Crux

WAITING for the veterinarian to arrive for Saturday appointments reminds the husband and I of the times we waited with other parents for our sons to be dismissed from pre-school. 

To be first in the queue, we are early birds and end up chatting with other early birds. Just as I once learned tips from using bright hues for body stamps (blue is cool; yellow is sissy) to holding 10-minute sanity breaks for student and parent to survive supervised homework, I rediscover the Filipino as Fur Parent during the intervals preceding vaccination, spaying/neutering, check-ups, and other interactions with the vet. 

From these myriad waiting lessons is a standout: people’s usual reaction to the “asong Pinoy” (or “aspin,” meaning “mongrel”) we have brought to the vet’s clinic. “Hindi ‘yan aspin; may lahi ‘yan.” 

The intent of the speaker seems to be to compliment our dog or cat (“pusang Pinoy” or “puspin”) by observing that it looks far from being a “pure native” and shows traces of a foreign breed, implying a better bloodline. 

“Lahi” in Filipino refers to race. We take the compliment as a backhanded one, a distressing expression of the deeply ingrained bias disparaging local dogs as “askal (“asong kalye (street dog)” or “asong gala (strays)”. 

Too often, “stray” dogs and cats are blameless victims of families that move away and leave behind their pets, without a thought for the animals’ sustenance and anxiety from abandonment or dislocation. 

These “strays” are not only rendered homeless; their offspring are also doomed by human cruelty. Unspayed females mate with uncastrated males and result in unwanted litters.

The overriding motivation behind our, so far, five cat spayings and neutering of a sire or a male aspin is a commitment to end this vicious cycle of irresponsibly allowing dogs and cats to uncontrollably breed and then blaming the animals for threatening public safety and health.

Breaking this cycle means not just planning and budgeting for expenses in engaging a private veterinarian but also involvement in ensuring the animal safely fasts for at least eight hours before surgery and administering medicine for 7-10 days to hasten the healing. 

The crux of the matter in responsible pet ownership is reversing the racist mentality that only the more expensive imported breeds of dogs and cats deserve veterinarian care. 

After a fellow fur parent pleasantly asked me if we had intentionally cut off the tail of our puppies (born stumpless like their aspin sire and dam), the husband and I reinforce our belief that, whether puspin or aspin, the Pinoy deserves our best, not the scraping of the dregs of humanity.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 21, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Leaves

THE CARCASS was beside the highway. Due to its age and immensity, it looked like a boulder blasted from a mountain than a stump that had once seen a hundred years come and go.

The husband said that ten men could not move that trunk. Still of use, its branches were carted away. Before we pulled away, my last sight was of a few leaves littering the ground near the stump.

Yearends put to mind these leaves of mine, a mortal’s tale that pales to the stories from trees and mountains. Except that sometimes more than the tale, the telling is everything.

One of the things put to the test by the pandemic, running for nearly two years now, is our sense of time. In the naturalized order, we account for time. What have I planned today? Who will I be five years from now?

Until physical then social isolation disrupted the flow, the calendar paced our days. This Middle English word comes from the Old French “calendier,” which evolved from the Latin “calendarium,” meaning “account book”.

“Turning a new leaf” does not just physically correspond to flipping the calendar to the next month. In the book of days, turning a leaf means reading a saint’s inspirational anecdote or a historical turning point intended to elevate the reader’s life of the mind. 

I discovered recently on the Internet Hillman’s hyperlinked and searchable website of the 1869 classic, Robert Chambers’ “Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, Including Anecdote, Biography, & History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character”.

A Scottish gentleman whose inborn lameness prevented him from joining games, Robert swapped jam sandwiches for books. Later, he teamed up with his brother William to sell books for a living when poverty shut the doors to university and priesthood.

According to the bookofdays.com, a habit of scrupulously accounting for his days boosted the Chambers’ bookstall. Robert woke up early to read; this way, he also reduced his use of candles. By reading aloud to a neighbor and his son as they baked, Robert added freshly baked bread to his paltry meals.

In the Chambers’ “Book of Days,” saints, royalty, and historical figures fill every leaf with ideas that met Robert’s criterion of “improving the fireside wisdom of the present day”. 

Since the pandemic began, the journals I keep each year harbor more ghosts than leaves of wisdom. These empty leaves are more redolent of the Irish singer Enya’s version of the “Book of Days”: “No day, no night, no moment,/ Can hold me back from trying./ I’ll flag, I’ll fall, I’ll falter,/ I’ll find my day may be/ Far and Away.”

With apologies to Robert Chambers, I’ll find my day.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 13, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Tabi”

INTERESTING to follow are two foreigners who documented Visayans and the superstitions they believed at the turn of the century. Published in the July-September 1906 volume of “The Journal of American Folklore” is the paper written by W. H. Millington and Berton L. Maxfield on “Philippine (Visayan) Superstitions”.

Millington and Maxfield hold that the beneficent effects of the free public education introduced by the American colonizers were overpowered by the pre-colonial belief system; the “lizards, rats, and bats” that “swarm(ed)” and took over local households when the humans were away; and even the questionable actuations of neighbors that indoctrinated in Visayans “in general” the belief in “three kinds of spirits: the tamawos, dwendes, and asuangs”. 

More often than not, the people—whether believers or skeptics—are more interesting than the belief. Millington and Maxfield scoff at the “half-educated people” who share the superstitions of the “lower classes” in our islands; in turn, I am as fascinated by these two authors who, in their unquestioning faith in rationality, education, and class, were not as different as they thought from the people they studied as specimens.

The second to the last page of their paper mentions that on the evening of Nov. 2 or All Souls’ Day, the superstitious Visayans—at least, “most of the lowest class”—prepare a sumptuous supper and put this on the ground as offering to the souls of their departed.  

Would Millington and Maxfield (or their shades) be interested to know that the practice continues on Nov. 2 more than a century later?  Did they speculate how poor Visayans could afford to lay out a “rich supper” for the unseen when they themselves were starving? 

I prefer the version taught to my sister and I by Yaya, born on Nov. 2 or “Kalag-kalag”. 

In feasts, the living take precedence over the dead. This woman taught us to light candles at twilight outside our home so the light would guide the “kalag (soul)” wandering on Kalag-kalag.

I thought this intent was risky after imbibing in her injunction to always say aloud, “tabi (excuse me)” when walking outside in the dark to avoid intruding into the spirit space Millington and Maxfield diminished into an offshoot of poverty and ignorance, stratified into the cultured but acquisitive tamawo prone to luring children into their glass castles installed under earth mounds; the seditious dwende who crash into people’s gardens; and the “cama-cama” who dwell in wells and covertly pinch black and blue couples courting by moonlight.

When I voiced my doubts aloud, Yaya assured us that the light from candles and prayers draws the right spirits to us. Tabi, tabi, po.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s November 7, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

“Butong”

NOTHING different sets apart the husband’s “suki (preferred seller)” for coconut, the family’s shack surrounded by an oasis of dark green coconuts and browning husks beside the Sta. Rosa-Tagaytay Road.

Ever since a Laguna pioneer returned home from working as a helper in the U.S. and used the plentiful coconut as substitute in making the local version of apple pie, “buko (young coconut in Filipino)” pie is a favorite “pasalubong (present)” in these parts. 

Due to its white sugar and condensed milk, though, buko pie can only be an occasional treat, not daily fare. Paring down to the basic and essential, the husband bought buko from this couple in their 30’s and was pleased to find that a coconut sold for P20 yielded about two liters of “water” and “meat,” a leap in savings from the P100 bottle of coco juice only sold in supermarkets. 

