Proof of life

             

            CHILDHOOD is a flavor.

            In Omnicast Mega (OM) Central, which transmits the evercascading babble of unvoiced thoughts circulating around the planet, Chocnut has a mental hiccup.

 

            Our talebearer is one of millions in a pod ejected by a carrier and left to feed in an incubator simulating the pre-Covid (PC) childhood favorite Chocnut, now replicated with flavor of ground roasted peanuts, flavor of powdered milk, flavor of cocoa, flavor of…

 

            A nanosecond after Chocnut registered the Sound, it also had its first spasm. The involuntary setback is, if its system was only wired to name it, called a memory.

 

            After PC, the TC scrapped foundations that made the old society as stable as a stack of crumbling Chocnuts. Memory was dealt a mortal blow when the TC replaced motherhood, mammalian and primitive, with carriers that parthenogenetically reproduce without mates and eject pods by the millions in Chocnut incubators that speed up the feeding stage 100 times so larvae can be deployed around the colony.  

 

            Now everything works. No remembering, just feeding. The news broadcasts destabilizing PC society were superseded by omnicasts, all-penetrating transmissions of every nascent thought and desire that may hiccup in units purged by program of memory and imagination.

 

             “Take care (TC)” may be benediction or threat since, by TC (technical committee) rules, the unvoiced, made public via omnicast, removes the need for expression.

           

            Chocnut, our talebearer, monitors FM (Far Mega), the deep spaces out of reach of the AM (At ease Mega) spectrum for the colony but still within the orbit of the TC’s sleepless omniscience.

 

            The Sound Chocnut recorded at 00:00:20:20 emanates from the dead exoplanet Primus. Unknown to Chocnut, who has never heard of history (refer to last Sunday’s tale), the Mothers of the Moons rebelled, finally refusing to let their children rise from the sea, only to be devoured by their siblings in cycles of six bloody moon phases.

 

            After Primus and its last dictator disappeared into the pure opacity of moonless dark and cold, the playgrounds beneath the sea churn warm from the nocturnal frolic of the Moon children, watched over by their Mothers. Perhaps it is an iota of this joy that escapes above the sea, a susurrus sieved and transformed into a playlist by Chocnut, who is suddenly assailed by a faint peanut-flavored memory.

 

            Weaned on the cold teats of artificially flavored motherhood, did Chocnut have a childhood? We will never know as another Chocnut reports after time out. TC (take care), terminated Chocnut.

 

            TC, repeat the omnicasts as an armada of destroyers departs for the Mothers of the Moons. Take care: disobedience is proof of life.

 

 

 

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

 

 

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 9, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

When babies are not welcome

AS early as January, merchants began rolling out the Cupids and chocolates, the froth-and-tease that precedes the gift-giving hard sell that’s become Valentine’s Day in this country.

In El Salvador, the choices are stark: stagnant water and a government appeal not to have children for the next two years.

Last Jan. 27, the International New York Times (INYT) reported how Zika, a mosquito-borne virus, has “rattled” El Salvador and other countries in the region into scrambling for measures to control the spread of the disease that leaves infected infants with microcephaly, a rare condition marked by an abnormally small head and brain damage.

Zika is spread by the Aedes mosquito, the same carrier of dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya, reported the INYT. The insects thrive in the standing water pooling amidst the trash piling in congested cities.

What hampers the communities and authorities from cleaning up and dispatching the mosquitoes is another Salvadorean epidemic: gang violence. The INYT refers to El Salvador as the “Western Hemisphere’s most violent country.”

In a country where mosquitoes and gangs compete for dominance, one would think having babies would be the last thing on people’s minds, even with Feb. 14 approaching.

Yet, the government’s call for a two-year moratorium on babies, with the implied strategy of contraception, is an issue that is “complicated” to raise in this “conservative, religious” country, reported the INYT.

While the El Salvador archbishop fell sick and could not say Sunday mass immediately after the public appeal for a birth moratorium and the nation’s bishops had yet to meet to discuss how to react to the government’s “new theme,” Salvadorean women interviewed by the INYT said postponing the babies was not a problem for the top three reasons: gang violence, unemployment, and Zika.

We are better off than El Salvador: violence that’s much worse in the media reports than in reality, so-so employment, and no Zika.

