversation last Friday. Soup variations were made in Sydney by my sister and I in Silang. My friend S. looks for lentils and other beans in the depleted grocery shelves in Las Vegas. Guided by his mother, my graduate classmate L., E. experimented at home with monggo beans. Another classmate, M., shared in our group photos of his garden experiments.

When R. suggested pickling the mangoes ripening in M.’s backyard in Iligan into “sambal,” Indonesia’s version with chilli, imaginations and appetites ran off to another direction.

Under the familial and familiar runs a slipstream. I know it’s there even if I only glimpse glints in the darkness. The politeness at checkpoints, the nightly siren, the silent highway, the kilo of wrinkling calamansi costing 250 pesos at the neighborhood tiangge. Something out there makes it hard to think and write.

L. puts it succinctly: “maingay ang isip (the mind screams)”.

Among insects, true nests are created only by the social ones. Ants and termites connect chambers and tunnels for movement and ventilation, according to scientists. Do social insects perceive threats as we do? Do they experience lockdowns? How do they care for their most vulnerable?

This will be a long summer of seeking nests.


Halad. Nest of unknown bird retrieved from leaf pile, Silang, 21 March 2020



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 22, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Prepper

IT was past three in the morning. Friday the 13th. Wondered what woke me and read the phone screen: “Kumusta namo diha (how are you doing)?”

So S. and I reconnected the gap of some 30 years when I stayed put in the country and she married, divorced, remarried somewhere in Nevada. We met in one of my earliest jobs and clicked like sisters. I was definitely the “manang (older sister),” as unbending as a stick to the flash of sunbeam that S. was to everyone.

We bonded over, what else, the coronavirus. I mentioned the lockdown of Metro Manila and remembered the three eggs left in the fridge.

S. said her investments took a beating but that she has “cushions” laid away. Then she sent images of their stored drums of water treated every five years and canisters of food that will “stay fresh for 25 years”.

Survivalists, as portrayed in the 2012 National Geographic series, “Doomsday Preppers,” intend to survive a final holocaust, whether it be a “super volcano” eruption or pandemic. Yet, according to “The New Yorker” series, “Annals of Obsessions,” this American subculture is not just about stockpiling food or weapons.

Jason Charles of New York, when not on duty as a fireman, gets together with other families to learn how to prepare for the worst.

“The antisocialness that is developing in us is gonna be the danger for us,” says Charles. “We need to be social, we need to communicate… people need one another to survive.”

After going through my first phreatic eruption, first ashfall, and first lockdown, I think nothing is worse than the miasma of anxiety floating around as we freefall away from the ordinary and comforting.

Suddenly, respecting someone’s space has become “social distancing,” an infection control mechanism. “Quarantine,” “isolate,” “work remotely,” and “disinfect”—our buzz words move us inexorably to this moment, ever since we think in filter bubbles and connect on social media that’s often not.

In the age of anxiety, how can the preppers be a subculture? Starting “hard up” as an immigrant, S. cut her own hair, “never spent a dime” on fast food burger, did not own a credit card, and saved her “small salary.” S. never sent a balikbayan box to her family in the north of Cebu.

Lots she bought instead for her siblings. Relations live in her properties in Cebu City. Living in an “old small house” she bought with all her cash in 2009, when unpaid mortgages threw Americans to the streets, S. has not stopped being a Pinoy in the arid and freezing desert of Nevada.

Only a Pinoy knows what it means to have a roof over one’s head. And own this roof.

Thirty years ago, I nicknamed S. after a sunbeam for the joy she gives. My memory remains good.


Sunning beauties. Kitkat and Tigr, Silang, 13 March 2019


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 15, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Monggo Friday

I HAVE a bias against Fridays: in the country, this is the day when monggo (mung bean) soup is only available.

Why Friday? As a commuter, I have learned never to schedule any errand or appointment on a Friday. When I edited for a newspaper, most of the invitations for launches and parties fell on Friday. Mall-wide weekend sales start on a Friday. Workers go home to provinces on Friday. Road traffic peaks on a Friday. Cursing along Edsa is worst on Friday.

On Friday, cafeterias on campus serve monggo soup. Only on Friday.