In Cebu, coconut fetches P40 to P50 a piece, especially during holidays when buko strips are popular for fruit salads. 

Beneficial for many ailments from diabetes to kidney stones, coconut is ideal as a snack or even a meal. The Cebuano “sagbay-luwag” that slips from the still pinkish coco shell to throat and gut has a less literary, ruder translation in Filipino: “malauhog” or mucus-like. I cannot think of anything else that looks and feels slimy but tastes so good. 

According to Binisaya.com, sagbay-luwag is the stage between “dalinog” and “butong”. Dalinog refers to a white and creamy substance surrounding a coconut sprout. As a child, I was often given “buwa,” a spherical, spongelike bulb found in germinating coconuts. Despite its strange appearance and texture, buwa is juicy and delicately sweet.

Cebuano is rich in capturing the diversity of desirable young coconut meat: “balatungol (tender),” “kuyamis (soft),” and “lamog (meaty)”. Between the Bisdak husband and the Silang-born suki, there is no loss in translation because the wife (her husband is often away on buying trips, as well as takes on tree-felling and -cutting) performs the time-tested technique of “reading” coconuts: knocks the coconut and listens to the echo to determine if the meat is young or mature.

A coconut between butong and “lahing (mature)” is called “bagatungol” or “ungol,” the latter term also meaning “grumble”. Shaken, the lahing rumbles. Harder and thicker, mature coconut meat is more filling, a bit akin to the consolation of accepting our easily peeved older selves.

When the suki recently sold a load of coconuts to a buko pie maker, she gave the husband and other buyers free water since the entrepreneur only needed the meat. Sweeter than butong is the kindness of strangers, unforeseen and thus, more exquisite.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 31, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Not a ghost story

UNLIKE the rest of the country, Cebu City will keep cemeteries open to fully vaccinated individuals during the “Kalag-kalag” days of Nov. 1 and 2. 

Defying the national government may make waves in the political realm. For souls, the closure of cemeteries is not an issue. There is no quarantining the dead.

Clay covers of secondary burial jars from pre-Hispanic times feature two human figures in a boat, the rear figure rowing. A museum curator told me that the ancient Filipinos believed that after death liberates the soul from its corporeal casing, the immortal continues to the destination it has been journeying in its lifetimes.

Raised as a Catholic, I believe Jesus will return and judge the living and the dead. Meanwhile, the dead are not in crypts and columbaria but among the living. 

A few nights ago, a flickering bulb brought back a nearly forgotten memory. It was near midnight when I cleared my work and switched off the lights at home, one by one. 

Downstairs, the flickering light bouncing from the toilet broke the dark into intermittent shards that hurt the eyes. Even more strangely, the set of bulbs that automatically shut down in power fluctuations all worked except for the one in the toilet. 

The shadows cast by that flickering bulb reminded me of a weekend when my cousins and I were playing “tago-tago (hide and seek)” in my grandparents’ home. Not eager to be found first and take the place of the “It” who had to find all the players, I ran inside Lola’s small dark storeroom, which we were forbidden to enter and thus, seemed to be the perfect hiding place.

Crouching in the dark, I waited for my cousin to shout that he had flushed out his brothers. Before this happened, though, a shadow was silhouetted against the door’s vents: Lola. Caught in the forbidden, I bolted out of the storeroom, got more than an earful from her, and, of course, became the next “It”.

The morning after, the bulb worked perfectly, as if it had never flickered in an icy toilet where the jets of the shower were only a degree less cold than the chill that certainly did not come from the small window closed for the night. The husband confirmed that the bulb worked when he had his shower earlier in the evening.

Power fluctuates, he said.

I stared for a time at the bulb in the morning light that mocks and dispels all fancies. I learned later that Mama, 82, made a turnaround and consented to a hospital procedure that she was earlier set against. My mother is Lola’s eldest and the most contrarian of her children.

In the journey of the living, the souls of our dead stay at the helm. The immortal steer and row, steer and row.

Wikipedia image of the lid of the Manunggul Jar at the Philippine National Museum of Anthropology

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

 * First published in the October 24, 2021 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Memorabilis

THE DAY Kitkat’s last litter of kittens found their climbing legs meant a catastrophe of sorts for my books. She moved her four kittens to a corner near a bookshelf, where they broke their 24-hour napping and nursing to explore the vastness of our half-a-duplex unit.

One of the books dislodged by feline curiosity was a slim volume that slotted perfectly between the shelf and a sack of rice where it opened like an accordion of newsprint pages, which Mo, Mongha, Heart, and Q decided was a good repository for piss and poo.

So when I had to check again Julian Go’s “American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism,” I found the fallen volume reeking unmistakably of kittens but fortunately spared their claws.

Cleaning off the worst of the kittens’ memorabilia, I wondered if Q and company had used their toilet break to browse through Go and left their tokens as proof of their opinions on: a) the U.S. colonizers, b) Filipino politicians at the cusp of their tutelage in the oldest profession of selling their nation for lucre and power, or c) the historian’s take on a contested past.

History is anything but objective and dead. I only have to scroll Facebook for five minutes to be bombarded by the War of Colors blooming among advocates for politicians making their bids for 2022.  

Underneath what is dangerously veering to become a pissing contest of hues and tints are attempts at conversations on how the past relates to the present and the nebulous future everyone, no matter their color preference, has in their sights.

I went back to Walter Benjamin (fortunately, filed digitally), a thinker whose reflections before World War II have bearing on what seems to be trending, from Facebook to Twitter: “what really happened in the past”.

For Benjamin, the view of the ideal to be achieved in the future reduces the present to an “anteroom” where “one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity”. Yet, one can also view “historical time” as “constituted… via the existential modes of memory, expectation and action”. 

Agreeing with him that the present is an “interruption of history” or an “arrest of happening,” I see it as a grievous mistake to focus on current disagreements and throw away communication and relationships. 

After the winners and losers are tallied in 2022, are we restarting life with people sharing our beliefs and biases? Unless culling takes place, the current motley company, human and feline, continues. The present is more than kindling for the future, beneath the piss and poo.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 17, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Passage

THE FIRST time I stood outside the Lepanto chapel dedicated to the Birhen sa Sto. Rosario, the farming community of this upland barangay in Alegria, on the southwestern portion of Cebu, was preparing for fiesta.

In the 1980s, I worked with communities to pilot a community wall news. It was my first job after college. A colleague handling community theater had the young and old flocking to the skits held by passionate amateurs at weekly “tabo (market gathering),” as if gods descended from the top-rating AM radio drama dominating the airwaves.

In contrast, it seemed that my main job was to explain till I was blue in my face the strange idea of a news wall that featured photographs of local farmers and was moved around the sitios. Finally, local leaders of Lepanto expressed interest to start a “hatud-balita (deliver the news)”.

At that time, Lepanto was connected by a road that was treacherous in rain or in drought, with gullies of loose rocks that made travel on horseback safer than any other means. The local horses despised me so I chose to walk and cover the sitios.

Information about the latest in forage systems and integrated pest management does not travel faster than word-of-mouth about a local worker and a certain young woman “from the city” seen walking around even before roosters have flicked the dawn dew from their cockscomb. 

When the two are again seen doing the same thing—“walking!”—before the doves roost in the gloaming, it is no longer information that is transmitted but a drama serial. I don’t know when the “hatud-balita” became “hatud-Mayette” because no one told me, certainly not the local counterpart I was training to hand over devcom duties.