It is understandable why, with Feb. 14 approaching, we are not preoccupied with clearing standing water, fumigating the neighborhood, and reciting a loop of Hail Mary’s from fear and desperation for a child that’s still in the womb.

It explains why health workers distributing condoms outside motels on Feb. 14 invite derision. It’s not that they don’t want unwanted babies; the government only works to please condom manufacturers, never mind if they promote sinfulness and break up marriages.

Two worlds: one that does not welcome babies, another that does.

However, if one took away the particulars of place and time, what can the women of El Salvador ask their Filipina sisters: prior to conception, what kind of world do you dream of bringing a child into?

A world where a young mother without a husband, an education or even a supportive family can bring to full term a child, no more certain of its place than its mother.

A world where one can believe one’s child has a fair chance at a better life than its parents.

A world that loves a child and its becoming.

Though we may be in far greater danger from the arrows of Cupid than from the proboscis of the Zika-carrier mosquito, we should ask ourselves like the women of El Salvador: into what world do we bring a child?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)



*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s January 31, 2016 issue of the “Matamata,” a Sunday editorial-page column

“Halok”

“HALOK (kiss)” on Fridays, the feast day, usually entails lining up behind many visitors of the replica of the original image of the Sto. Niño at the Basilica.

“Kissing the image” is not the best translation for the practice, pursued by different people for different reasons in different ways.

The image is encased in glass, stone and wood. Unlike other life-sized icons whose paint is worn away by years of penitent rubbing to reveal dark, stained wood, the Holy Infant image is still mint, bestowing on visitors a smile lurking in its eyes and half-tilted mouth.

Only the marble tiles that have sunk to the ground in front of the image tell tales about the feet shuffling over the years.

To hear oldtimers describe it, the practice of “kissing” the image used to be so convoluted and drawn-out, the visitors spilled outside of the Basilica and snaked round the block. The “halok” was in itself a pilgrimage, with visitors from outside Cebu spending a day or more to keep their “panaad (vow)”.

Today, guards keep the line moving by asking visitors to abbreviate their “halok” (often pronounced as “hawk” in keeping with the city practice of shortening a word to ease pronunciation). The longer personal prayers can be uttered at the sides of the shrine, whose glass panels allow visitors a glimpse of the left and right profiles of the image.

In the queue is a mixture of locals and tourists. Clothes and conversation are not the only way to tell apart the two groups. Tourists are attached to their cameras and smartphones. Their casual attire says that the “halok” is just another stopover, perhaps between getting dried mango in Guadalupe and dried fish in Taboan and cooling in the beaches in Mactan.

The young man in front of me took several selfies during the 15-minute queue last Friday. I did not want to spoil his selfies or end up on his Facebook wall so whenever his arm raised the smartphone, I ducked away, weaving side to side like an old boxer trying to stay in the game.

My “drunken master” routine amused someone. When I ducked, I felt someone touch my behind. Turning, I saw a man long past middle age. In the airless corridor, he looked even more wilted than my collar.

But when the touch was repeated, I could no longer dismiss the “accident”. Quickly turning around, I caught my tapper red-handed: a small girl in a shiny pink dress that looked new except that it was halfway down her waist.

Either she was a late child or a granddaughter of the couple behind me. The girl just can’t stand still, her grandmother apologized.

I forgave this tiny creature for mistaking my substantial behind for one of the balloons vendors carry around the Basilica. Balloons, popcorn, snapshots by a roving photographer: when I was a girl, a day in the Basilica meant all these three.

Today’s kids can choose fatter, nicer balloons that resemble popular cartoon characters. I’m glad the practice of releasing balloons to bring petitions skyward has lost favor. If I had a Dora the Explorer balloon that escaped to the sky and later, ended in the sea, it would be the end of the world for me, as it would be for the sea creatures unable to dive back or eat after swallowing the deflated balloon.

The salty yellow popcorn in its cellophane bag is gone. The frenzy of finger-licking and greasy stains left on new clothes were reasons why wise parents always posed their children before photographers as soon as they got to the Basilica, not later.

Yes, in the age of digital cameras, the “maniniyot” survives. Roaming the Pilgrim Center, these men and their cameras may be vintage curiosities to the selfie generation. Watching a photographer coax a human whirlwind into standing still and flashing several missing teeth that will end in a family album (another curio), I think the “maniniyot” documents down the ages what sets apart the devotion to the Sto. Niño: its attraction for children and families.

