Contact

SNUG in its father’s chest, with only its small head poking out of the sling, the infant slept on as its parent checked out merchandise. In a mall during a weekend, I spotted father and baby among the people milling about the infant section of a department store.

At first, I was drawn to the ring sling, a frontal variation of the papoose that’s made with a loop of cloth threaded through two rings. When my sons were babies some 30 years ago, the ring sling wasn’t trendy yet. Nor was babywearing a man thing, too.

Then I noticed what hogged the young father’s attention while his baby napped. It was a tube he kept upending then peering into with an eye at one end. A kaleidoscope.

A favorite back when I was a child, the “magic” tube occupied me endlessly. I held it to the light, shook the tube, and watched the colored bits inside dissolve into crazy patterns, no two ever alike. When I first held my parents’ gift, I thought it was cooler than a book.

I mentally added the kaleidoscope in my rapidly filling bucket list for future grandchildren, and then moved to a secondhand bookstore. Bookstore browsing is my weekend contact sports, with reading titles sideways or on my knees having the highest level of difficulty so far, while other bookworms around me trawl, read, diss/defend authors, flirt, and, once, write what must have been a book in the making.

Stepping out to take a breath, I realized, not for the first time, how all of us must resemble ants tunneling around merchandise, which can be summed up in three adjectives: American, popular, and cheap.

There is a smattering of authors with non-North American names but rarely anyone representing the Global South, which, in transnational or colonial speak, stands for developing or less developed countries. Only in Cebu did I buy books written in English by Cebuano authors in a branch of this popular secondhand bookstore.

As a reader whose obsession for books outranges her budget, choosing to read works about the Filipino written by the Filipino is an act of will that often gets eroded by what’s left in my wallet even after I forego brewed coffee and “turon”.

Yet, to quote anthropologist Arturo Escobar, “we are… placelings”. “To live is to live locally, and to know is first of all to know the places one is in,” Escobar quotes philosopher Edward Casey.

Since I was a kid, the imaginary, imagined, and imaginative lures and beguiles, like magic glimpsed at the end of the kaleidoscope. Yet, life, enfleshed and quivering, can only be in the here and now, what’s in place and in contact, enrooting, transforming, transposing.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 17, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”