I had my re-education about information in the interstices of community life: judging a beauty contest, washing clothes with other women, never refusing a dance in the fiesta, never saying no to an offered glass, even if the liquid smells like vinegar, tastes like orange, and uncoils like a snake.

No one is needed to deliver news. Information will grow legs and do the walking where there are ears.

Recently, I found myself again outside the Lepanto chapel being prepared for the October feast of Our Lady of the Rosary. Boys ran around. I was happy until I noticed they were firing toy guns with the ease of TV police hero, Cardo Dalisay.

According to communications experts, the elections in 2022 will be waged and won online. I followed the boys in their pretend games of slaughter before joining my son and husband, who the gossips and bet takers foretold I would marry because we were seen, from dawn till dusk, walking.

In many places, digital still knows nothing to the murmurs from the ground.

 

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

* First published in the SunStar Cebu’s October 10, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”  

Angels and demons

WHY cannot the Filipinos forgive and forget what the Marcoses did? It is the Christian way to forgive the sinner and condemn the sin. Ferdinand Marcos did some good for the nation, too. And he is long dead.

My tita expressed these views online and in public. She gives me pause because she is not a troll, a web ‘bot, or a social media influencer. 

When she wrote, “Am a Marcos loyalist,” Tita made me think of the Angel of History, the “Angelus Novus” in the Paul Klee painting first owned by Walter Benjamin.

I believe that Ferdinand E. Marcos (FM) is the author of the darkest and bloodiest chapters in the history of our “democracy”. My tita thinks that FM is the best president this country had. 

I was born in 1965, the year FM moved into the Palace. Bongbong Marcos (BBM) aspires to become the 17th president of the country and follow the footsteps of his father, the country’s 10th president. 

If the son succeeds, there is the number 7 that conjoins son to father in the history that will be rewritten again by the Marcoses. In numerology, seven means perfection. 

According to 6.7 million sites (rounded off, the figure is 7) turned up by Google to my search in 0.53 seconds (just 0.17 away from the number 7!), people with 7 in their “angel chart” have an angel sitting on their left shoulder, whispering answers, and making their life profound and meaningful.

The Angel of Numerology is not Klee’s emissary. Looking not so much disheveled as battered by the storm called “progress,” the angel is stupefied by the past but remorselessly drawn to his appointment with history, as the philosopher Benjamin theorized in the essay, “On the Concept of History”.

Nazism, with its mad dream of the Master Race and the campaign of genocide that erased six million Jews who fell short of Aryan perfection, affected the work of Klee and Benjamin, as well as claimed the life of the latter. 

As Benjamin wrote, “A storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm… propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”.

Despite Klee’s apocalyptic depiction and Benjamin’s depression and seeming surrender to racism and authoritarianism, the Angelus Novus (New Angel) emboldens the viewer to sustain the struggle resisting inhumanity and contesting the abuses of power.

Weary but not defeated, citizens must sift through the rubble of lies “piling wreckage upon wreckage” in BBM’s recasting of our future in his father-and-son narrative. 

The father may be buried but he is not dead. In 2022, the dead should stay dead.

Source of image of the “Angelus Novus” by Paul Klee: sfu.ca

 

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

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 3, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Gaslight

TO gaslight is to manipulate a person into questioning his or her sanity. This form of emotional abuse was first depicted in the 1944 movie “Gaslight,” featuring Charles Boyer as a husband plotting to drive his wife, played by Ingrid Bergman, to insanity.

Based on the play by Patrick Hamilton, Boyer’s character switches on the attic lights, making the gaslights flicker. The husband convinces the wife that she has imagined the spectacle.

False narratives shift the ground of reality to make a victim cling as to a lifesaver the false reality created by his or her abuser. In Mike de Leon’s 1981 film, “Kisapmata,” mother and daughter swill the dark to bare their hearts in a house where both women are imprisoned by the retired police officer Diosdado “Dadong” Carandang.

Dely, played by Charito Solis, knows their daughter Mila (Charo Santos) is pregnant with Dadong’s child. Incest and rape are impossible to prevent, the viewer gleans from Dely’s testimony that before Mila was born, she fled Dadong, only to return because no one helped her. Resistance is futile for Dely, who conspires with Dadong to keep Mila from leaving home with husband Noel Manalansan (Jay Ilagan).

In this odious tête-à-tête where light is broken to pale shards by the overriding darkness, Mila blurts out that she did not invite Dadong’s attention, immediately establishing that these two are not mother and daughter but rivals and antagonists. 

Mila escapes to religion, going down on her knees the morning after she is raped by her father to pray to a vengeful God to rescue and free her, a divine champion whose wrath will open the eyes of the blind, unplug the ears of the deaf.

What is ultimately unbearable in “Kisapmata” is not Dadong, the fiend with a fetish for guns and his own flesh. What chills is the gaslighting. 

As pupils well-schooled in their trauma, the women do not blink in sacrificing all to secure their own survival. Dely will feed Mila again and again to the monster who begat her. Mila will not show her diary and at least gird with the truth her poor naïve husband, who thinks he is only up against an overprotective “Tatang”.

Gaslighting bends and twists logic. Why does a woman escape and then return to give birth in the lair of a beast? 

Why do Filipinos dehumanized by a family that has plundered, raped, and murdered for years bring the Marcoses back to power? Why do we breed in fake histories and varnished pasts the monsters that will devour our children again and again?

In the darkness of the Carandang prison, Mila cries out: “Ba’t ganito tayo? Nagsamasama dahil sa takot?” If we cast our future in lies and nightmares, we are truly insane.

Source of image: “Elephant in the room” by Tarantadong Kalbo  

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 26, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Labyrinth

DON’T judge the book by its packaging. Yet, for the first time in five decades, I hesitated to unwrap a book, so enamored was I with the brown kraft paper wrapped around it like a drape of seaweed.

I used to believe one discovered a book by happenstance: the stars aligned; actual bills, not receipts, fattened my wallet; and The Book was waiting in the darkest corner of a bargain bin on the incredibly roach-poo-festooned floor of the last independently owned bookstore staying open in a city that placed a premium on cell phone accessories and Mega Lotto bets. 

Then I relocated and found serendipity elusive in a metro that still seems, after nine years, like a very good imitation of the Cretan Labyrinth that was so cunning, its creator Daedalus barely escaped after finishing its construction.

In no time, I dug two holes from online book buying.

“Tsundoku” must be familiar to persons whose books pile up on shelves or have turned into quasi-shelves from remaining unread. 

The word combines “tsun” from “tsumu (to pile up)” and “doku (reading)”. The first syllable has an accusatory clangor, followed by the next syllables onomatopoeically mimicking the drooping and dropping of one’s head, felled by guilt and remorse.

Does tsundoku offer repentance or reform?  I donate to school or public libraries, as well as give away books to students, friends or colleagues. 

A sign that we are learning to live amidst the pandemic is the revival in some malls of the reading nooks that invite barter.  For, really, how many books are considered as too many? 

The other consequence of online book buying is not rhetorical but ecological: does bubble wrap have a second life? 

Like a two-headed ogre, I am crestfallen when a book is shipped in a shocking state of undress (clingwrapped as if it were a lunatic or swimming for life in a pouch with other survivors with maimed covers or dented spines) but also flustered by the non-biodegradable material used as protective sheaths or space fillers. 