Why only Friday? The Lenten practice to abstain from meat on Fridays is in keeping with the tradition to witness and share Jesus Christ’s Passion and death on Friday.

Why doesn’t the Friday-only rule also apply to eggplant or squash?

Whether in Cebu or Manila, the race for monggo soup is quick and brief. Once, after the husband and I had monggo soup for lunch, I lined up again to bring some home for dinner, only to see the chafing dish scraped clean of the greenish brown goo.

Then, as if by a miracle, the server came out of the kitchen, saying there was enough left in the pot for a last serving. That night, the single bowl of monggo soup we shared was clammy, scanty, and soul-satisfying.

Whether embellished and reinvented in a restaurant or splashed on a chipped bowl at a roadside stall, monggo soup is best shared. The greediest and stingiest operator may serve some watery version that you can either drown in or pan as if sifting for gold instead of mung bean but mongo soup never seems to run out when you are spooning this on rice, catching up with your mealtime companions, and telling your own stories.

My unforgettable monggo soup story happened when, in college, I watched one of the hands clamoring for a bowl accidentally drop a five-peso coin into the pot. The seller expertly fished out the coin with the ladle. At least, a bowl of monggo soup then did not require a twenty-peso bill.

Recently, I made my first monggo soup. Given my kitchen incompetence, I turned to the Internet and learned that mung bean soup is eaten by many Asians during summer. Monggo has anti-inflammatory properties that protect one from heat stroke and high body temperature.

In the end, I made the soup the way my yaya prepared this for our family and still does. I sautéed garlic, onion, and tomato. I added bits of ginger and dried-fish leftovers. I counted five heads and hoped the petrified brains and ossified eyes added extra flavor.

Last, I added the tiny beans, shedding off their green jackets and revealing creamy flesh after a night of soaking. And yes, we had my monggo soup on a Friday.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 8, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Together

WHAT would be the story surrounding a policeman meeting a fixer on a train?

A meeting I witnessed on the Manila Metro Rail Transit (MRT) System departed from the one created by Patricia Highsmith in her novel, “Strangers on a Train,” published in 1950 and turned the year after into one of the great works of Alfred Hitchcock, film noir master.

In both fictions, two strangers strike a chance conversation and discover they each want someone out of their life. One man, a psychopath, suggests to the other (an architect, in Highsmith’s novel; a tennis player, in Hitchcock’s film) that they kill the person they detest but swap murders to avoid detection.

Crushed and jabbed by bodies and bags in the MRT, I remember thinking it would not be implausible to ignite between two men a charge so electrical, it fuses them into the instant, dark intimacy of not just planning to commit the ultimate transgression—taking another person’s life—but also jettisoning their identity and plunging into the unfathomable murk of someone’s depravity.

Or is the corruption their own and the other person is not a stranger after all but one’s doppelgänger, dark half, twisted twin?

At some point in my ten-station MRT ride, these two old men must have boarded the train and stood close to me. They would have remained unremembered faces in an uneventful routine train trip except for a second tandem of old men boarding our train at the next station.

The first tandem was paid to process the registrations of public utility vehicles. The second tandem are retired policemen processing their pensions.

These men’s stories I learned from the more loquacious ex-cop, who had the clarity of one born to tell stories for a room (or train) full of listeners. The ex-cop told his fellow retiree that the stranger standing next to him also stood beside him when both of them rode the MRT that dawn.

To encounter again the same man on the MRT ride at the end of the same day apparently was a coincidence worth putting an arm around the other person and sharing a lifetime’s equivalence of stories.

They were not ex-cops and transport fixers, just old men with old men’s memories of the days when the sap ran quick and strong.

There is a sixteenth-century Latin verb that means “together”. In the age of pandemics, the verb “coire” is a curse, an invitation to draw a line and view the rest of the world from the high tower of paranoia. Highsmith and Hitchcock created fictions as allegories of society stigmatizing deviants, homosexuals, and Communists.

“Coire” gives birth to “coition” and “coitus,” capturing possibly one of the most transcendent of human connections. Narratives, as we choose, shape life.



Open palm, open mind. From the Jewish hamsa to the Catholic gesture of prayer and offering, the open palm is worth heeding in fraught times.



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 1, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”