No problem

CLIMBING presents no problem to Tigre, a marmalade stray whose favorite perch is the topmost shelf in the kitchen. On it is a still shiny pan, which the cat likes as a pillow when he slinks in for a midmorning nap.

When I rinse a cup, I automatically look up. The fallout, either from a dislodged pan or an oversleeping feline, would be hard to explain in a pithy epitaph.

Tigr considers all these as nonsense. Many a time, those lambent sulfurous orbs are trained on me just as I look up. Excuse me, is this your fur drifting in my tea? An answering yawn, if I am lucky, is all I get.

I accept that being alone is a condition for writing. And thinking often means talking to oneself because some ideas have to be hung out like clothes on a washline that have a lot of flapping around to do before they can be worn.

Still, it is no small comfort to seek out Tigr when the writing stutters. For him, there is no problem. When he scrubs our ankles with his madly purring visage, the husband asks aloud if he has picked up an ear infection and I wait with trepidation for my ankles to get nibbled.

The problem with humans is that to be human is not to be without a problem.

Tigr reminds me of John Puruntong, the beloved character played by Dolphy in the Ading Fernando-created sitcom, “John en Marsha,” which dominated Philippine television from the 1970s to the 1990s. John was television’s version of Juan dela Cruz who slept, too, on a dented pot, curled every night on a hard narrow bench in the family shanty.

John is loved by his family: Marsha, Nida Blanca’s jewel of a wife, who never nagged or envied the neighbors; daughter Shirley, spunky but loving, played by Maricel Soriano; and Dolphy’s son Rolly Quizon, who played reel son Rolly.

Marsha’s sinfully rich mother, Doña Delilah Jones, ruins the domestic harmony, constantly hectoring her son-in-law with the catchphrase, “Kaya ikaw, John, magsumikap ka (keep striving).”

Does John bite the bullet or bite off his monster MIL’s head? He does neither. Every weekly episode finds John browbeaten by Doña Delilah, who orders her maid, the screechy-voiced Matutina, to sweep the bills off the floor of her mansion and offers these to solve John’s problems.

John does not accept the money because he understands that the lack of money is a false problem. In portraying the Filipino who, with peace of mind, can sleep on a pillow of aluminum, Ading Fernando and Dolphy captured the nature of a conundrum, problematized by Plato and Martin Heidegger.

A problem does not merely counter “doxa” or common sense, writes Audrey Wasser. “In perplexing, problems disrupt our worn-out stories.”

Or, purrs Tigre, “no problem”.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s June 23, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”