Recently, a bookseller’s honeycomb-like green wrapper was so pretty, it made me flirt with the idea of ordering again. 

What stopped me was not a head blow from the guardians of tsundoku but simple math. Six layers of packaging brought the new expanded edition of “The Essential Rumi” into my hands: the shipper’s pouch held a layer of bubblewrap protecting the corrugated cardboard sheets encasing the kraft-paper-and-cellophane “green wrap” sheathing the clingwrapped copy of Rumi’s poems.

Plastic is the Minotaur of modern consumption, a labyrinth that brings to mind the Sufi mystic’s words on words: “I used to want buyers for my words./ Now I wish someone would buy me away from words.”

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 18, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Home

 

         WHEN ants are on the move, pay attention.

         Days of incessant rain made me see my neighbors, the anthill, in a new light. 

         I used to think summer requires that I scour the ground with my sight before setting foot in the garden. Silang in Cavite is blessed with rich, dark soil and lush water, the inspiration perhaps in the naming of many of its 64 barangays: Anahaw, Balite, Banaba, Biga, Ipil, Narra, Langka, Munting Ilog, Puting Kahoy, and Yakal, to name a few.

Where flora thrives, the insect world is not far behind. Silang is home to many creatures other than land developers with a penchant for Italian names and homeowners leery of Metro Manila smog and crime.

I realized this during the first summer when indescribable pain shot up my legs after standing too close to a trail of ants. Hopping in pain, I landed on a nearby spot and, hopping, howled again. 

Our garden is plotted on a superhighway grid in heavy use during summer for ant traffic in food.

Weather is no determinant, though, for ant aggression. I corrected myself after a typhoon recently swept over our place.  

When the rains fell for hours and then days, the ants were again on the move. When the wind shook the sodden bamboo, it pelted angry ants. When the rains puddled on the ground, the ground crawled with seething ants. 

Pain from a creature so small, it reaches sensitive and hard-to-reach body parts in the blink of an eye, comes for the outsider of the anthill or the colony. Home is the barb of the sting.

Home is not always warmth, refuge, shelter. Home is contested ground. At some homes, predators do not lurk under the bed or haunt dreams. They walk among their victims.

Last Sept. 3, four puppies were found lined up in a grassy lot in Barangay San Miguel in Samal (Igacos). Aged about two to three months, the puppies were beheaded.

SunStar Davao reported that barangay officials and a resident offered reward money for those providing leads to enable the authorities to apprehend the perpetrator. Bantay Hayop Davao called the malefactor “worse than an animal”.

Does evil have gradations? If so, worse than the creature that killed the puppies is the puppies’ owner, who, despite denying any involvement with the beheading, “ordered the puppies to be thrown as they were infested with lice,” reported SunStar Davao.

Section 6 of Republic Act No. 8485, also known as The Animal Welfare Act of 1998, prohibits and punishes cruelty to or neglect of all animals.

Many people open their homes to rescue and adopt homeless asong Pinoy (aspin) and pusang Pinoy (puspin). The San Miguel crime changes everything.

For outsiders, home is the barb of the sting.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s 12 September 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

‘Ber

WHEN I was commuting before the pandemic, Jose Mari Chan was perpetually popping up and crooning “Christmas in Our Hearts” when the ‘Ber months rolled Christmas in sight.

In queues. In smog. Squeezed in the bus and train. Jostling in mall and sidewalk.  

Before the pandemic, I sincerely wished to throttle Mr. Chan.

Last Sept. 1, Jose Mari dislodged Led Zeppelin in my Spotify playlist. My inner cynic took a backseat to allow the child to listen for hours to “A Perfect Christmas”.

After the orchestral opening of the song, Jose Mari slides in these lines: “My idea of a perfect Christmas/ Is to spend it with you…”. 

The pause that follows before Jose Mari warbles the next line (“In a party or dinner for two”) is an open invitation to substitute a memory resonating more deeply with the listener.

A pandemic that has taken away first strangers and then colleagues and loved ones becomes a light beamed around a familiar room turned disorienting in the dark. 

In the second stanza, Jose Mari leads with “Looking through some old photographs/ Faces and friends we’ll always remember…”.

A few days ago, my three-year-old smart phone got fed up reminding me that I was storing too many photos and moved everything to the cloud. 

In the second to the last stanza of “A Perfect Christmas,” Jose Mari croons, “I can’t think of a better Christmas/ Than my wish coming true/ And my wish is that you’d let me spend/ My whole life with you…”.

During the pandemic, we rescued puspins (pusang Pinoy) and aspins (asong Pinoy). A few friends have moved since to the “balangaw (rainbow)” and “kalalaw (constellation)” playgrounds. 

In these ‘Ber months, Jose Mari reassures me that some wishes come true.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 5, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Covid coincidence

 THE PREFIX “co-” is diminutive but powerful. Attached to a noun, verb or adjective, the prefix creates a new word that implies “together” or “mutual”: we are co-producers, coexisting and cooperative.

What about “Covid”? I remind myself that the co(rona)vi(rus) d(isease of 20)19 does not lead off with a prefix; it is an acronym officially entered on Feb. 11, 2020 by the World Health Organization in the International Classification of Diseases.

The speller in me, though, is upset by the acronym’s aberrant “co,” which punishes closeness and rewards distancing and isolation.  

I refreshed these lessons in spelling because of a recent conversation conducted through the hedge with our five-year-old neighbor, E, while her father and I worked on our respective gardens.

E: Ano ‘yan? (pointing with a soil-encrusted finger)

I explained that I wore a mask to protect me from Covid.

E: Ano ‘yang Covid?

Seen through E’s eyes, our families, though we share a wall and a hedge, differ. When she sees us in the outdoors, we wear face shields and masks.

Unvaccinated, E’s parents said they remain skeptical about the vaccines. We are scheduled for our second dose.

One household hardly mentions Covid; in the other, the acronym is as worn as a shirt washed for years.

Thanks to her talkativeness, though, our neighbor made me revisit some forgotten rules besides spelling.

Experts’ narratives of disease containment emphasize homogeneity: only when about 50 to 90 percent of us are vaccinated can we reach herd immunity, keeping down the rates of infection and indirectly protecting those who are not immunized.

In our communities, we know how homogeneity is a fiction. As E exposed with two questions, community is not one big compliant and complacent mass but an accident of diversities, of unruly “us” and bull-headed “them”.

When we insert “versus” instead of “and” to bring together these discrete groups, we get a clash instead of community. Even a nuclear family can have a clash of nuclear personalities.

Yet, no one is untouched in this pandemic. Infections and deaths close in. Now, “it’s people you know,” says my sister.

Our desire to survive this pandemic is more powerful than fears, alibis, arguments. We hear better when we listen rather than confront and accuse.

We need to communicate more than ever. Yet, we must also check that we do not misinform (unintentionally) and disinform (purposively spread false information).

In not allowing a hedge, an embarrassed parent or a taciturn neighbor to stop her questions, E illustrated for me the miracle in this Covid coincidence: sharing space and time, we co-create. Better solutions rather than problems.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu's August 29, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, "Matamata"

The undead

“STRANGE fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees/ … is a strange and bitter crop,” sang the great Billie Holiday in the timeless blues anthem to prejudice and hate.

Mixed fruits the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) brings me although these are no less strange, rediscovered in their unfamiliarity in the jaundiced light of strange times, borne by a virus that feeds on people’s need for contact and intimacy and offering redemption through denial of the same.

