Smell check

LIVE by your nose.

I spend a lot of time at home with the K-pups (once four, now three “kinit-an (abandoned)” Aspin puppies since Trail passed away last June) under community quarantine. I have tried, but not very hard, to discipline them.

They, though, have convinced me to explore more with my nose. The munificence of their wisdom, specially under current circumstances so effective at quelling the sense of expectation, rushed in when I picked recently lemoncito fruits.

Six years ago, when the husband and I moved in, I threw on the hard, rock-strewn soil all the seeds and peelings from the kitchen. When the first shoots appeared, our city-bound selves wondered: which of those seeds are these?

Year after year, the four clusters shooted up like sentinels. Except for long thorns encircling the trunk, these bushes did not put forth anything until, for the first time, the topmost branches drooped from the weight of fruits.

The orbs dangled above for days until they flushed yellow. While I snipped the fruits by the stem, the K-pups sniffed at the ripe globes rolling on the ground. Lemoncito, they decided, is uninteresting. I, on the other hand, cannot get over smelling my hands from the oil that oozes from and coats the fruits.

Six fruits or more I squeeze for a refreshing drink. Just one fruit releases a stream of olfactory notes, segues, echoes lapping at the edge of memory. The nose knows.

Perhaps walking and staying upright makes us rely less on our noses. We wait for an odor to creep on us, seduce or assault, pique or assail. If we had our noses closer to the ground, would we, like dogs and cats, follow our noses?

During a first visit to the vet, we made three separate trips, taking first Rem, then Noki, and finally Play. Though the three dogs all lack exposure to the world beyond our home, they had different reactions.

Rem shivered while inside the clinic. Noki defecated and urinated. Play dribbled urine. All three did not react at all to the injections. The only other dogs in the clinic that day were having a trim and shampoo, composed like matrons relaxing under the pampering.

Nothing to fear, an assistant reassured Noki while inserting a thermometer in her anus.

Snuffling at the air, I rubbed and soothed Noki’s haunch, unable to smell but imagining what the K-pups were sensitive to: the narratives of smells lingering from countless dogs and cats going through confusion, disorientation, anxiety, fear, pain during their visits. Plus some matronly fussing.

You should never lie to children or to animals. You can’t.

Making noisy breathing sounds, I rubbed noses with the K-pups afterwards. You bet the nose knows.




Nose up. Source of image: Fred Blunt from Flickr.com



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 26, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Dear PJ

PARDON, Pablo John F. Garcia, representative of Cebu’s Third District, head of the Technical Working Group (TWG) recommending denial of the franchise application of the ABS-CBN Corporation, and one of the 70 members of Congress (#28) who blocked the network from using a frequency in the country’s broadcast spectrum for 25 years anew.

Once I walked with you as a “kauban” during a 1980s rally of workers and tricycle drivers in Mandaue. While distributing leaflets, I reread the manifesto and wondered: what if you had written that tract, slashed out the polysyllabic words, and rendered the substance spare, vivid, pellucid?

For I know you better through your writing. As columnists, we laid our infants—my younger son and your first-born—with the other newsroom babies photographed lying on a conference room table in 1998, the launching of “Cebu Daily News”. Your irreverent column was a favorite in the daily that challenged the two-corned competition between the two English papers in Cebu.

Writing grows with the writer. Since you graduated from the University of the Philippines (UP) - Cebu High School with a Gold Medal for Journalism and became editor-in-chief of “The Philippine Collegian” while studying at the UP College of Law (fourth-placer in the 1993 Philippine Bar Exam), the years honed your pen.

Acuity, parsimony. A phrase you wrote could cut when a lesser writer would need a page to inflict a graze on repute. As the blogger Onion-skinned, you skewered in your exposés of Cebu media. Was it then that unease crept like a slug because these journalists were critical of Cebu governor Gwen Garcia, your sister?

Your sting as a gadfly of media rests on a deep familiarity with the workings of the press. So I wonder why, after rereading the 40-page TWG report, I could not find a mention of at least one merit of the ABS-CBN company: it brought essential information to a public.

Public service without the office. As you emailed me on Aug. 2, 2014 for an interview I requested for my graduate thesis: “people rely upon journalists for their information… even in the shaping of their views.”

So it is that the TWG report rife with the demerits of an applicant seeking the “privilege” of broadcast frequency stands out in my mind not for the 40 pages of legalese or for that telling phrase—“this matter is in no way related to the freedom of the press”—but for an absence as palpating as silence.

What you wrote of the blogosphere in your August 2014 email ricochets: “There are relationships involved in every ecosystem, so it's essential to point out what these relationships are. And to remember always that, like every ecosystem, it also generates its own trash.”



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 19, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Renewals

AT 81, my mother is still a stereotype-buster. I was shaken awake at dawn by Mama making a video call via the tablet given by her siblings on her birthday.

Despite this being the first time in eight decades that she is dipping her toes in digital media, she is more omniscient than ever, empowered by Netflix and Messenger.

