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”