“Can one take a bath after getting the vaccine?” According to the doctor debriefing our cordoned group, this question is the “most asked” by just vaccinated individuals. 

The bath as a social ritual was long altered by the pandemic. Navigating the crosscurrents of Zoom meetings and Facebook Live webinars, we increasingly eschew a necessity that used to be essential for keeping face in the Asian context: the morning bath.

In a twinkling, we transform into mermen and -maids, donning an office shirt over last night’s pajamas or splashing water on a stale face to appear fresh and bright from the neck up for virtual encounters.

Stay-at-home and work-from-home are realities that transform us into cross-platform denizens, situated in the domestic while pivoting the new borderless social.

The new social, though, is an illusion camouflaging the anti-social. Leaving the vaccination hub located within a city’s financial and commercial district, the husband and I walk a few blocks to return to the carpark when I hear two women walking behind us.

I feel the tautening of my neck, back, and arms as their voices, in loud, animated conversation, draw closer and closer. 

My strides stumble as I debate whether to slow down or work faster. If we let them pass us, will they get close enough to release in that fatal second or two some of the super viral load of those infected with the Delta variant? Or will I?

As if in rebuke, the voices behind us abruptly de-escalate. The women swerved for another direction.

The husband and I are back to being the solitary humans walking on the vacant sidewalks beside the wide, empty streets. In this apocalyptic landscape, I breathe better behind the layers of my personal protective equipment (PPE). 

Remembering the debriefing, I reflect that, especially for the unvaccinated or the partially vaccinated, the bath is the prerequisite for purification, a sloughing off from possible contagion from other people so one can continue to function as a human counting out its days and nights in fear of playing host to an infection that breeds in living cells.

The vaccine came too late. I had become a shirker of flesh, a seeker of bubbles, another Covid mutant: the zombie.

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

* First published in the August 22, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column in SunStar Cebu, “Matamata”

Waiting for vax

 

I AM in the pale. In numbers, I belong to the 87 percent of the country’s population that have not been vaccinated against coronavirus disease (Covid-19), by choice or not.

It is the latter in our case. The husband and I have registered when the local government units in Luzon where we live and work made the call for A3 and A4 groups, prioritized due to underlying health conditions and working in the public, private, and informal sectors.

Our latest registration was in the Parañaque website, open also to non-residents. The government launched a “mega vaccination site” at the Nayong Pilipino, with eight “ambulatory vaccination centers and 30 drive-thru booths” and the capacity to inoculate “at least 15,000 persons a day”.

Currently, the husband and I still belong to the 96,731,254 Filipinos that have not received even one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine.

As of Aug. 9, the country’s population is 111,185,350, according to the United Nations. Only 11 percent of Filipinos are fully vaccinated while 1.9 percent have at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, based on the ourworldindata.org.

Vaccine equity has to leap out from public health jargon into reality because the supply of vaccines is insufficient to meet the demand.

In our part of Cavite, the administration of the second dose of Covid-19 vaccines was delayed for weeks and has just been resumed. Prioritized are the A2 and A3 groups, who are elderly, have comorbidities, or are both.

Yet, the A4 (frontline economic workers) and A5 (indigent) groups are also vulnerable. Many Calabarzon residents commute to and fro Metro Manila for work, putting them daily at risk.

When the poor get sick, they rarely rush to hospitals. “Coronavirus inequality,” to borrow the phrase used in a “Washington Post” article, is the reality that those with less in life fear more a lockdown than disease.

The former means hunger, a protracted dying. Covid-19 works quickly on people with poor nutrition and health and little or no resources for work from home, physical distancing, isolation, and hospitalization.

I will accept any vaccine but first, it must be available.

I will wait for a vax appointment, which every government website I have registered in promises to send but has yet to fulfill.

Walking into a congested vaccination center without an appointment is a sure ticket to the Delta class.  

As part of the walking unvaccinated, I pose a potential threat to others, including the vaccinated. A nearby vax center has closed for “disinfection”.  Vaccinators are getting exhausted, infected, or both.

Yet, the deafening call to “get vaccinated” lacks this antecedent message: “make vaccines available”.  Please.

Dead reckoning

ANXIETY is the siren wail that pounces in the middle of the day, with another spiraling in the void opened by the emptied highway, followed by another and another.

It is a photograph of a shop posted by an entrepreneur that is moving out and returning to where he started: home. 

Anxiety is writing a tribute for someone loved and writing another for a different beloved before the week is over. It is waking at the dead of the night and listening:  who is next?

We clutch at the no small comfort that no loved one has died from the virus. Until we realize that grief is dredging up memories of a certain vintage. 

We have not seen last year/lost year all those who took departure. We thought love was best measured out by the restraint of physical presence and the chance of contagion. 

What is this remorse then for emotions unconfessed, stories hoarded and never to be unspooled? Regret is colder than the touch of fear accompanying the solitary flipping through a scrapbook labeled “The Last Time They Met”.

After the re-imposition of modified enhanced community quarantine, I wake just before midnight, intending to bring inside our ten-month-old calico for a meal before she begins the 12-hour fast and quarantine before spaying.

Wiggy is not with her four kittens, powerful engines idling in those tiny abdomens falling and rising in dreamless sleep. Her orbs are not among the marbles reflecting the moonlight in the faces of her three younger half-sisters from the same mother.

When I hear the mewling of kittens that announces her return, I had time to ponder how inventions like curfew and quarantine are redefined by a creature that makes no sense of these. 

The risk of aspirating—vomit during surgery entering the lungs—requires the caging of a cat to ensure her stomach is empty when anesthesia relaxes the epiglottis that prevents regurgitation.

Wiggy, who since birth comes and goes like the wind, enters the carrier not because she comprehends this long-winded explanation. She trusts me. 

We look at each other across the mesh barrier. I find it difficult to breathe and take her out. I watch her curl up and sleep outside the fetters of my anxiety. Still sleepless hours later, I put her in when there is no more excuse to put off what must be done.

Before modern navigation, a person out at sea estimated distance from the nearest land by dead reckoning. Adrift from the known and familiar, fishermen and sailors read celestial objects or based their estimates on an object known as a Dutchman’s log. To enable one to guess the speed of the vessel, the object had to stay afloat. 

Buoyancy is the trust of a creature that belongs to me and I, to her.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 8, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Lift

 

LOVE came disguised as fear. Professor Madrileña dela Cerna had a formidable reputation even among the terror teachers undergraduates love to parody when they are unable to separate love from the farrago of fear and awe.

Later, when I taught in the same campus, I respected from a remove a senior member of the faculty, research director, and advocate of causes from women empowerment to history and heritage.

In 2007, I crossed the threshold when Ms. Madz became my editor in the Cebu Provincial History Project.  

The husband and I conducted field interviews and archival research for the histories of Badian and Alegria. We worked on the field with our two sons in tow and, once or twice, with Ms. Madz, not quite yet a tita but no longer the paragon of academia whose presence always snapped me out of my slouch, real and imagined.

After work took the husband off the research, I continued with the writing of both histories and lapsed, time and again, in meeting deadlines. I dreaded the confessionals with Ms. Madz.  Bending slightly over the short maternal figure and leaning to hear her soft-voiced inquiries, I felt the weight of my transgressions. 

Being Ms. Madz, she jacked me out of that sinkhole. If ever there was a person destined to be a mentor, she was. She shepherded our team to cross the finish line years after the deadline with ferociousness and empathy. 