Did you quarrel your husband? she asks in greeting.

I check my husband—unharmed and sleeping—and tell Ma she should ease on the action movies before bedtime. She tells me she has not slept since she discovered Netflix.

She demands to know why she cannot see us on the screen. Is my husband really okay?

Except for projecting some murderous harpy’s designs onto me, Ma exploring the world wide web reminds me of the power of renewals and our rites to preserve them.

Last year, counting down to her 80th, I roped in my sister to the superstition of not mentioning she was 79 and rounding off her actual age to end with the good-luck figure of “0”. My nieces thought they were flying in from Sydney for Lola’s 81st birthday last year.

So this year, after my sister explained the mechanics of our “dagdag-bawas (add-minus)” scheme with Ma’s age, my older niece had only one conclusion: “fake news”.

“Pwera buyag”. According to the Sugbuanon advocate Lilia Tio, folks say this to protect the subject from a reversed blessing. When my sister posted that Ma looked girlishly happy holding her tablet in my aunt’s Facebook post, I muttered “pwera buyag” to ward off illness or any misfortune brought about by a passing “diwata (fairy)” overhearing the praise and getting envious of a mortal’s blessing.

I am too lazy to explain on Messenger to my logical nieces that what seems like “fake news” from the old country has a place in the age of Covid-19. When my younger niece started menstruation, her Ma tried to convince her to wipe that first blood on her face to prevent future pimples.

Predictably, this dermatologic heresy shocked my nieces, whom I love despite their rigid rationality, “pwera gaba”. According to Ms. Lilia, this is the reversal of “pwera buyag,” deflecting any punishment from a person who has uttered an unkind thought.

Yaya, who raised my sister and I as if we are her own, sprinkles her talk with these expressions. She also killed a chicken and wiped its blood on my sister’s forehead on her eighth birthday, “pwera buyag,” as well as carried out that first blood anti-pimple incantation on her (only after chasing and catching my sister, who squawked as if possessed by the chicken spirit).

Yaya never did that for me, I accused my sister. Yang loves you, too, she said. You were just hard to find among your books and drawings, “pwera gaba”.


Turning chicken? (Source of image: Shutterstock.com)



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 12, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

If

IF I were a hundred years old today, I would put my faith on a “suwiter (sweater)”.

In the American colonial-era periodical, “Bag-ong Kusog,” I came across in its editorial page a two-sentence article advising the reader to choose the right sweater and avoid catching the influenza going around Cebu on Jan. 28, 1927.

The final line clinched it, weaving fashion and public health: “Pangitaa ang ‘Sport Coat Sweater’, kon dili ang ‘Ideal Sweater’.”

The “leading periodical of its time,” according to the 1975 research of National Artist Resil B. Mojares, the “Bag-ong Kusog,” has been digitized by the University of San Carlos Cebuano Studies Center and may be viewed on The Nueva Fuerza Online Archive.

In the age of coronavirus disease (Covid-19), this century-old publication has become my favored “layas (escape)” hatch.

Though I miss the hushed-library sensation of turning slowly an almost sacrosanct sheet of newsprint, the PDF files of the periodical are clear enough for daydreaming.

If I were seven years old in 1927, I would bite all fingers in indecision, unsure what to order and buy from the Mercer Book Company: “Ang Lunario” for P0.20 or “Pocket Dictionary” for P1.50.

More expensive than the dictionaries of Castellana and Binisaya “hinubad (stripped? unchained?)” into English, the new colonizer’s tongue, was the P2 price of “How to write love letters” at the Gacura Mailing Store on Dalan Borromeo.

Two pesos for a book was eyebrow-raising in 1927, when “50 sintabos ang bulan” or P6 for a year was the subscription price of “Bag-ong Kusog”.

If I were seven and had two pesos, I would not choose love but the Philippine Candy Factory (Telephone 388). No seven-year-old can be deaf to their siren call: “Always remember… ‘PhiCyFy’, don’t forget it, they satisfy”.

Nostalgia, exacerbated by quarantine, cloaks the past in romance. A shipment of “Crown” bicycles “for men and boys” was announced in a half-page ad on Jan. 28, 1927. With P150, the most expensive “Model 75, Motobike de luxe” could be brought home by the workman, office messenger, school boy, boy scout or any male taking “pleasure… in the great outdoors”.

Five pages after, another half-page ad shows a 10-year-old girl embroidering on a “maquinita,” which C. Q. Demerry Store offered at P2.50, discounted for all “kababayen-ang sapian kon kabus (women, rich or poor)” to master the craft.

What if I do not fancy sitting for hours before a maquinita? What if I want to escape on a bike? What if I do not believe biking devirginizes disobedient girls who mangle their sewing?

When such questions raise their unruly heads, I know I am back in the present. “If’s” never satisfy for long.



“Old progressive”. (Source of illustration: Dreamstime.com)



* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 5, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917322631)