If

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917322631)

Tomatoes

TOMATOES change color, even these store-bought ones. I can eat raw the ripe ones with fried “bolinao (anchovies)” for meal after meal. Waiting for the hard green irregular spheres to turn pliant and mushy, I am aware of not just shunting aside the querulous insistence of appetite or imperative command of hunger.

A subtle exhibitionist, every tomato bides its pace, clinging to its swirls of sunset yellow before suffusing into orange and flaming finally into bright shiny red.

The “tomati” in Nahuatl or Aztec, spoken by the ancients in Mexico, gave birth to the “tomate” of the Spanish colonizers and then the “tomato” of the English imperialists.

Though much co-opted, the tomato dares one to stereotype. Botanists regard the tomato as a fruit; nutritionists, a vegetable. I am grateful that farmers just have the common sense to raise it.

I take after my mother in munching green tomatoes dipped in a little salt. I know Ma will never want to try fried green tomatoes or meet the oddballs in Fanny Flagg’s 1987 novel, “Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café”.

Yet, when it is safe to go home, I will bring her my secondhand copy so she can make the acquaintance of Idgie and Ruth, Evelyn and Ninnie. God willing, when Mama turns 81 this year the coronavirus disease will just be another scourge, like the homophobia, racism, and ageism that people take on, dip in a little salt, and lick.

One or two of the best tomatoes I have set aside, dried in the sun, and planted. Summer is best for tomatoes because there is no rain to dislodge the buds and flowers. The most beautiful name for the tomato is given by the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “ripened flower ovary”.

The earth is also an ovary, sex, uterus. We live amongst birds and in their nesting and migrating, their droppings result in seedlings cropping up in odd places. Tomato seeds, like the future sun worshippers that these will become, are germinating in the ash-mixed soil from our compost pile that faces the sun.

Three months ago, the ash wafted from the Taal Volcano eruption made breathing difficult. Freed from the sulfur that evaporated and darkened by rain, decaying leaf, and organic rot, the ash makes the soil richer, better for our small garden.

For now, the seeds in their reused coffee cups of soil are invisible, quarantined in their dark earthy wombs. Soaking up the sun and just enough water, the invisible will have presence one day.

From quarantine to harvest, the tomato holds out this promise.

"Don't give up before the miracle happens," wrote Fanny Flagg.



Ripening. Tomatoes after two weeks of enhanced community quarantine. Silang, 29 March 2020



(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 29, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Slogans of love

LOVE is a tagline.

Like the pails of roses and bouquets inundating the public pulse last Feb. 14, some took to the public sphere of mass media to spread advocacies for lovers, those about to fall in love, those resisting love, and those immune to love.

Here are my favorites, a mix of social good and pithy capsules for that most maddening of emotions (sa Binisaya pa: “makaboang”):

“Wear your feelings.” As paraphrased by SunStar Cebu’s Fe Marie Dumaboc in her Feb. 13 report, this was the essence of Talisay City Mayor Gerald Anthony Gullas’s Feb. 12 memorandum directing City Hall employees to abandon their uniforms in favor of an attire to “express (one’s) feelings” on Valentine’s Day.

His inclusive color code accommodates almost all statuses: red for couples, green for the “single and ready to mingle,” yellow for those neck-deep in “complicated” relationships, orange for the “prisoner to someone’s love,” pink for the solitary ones, gray for those relieved they “got away,” and black for the “dense”.

Talisay City Chief Maj. Gerard Ace Pelare reminds the public to avoid trouble by staying within the law: “make sure your date is of legal age”.

In a telenovela dilemma, a male teacher rejects his undergraduate student, protesting that he is too old for her. What should be emphasized are the reasons why student-teacher romances are inappropriate and must be avoided, regardless of the student’s consent: abuse of authority, conflict of interests, exploitation of the student’s vulnerability, and threats to the student’s emotional stability and academic performance.

“Dili magpataka og partner (choose your date).” Department of Health (DOH) 7 Director Jaime Bernadas advises checking first the recent travel history of the intended before going on a date that may just lead to a possibly fatal exchange of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), reported Wenilyn Sabalo in SunStar Cebu last Feb. 13.

And not the least is “H.E.A.R.T to H.E.A.R.T,” cautions the Commission on Population and Development (PopCom) 7, whose advocacy launched on Feb. 14 emphasizes these touchpoints for millennials: H stands for HIV, AIDS and STI; E for early sexual encounters; A for adolescent sexuality; R for reproductive health; and T for teenage pregnancy.

Love is a minefield, not just on Feb. 14, one infers from this headline from “Bag-ong Kusog,” the leading newspaper in Cebu during the American period: “Mirisi nga babayhana” (published on May 6, 1917).

Tamely translated, the idiom means “serves her right” but it is not just in matters of the heart that the saltiness of the Cebuano is beyond the ken of English.


Too close for comfort. The 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) [Source of photo: Medscape.com)


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in the February 16, 2020 issue of SunStar Cebu’s Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”