Ferocious because she recognized no obstacle in seeking the truant among us. She persisted and succeeded in getting a contemplative order to grant her a phone call so she could ask a fellow writer, who was in strict seclusion in monastic silence, about a manuscript in progress.

Empathetic because she made us listen to another writer digress into the manifold ways the families in one town cooked “humba (braised pork belly)”. Ms. Madz praised the writer after this soliloquy, which made me savor history for the first time as pork lard simmered slowly melts on the tongue and suffuses the soul.

“Humana gyud (finish it),” she said in her soft as steel Madrileña tone after she listened to my personal Calvary. And we did, those town histories. As I did years later, my master’s thesis. 

When I talked to her about the dissertation I am pursuing on Cebu journalism, Ms. Madz was already my mother’s “classmate” in a renal unit, undergoing regular hemodialysis. 

The familiar figure was much diminished by the machines softly whirring, flushing and cleaning blood. Somehow she always turned our talks to focus on what I had to finish. Last July 27, my shepherd, and for countless other students and mentees, went home. 

“Nahuman na (it is finished)”. Puhon, Ms. Madz, in our next confessional.

Source of the image of Prof. Madrileña de la Cerna: cebudailynews.inquirer.net

* First published in the August 1, 2021 issue of SunStar Cebu's Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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

Sayote with mango

I DISLIKED vegetables as a child. The dislike approached repugnance whenever I contemplated the “ginisang sayote (sauteed chayote)” my “tita (aunt)” spooned on my plate.

My sister, cousins, and I were part of a lunch pool. Since we went to the same all girls’ school with their daughters, our aunts took turns picking us up for lunch.

Don’t let the food wait. Eat vegetables. I grew up with women with so unbending a fealty to values, my first rebellion had to take a potshot at one canon: greens.

Noticing that the lazy daisy never unloaded vegetables for the young folks, one aunt rationed each of us with a spoonful of greens. I was exempted from showing her a clean plate before taking this down to the kitchen.

One day, a cousin protested the special treatment. Without glancing at me, Tita said I was old enough to be above such hanky-panky.

When Tita recently passed away at 92, my sister and I talked about the passing of the last in a generation of women who mothered our family.  

Mother, Nanay, mater. The Latin word for mother is embedded in many English words, from matriarch to matrimony, maternity, and matrix. Contrary to popular notions of nurturance as having a soft and yielding nature, the heart of the mater is strength.

Strength can be wielded to attack and destroy. Yet, another side is to build and empower. Working as a journalist, I saw Tita outside the realms of family and saw different facets of a woman who nurtured and built community. 

For a special report on solo parents, I listened to a woman narrate how she survived emotional, physical, and financial abuse after Tita and family gave her sanctuary and helped her put back, piece by piece, her self-esteem. 

Even in her mid-70s, she would go out of town, volunteering for voters’ literacy seminars as a member of the laity and the Cebu-Citizens Involvement and Maturation for Peoples Empowerment and Liberation (C-Cimpel).

Yet, it is the memory of the dish I concocted that resonates of Tita’s will to use power to steer a young person past the shoals of immaturity. 

The dish I named in my mind as “sayote with mango” I never brought it up with her. I am certain, though, that Tita knew about the times I whisked away a plate with a skin of mango “cheek” covering the sayote I minced, slid around my plate, and then swept under the skin. 

It was a simple thing to find and check the one un-clean plate in the kitchen. She would be justified to call me out. Tita did not and taught me a thing or two, before the classroom and the newsroom did, about integrity.

Alita Mendoza Solon, I am sorry I never said sorry for failing your trust. Daghang salamat for living fully with the heart of a mater.

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 25, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column

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

Ways of seeing

 

THREE materials I need to see in person: paper, wood, leather. I met Harley Dave Bahian Beltran because of a wood-and-metal installation that stood out in a crowded mall bazaar in November 2017.

Upcycled galvanized iron pipes formed a stark scaffolding in a mall decked out for the holidays. Iron tubes forming letters spelling out “Harl’s” were set against repurposed pitted planks. The industrial set-up displayed leather bags made by hand by Harl and fellow artisans, most of whom have a physical disability.

Each style of bag bears a name and a story. The Leona tote with short and long handles is named after his grandmother. The open Cherry tote was inspired by the Filipino actor Cherry Gil, a longtime patron of “Handcrafted by Harl’s”.

In 2017, what stood out was the handiwork, particularly the respect of the artisan evident in the spare functional lines, with greater prominence for the natural markings of the full-grained hide, imperfections that narrate worlds about the animal it had been.

I was drawn to the messenger bag Harl used that evening. It had a large birth mark on the flap, disfiguring if one preferred leather that is buffed, sanded, dyed, and coated to the veneer of perfection coveted by the market. 

Respect took over when Harl talked about the social enterprise of training and working with persons with disability (PWD) to produce bags, wallets, belts, biking accessories, even bow ties with leather from Marikina and other local sources.

Remembering this man’s passion—awarded in Germany for social enterprise in 2017—I renew my respect for a social entrepreneur who tries his utmost not just to survive more than a year of the pandemic.

At the height of lockdowns imposed in Luzon in 2020 and 2021, Harl’s team shifted to include making “Maska,” facial masks incorporating leather and “banig,” used in woven mats. Selling online during the extended lockdowns that shuttered non-essential businesses, Harl, wife Sheila, and older daughter Harriet allocated a portion of the sales to pack and distribute fresh vegetables, rice, and other provisions to families of PWD.

Harriet gets P10 for every drawing she makes by hand to thank online customers who choose “Harl’s,” which, according to her father, stands for “hope, ability, resilience, livelihood, spiritual”.

Last July 12, the enterprise marked its seventh anniversary, granting a 25-percent discount for those purchasing bags online or in person until today. Since that evening in 2017, when I brought home a Cherry, I have never had to have a bag repaired, even for a loose thread or a frayed seam. 

Life does not leave us unmarked. Scar or character: all depends on our way of seeing. 

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 18, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Tilapia redux

 

TILAPIA first crossed my plate in Quezon City. Once and never to return, I vowed.

At the university canteen, I chose a nicely fried fish and was shocked when it came on a plate, camouflaged under an ooze of greens like a Hollywood actor penetrating a jungle camp. Because I skipped breakfast and lunch to finish a paper and was not facing evening class with a gut up in arms, I tackled the now alien fish, only to share all but the tail with the fat university cats. 

Farmed fish taste depends on the quality of the water and the feed. Unlike the seawater ones, freshwater fish must be harvested at its ideal size. Too big, a fish grazes too long on moss, muddy bottoms or fish meal with its link to mycotoxins.

Spoiled by the diversity, taste, and affordability of Cebu’s marine bounty, the husband and I avoid fishy misadventures in Cavite, especially because the pandemic drives the price of fish caught off the Batangas coast to deep space.

After the Taal Volcano erupted last July 1, a young man in Batangas said in an interview that he took advantage of the two-hour window allowed by officials for male residents to leave the evacuation centers in the morning and visit their homes to feed the animals.

Speaking in the lilting tones of the Batangas-born, the fellow said that fish, like people, cannot skip a meal without consequences. 

The Taal Volcano Island is designated by the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology as a Permanent Danger Zone (PDZ).

For nearby lakeshore communities, vigilance means calculating the moods of a volcano. In the wake of the Jan. 12, 2020 eruption,  animal welfare activists focused on the horses, dogs, cats, and livestock that were abandoned in the emergency and needed rescue. 

How do you rescue fish? A fish farm involves not just fish but an ecosystem of men and dogs guarding against fish thieves. When you depend on fishing and fish farming in a PDZ, you do not wait to be rescued. 

Assessing the 2021 eruption, President Rodrigo Duterte joked that he will “cap the hole” of Taal. After the 2020 explosion, the president vowed to pee into the crater and eat ash.

Unlike the president, the discriminating tilapia does not eat ash. Aficionados know the fish must be bought “live and fresh,” cleaned thoroughly and cooked properly. 

In other places, tilapia, the second most farmed fish next to carp worldwide, is called the “St. Peter’s Fish”. Online sources trace the name to a belief that this was the fish Jesus of Nazareth multiplied in the miracle feeding multitudes.

Tackling a volcano, a pandemic, and leaders who do not know when to cap their holes, the tilapia will mayhap cross my plate again.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 11, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

"Taal"

 

I SCAN heaven for cues if I should water the garden. The husband checks his smart phone for the weather forecast.

Last July 1, as the aspins (asong Pinoy) and I were tangling over the hose, a boa constrictor they may soon chomp to extinction, the husband asked me to go inside the house. Taal Volcano erupted at 3:16 p.m.

In Cebu, I have lived near the sea for most of my life. When Taal Volcano erupted last Jan. 12, 2020, we adjusted in Silang, 38 kilometers away, to living in the shadow of a volcano. 

Sunk in a prehistoric caldera filled with lake water, Volcano Island was a postcard-perfect image first glimpsed from the Emilio Aguinaldo Highway in Tagaytay in 2012. Alone at home on that Sunday in 2020, I woke up from siesta to the smell of sulfur wafting in through the open window. The main crater erupted at around 1 p.m.

Closing the window to keep out the smell of what was first thought to be someone’s illicit bonfire was mere spontaneity for someone whose familiarity with a volcano was limited to choosing between the white or grey crayon to color the plumes emerging from a “smoking” cone drawn in grade school.

The sea is mercurial but nothing redefines uncertainty like a volcano. January 2020 woke up again what lay dormant underneath a landmark facilely described for tourists as the “largest lake on an island in a lake on an island in the world”. 

In the course of weeks of breathing for the first time behind an N95 mask to sieve the toxic sulfuric fumes and particles from the Taal ashfall that blanketed Calabarzon, Metro Manila, and parts of Central Luzon and Ilocos Region in 2020, I read that “taal” in the Old Tagalog spoken in Batangas, where the Volcano Island is located, means “true” or “genuine”.

Before the July 1 eruption, the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) allayed the anxiety of citizens by stating that the smog in Metro Manila is caused by human activities, not the volcanic smog or vog spreading from the Taal region. 

In a June 30 press release, Phivolcs confirmed that volcanic SO2 had spread over the National Capital Region and adjoining provinces. “As a scientific institution, we have been reminded again of the value of uncertainty and the limitations of our data, the value of citizen observation and the need to constantly challenge our own perceptions, interpretations and ideas.”

A day after the July 1 eruption, I admired a pure white moth nearly merging with the sheet of wood it was resting on. An orange strip running between the wings marred the white against white image.

“Taal,” according to the ancient Batangueños, is not perfection but the humility of accepting imperfection and living with uncertainty.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s July 4, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Love for women

WHEN I read the first social media posts about his death, I wanted to doubt the news.

When I read the breaking reports from media I trust, my next thought was of his sisters. When he moved in the Bahay Pangarap in the Malacañang Park complex, his four sisters shared the official duties that, if he had married, would have been carried out by the country’s First Lady.

Finally, when the undeniable sunk in—that the 15th president of the country was dead at 61—my thoughts turned to us, the people he deferred to, first in his inaugural address and frequently throughout his term as the most powerful person in the land: “Kayo ang boss ko”.

As I write this, I feel the familiar hollow of what we have lost, his death debriding me of the carapaces grown even before June 30, 2016, when he stepped down and another moved into Malacañang.

So this is where five years have gone: growing one layer over another as self-fortification against the acid rain of jokes, innuendoes, smearing, shaming, and inanities assaulting women. 

Five years of raining women.  Cut up in body parts: “suso (tits),” “bisong (vagina)”.   As curses replacing presidential punctuations: “putang ina (mother-whore),” “bitches,” “crazy women”. Or reductionist judgement: the presidency is not for women, women are not emotionally wired like men.

Officially anointed, gutter talk is gutter think, spawning a culture that turns violence into a metonym for governance: make the problem “disappear” in the War on Drugs; brand critics as terrorists; cut off media franchise; and threaten resistant women with assault, rape, gang-rape, and shoot-the-bisong.

His death on the 24th of June sent me five years back, long before a strongman’s loud and lewd language converted “love of women” into an infested mattress of thorns. 

The country’s first bachelor president was not above making jokes, often comparing his love life to Coke Zero. Not once did he paw women in public or spit back when they called him out.

This “soltero (bachelor)” reserved his most impassioned side for his parents, sisters, and motherland: “Ang layunin ko sa buhay ay simple lang: maging tapat sa aking mga magulang at sa bayan bilang isang marangal na anak, mabait na kuya, at mabuting mamamayan.”

This was no lip service. On Dec. 21, 2012, Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III signed into law the Reproductive Health (RH) Bill, which, after languishing for 13 years in Congress, grants Filipinos, specially girls and women, better access to information and means to prioritize their health and future.

Daghang salamat, President Noynoy. Love for women is again my ballot’s yardstick in 2022. 

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 27, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Fathers who cook

PAPANG did not cook. My father-in-law did. The husband does.

Papa Peking made “inun-unan (dish simmered in vinegar)” I can still taste: the fragrance of sauteed garlic and onion, the tartness of vinegar, the sly spice of ginger, softness of flesh after the scales peel away from the fish, and, overlaying all these, the sinfulness of pork lard, which he added as the finale, never measuring, just knowing by sight and smell how much to pour.

I grew up in a home that woke early to the breakfast smells of fried eggs, “buwad (dried fish),” and inun-unan, mingling with the aroma of Papang’s first cup of coffee, black as the night that still clung to the sky, leavened by a spoon of powdered milk, absentmindedly stirred while the sun suffused the dark and cold. 

The staccato of Papang’s two-fingered typing on the heavy Army-issue Underwood typewriter punctuated many mornings when I resisted stirring from my mat. Inun-unan, conspiring with omelet curling at the fringe and “sinangag (stale rice toasted with garlic),” always won.

My father bought the typewriter for a song from a relative. I was in senior high school then, feeling superior that I was learning how to touch-type in class. 

When I catch myself pounding away on the laptop keyboard, I hear that Underwood antique, silent now under its plastic cover, never to echo from my father typing exams for his medical students.

Papang and Papa Peking liked to share beer and stories. When Mama Margie talks about my late father-in-law, she often slips into the present tense and refers to him as “Mr. Tabada”. At first, I thought it quaint to refer to someone you were married to for more than four decades in such a schoolmarmish way.

The husband’s parents were public school teachers until they retired. Mama Margie still tears up remembering how she stroked a piece of cloth with longing in one of their outings in Colon. Papa coaxed her away by saying they had to stop for bread to bring home to the children.

“Breadwinner” is a many-layered word that hints of what fathers do for their families. The stories often describe what these men do, leaving unsaid the unlived and unfulfilled worlds they turn their gaze away from to stop by on the way home for bread.

When a friend commented how I refer to “the husband” in my writing, I joked that, thinking of my parents-in-law, I wanted to avoid mixing up the multiple “Mr. Tabada” in my life. 

In truth, I smell Papang and Papa Peking when our home is redolent with the scents, flavors, and memories stirred up when the husband cooks inun-unan with “iba (bilimbi or tree sorrel)” and the secret ingredient of a father’s abiding love for family.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com or 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 20, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Happy ever after

DID I get the vax?

To the question asked by the vet’s assistant, I answered that the three aspin (asong Pinoy) puppies were due for the fourth and last jab of the 6-in-1 vaccine, which also protects them from the canine parvovirus.

The assistant clarified that he was asking if the husband and I were already vaccinated for the coronavirus disease (Covid-19). 

Being a guardian of dogs and cats has a way of creeping and taking over one’s life. When the husband and I started to rehome Noki’s puppies, we followed the advice of my sister, another guardian who minds other people’s dogs, to rehome after 12 weeks. 

Prematurely separating a puppy from its mother traumatizes through forced weaning and deprivation of its canine family. In the first three months, a puppy is not just nursed by its mother but also socialized by her and its siblings. 

Twelve weeks also cover the basic deworming and vaccination program that protects the puppy during its first year. 

Since our lot is less than 100 square meters, with delineated dog, cat, and plant zones for everyone’s sanity, we see it as our responsibility to match each puppy and kitten with a “furever” family.

When prospective guardians see the puppies and ask “anong lahi (what breed),” the husband and I answer, “lahing Pinoy”. 

Within our spheres of influence, we push the stance that breed is not important. All dogs and cats, even those with feral ancestry, deserve kindness and respect. 

Life on the street is not fit for any animal. Life with some folks who think they want a pet can be as deadly. We screened guardians for red flags: this person will NOT eat our puppy; feed the puppy to its pet snake; groom it to be a bait dog for dog fights; or chain it to guard their home, expecting the animal to eat air while they get a tan.

We dismissed prospect no. 1 because she never visited us and the puppies. Expecting the puppy to be handed over the fence, this entitled creature probably equated it with a pinch of salt cadged from next door. Salt melts away; what would have happened to our puppy after she outgrew her novelty?

Prospect no. 2 met us and brought home a puppy. He passed her on to his 70-year-old grandmother to feed and look after. On the third day of failing on his vow to update us about our puppy, the husband searched for the man’s house and took back our puppy.

Our neighbor ticked the boxes: not only did she visit us and talk about her furry companions while it drizzled, she took the puppy into her arms and asked her if she wanted to go home with her. 

As of this writing, we have yet to visit Ikog and her new mom. Meanwhile, Ikog’s old mom is asking God for a genuine happy ending.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 13, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

 

Knitting

IN my memories of sitting in her kitchen, food was the spice and stories, the staple. 

She was daughter, sister, wife, and mother in an age that had the expectations of and prescriptions for women traced and ready for applying to every woman, no matter what was in her mind and heart, like the cut-out clothes I used to punch out for paper dolls.

She was the last of the siblings that included my maternal grandfather. While watching her debone for chicken à la King or turning inside out a pork hock only to stuff it again and sew it close like a sock for contui, I itched silently with impatience, wondering why we could not just eat without the tedious deconstruction.

Painstaking meals prepared daily was Tita’s overture to telling stories.  While cooking, she pulled out and consulted notebooks where she wrote down recipes, jotting on the flour-sprinkled, soy-spotted margins improvisations and tweaked measurements. 

The stories, though, were all in her head. Knitting stories invokes the power to animate. She breathed life and soul—“anima”—to relatives I barely remembered except as family ghosts.

The great grandmother whose amputated leg I heard echoing in every creak of the ancestral house was, in Tita’s retelling, a young girl who witnessed her mother give away the land upon the prodding of her sons, who then treated her as a maid to serve their every caprice. The memory drove my great grandmother to be sparing in showering material gifts on her own children.

A family’s personal stories are stitches seeded on the broad canvas of history. Women as actors and narrators of their fate are often embellishments, decorative while being invisible. 

Tita’s stories first made me draw nearer to the canvas to examine the elision of lives glimpsed as a small hand placed tentatively from the back on a starched masculine shoulder in a studio portrait. 

What are stories if not illuminations and magnifications? In Feb. 1986, I was about to start lunch with Tita and Tito when I absentmindedly refused an offer of Coke. I participated in the nationwide boycott of businesses owned by cronies of Ferdinand Marcos, following the disputed snap presidential election. 

Tito, who worked with the company bottling Coke, was silent but Tita was furious. From what seemed to be a far shore, I heard her speak for employees and families suffering from the boycott. Issues split us, her voice buffeted but holding, a tenuous line above the tumult.

Recently, in the online requiem mass, I looked past the white coffin and saw Juanita Solon Villarosa in her kitchen, meat thawed, condiments ready, memory casting for a story. I’m listening, Tita Niting. 

Source of image: dreamstime.com

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 6, 2021 issue of the Sunday main op-ed column, “Matamata”

“Hapit-hapit”

I WAS introduced to sex by way of Disney movies.

In the late 1970s, when there was a new Disney animated film at the Mever theater, Papang treated my sister and I to a Saturday trip in his 1964 blue Volks Beetle to Colon. 

We parked at a gasoline station that reeked of piss and petrol. The fumes always made me want to “jingle”. I was always optimistic that perhaps this would turn out to be the movie we would view thrice before Papang ushered us out of the theater. 

In those days, a movie stub was a ticket to a cinematic watch-for-as-long- as-you-can binge.  Papang, though, did not want his daughters to be in Colon when night fell and the pimps and “prostis” replaced the peanuts-and-newspaper vendors at street corners. 

Walking back to the gas station, my palpitations post-Disney would start again as soon as I took a whiff of the addictive amalgam of newsprint, ink, and body heat. The Ybañez news stall was covered from wall to wall with newspapers, magazines, and paperbacks. 

My sister and I would squeeze past the men who rented a newspaper to read or swat the air with while chatting with other readers sharing a bench. We were limited to one comic book but choosing which one to buy from the cornucopia in front of us is one of my earliest memories of desire.

I chose the Illustrated Classics, Tarzan, DC, and Marvel for their full-color drawings, later switching to Looney Tunes because, though printed in black and white, the publications offered “monster editions, with extra 25 pages of gags”. 

Then I discovered that for the price of an imported comic book, we got three or more Tagalog “komiks” that were fanned out on the sidewalk. I quickly picked my favorites, written in either the “wakasan (finished)” or “itutuloy (to be continued)” style. 

Our companions at home also read the “komiks” because the romances and the supernatural tales were molded in the same plots we followed on the transistor radio. Since Papang never glanced at the “bakya (lowbrow)” culture, he missed how love on the air and in “wakasan” pages took the “simang (diverted)” route from virginal sighing and courtly wooing.

A common phrase often said half in joke to couples returning home is “uli diretso, ayaw na hapit-hapit”. Teasing the unmarried about diverting for a quick motel tryst before going home reflects our elliptical culture of keeping sex in the interstices of the moral and the decent.

Writing this on May 28, the International Day of Action for Women’s Health, I hope for greater openness about sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). Pop culture harbors biases and subversions, the Disney evasions and the garish truths stepping out from the shadows.

Source of the image of the "Anak ni Zuma" cover of the "Aliwan" komiks: Philippine Komiks Database.com

(mayettetabada@gmail.com)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 30, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”