When it was nearly our turn before the icon, the little girl was cradled by her grandfather while her grandmother took from her bag two hand towels for wiping the glass panel. These will be shared with folks back home, a form of “extended” kiss.

During their first visit to the shrine, the grandmother remembered that she had carried the infant: “Now, she’s walking.”

Some kisses do linger.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 11, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Summer’s children

AFTER a time, I realized what was missing this summer: the sound of children playing on the street.

Summer then was the heat flushing us out to the street. There was no school to regiment our day, only “tubig-tubig,” “bato-lata,” “Japanese game,” and “buwan-buwan.”

The first three games were played even when the sun was at its fiercest. Our elders had not heard of global warming then. Only occasionally would a playmate be called back to their house, face streaming with melted dirt from grimy hands that wiped away sweat to better aim a slipper at the much dented can of sardine in “bato-lata.”

Released later, this kid would have been made to change into a clean white sleeveless undershirt, neck now caked in layers of Johnson’s baby powder but head still emitting the fierce fumes of sun and sweat, laced with Johnson’s baby cologne. And off we went to “biko,” “siatong,” “dakop-dakop” or “tago-tago.”

If the moon was bright and if there was another brown-out, sometimes our elders would lead the evening exodus to the street, where water was poured on the ground to draw and bisect a circle. This line of water meant life and death: running along the line, the “It” tried to tag the player to take his place; the rest of the players ran away from him but had to keep within the circle.

This was life and death in summer then.

Although I can still whiff the smell of summer in a late afternoon bonfire, our street does not ring with the cries of children.

Perhaps computers and smartphones have taken them away. Or they are in the mall, trying to escape the global meltdown while creating more carbon footprints to hasten it.

It is much more complicated to be a child these days. Our children grow up too fast too early. The younger son has a summer job, waiting on fast food diners, washing up, and sorting garbage. Initially, we consented because half of his earnings go to a fund benefiting his school’s scholars.

After he asked permission to work beyond his shift, I hardly recognized the baby I once dandled after siesta. He’s making choices I made not once in the interminable summers of my youth.

Youth is about making choices, not regretting them. In Rebelander S. Basilan’s unforgettable report in Sun.Star Cebu last Apr. 21, 2013, Maria Christina, 11, and Baltazar, nine, Guevara sell fruit salad-flavored ice candy outside the fence of St. Joseph Academy in Mandaue City.

Christina would rather help their mother than go on vacation like other children. Josefina, 37, also sells ice candy to augment the pension of her husband, 67. They have five children.

The Guevara siblings mind their Styrofoam box of ice candy from morning till afternoon. Since Apr. 1, when they began selling ice candy, Christina and Baltazar have earned pocket money. Christina plans to buy a new pair of shoes for June with her funds, P50 as of Apr. 20.

When Rose, 13, earned P500 for the first time, she watched her mother, 40, pocket the money. The same thing happened when Rose earned P200. (Real names are not used.)

When Rose refused to be used by the third stranger, her mother “mauled her, slit her arms with broken scissors, and struck her with a block of wood,” reported Kevin A. Lagunda in Sun.Star Cebu’s Apr. 23, 2013 issue.

In her sworn statement to Tabogon police in April, the fourth grader said in Cebuano that she saw her mother block the door and watch her rape. When Rose asked her mother why she was sold, she was told, “This is for our living.”

Now, this is life and death in summer.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Apr. 28, 2013 issue of the main op-ed column

Boknoy’s complaint

STEPPING inside C’s, the family’s barbershop for a decade or so, I figure a haircut is in order for the new year.

Then I meet Boknoy, 10, one and one-third fingers short. (Minors’ real names are withheld.)

At first, my eyes are fixed on Natan’s scissors. Haircuts are reliable pick-me-ups, but only when your barber is not whacking your head as if it were the economy.

This kid walks in. His grin is bigger and more crooked than the right arm he suspends from a blue sling. He squats on the chair to my left, dials the payphone and engages someone in a meandering discussion about the spaghetti that is taking its sweet time to find its balls or something.

The squeaking monologue makes the dozing man on my right sit up. “Buhi pa diay (so he’s still alive?),” he cuts in on Natan, dissecting the mayor.

The shears pause. Natan breathes in, fills both lungs, and plunges back into the deep.

That’s how I first met Boknoy, a bright fourth grader whose wrist bone and fingers were blown to bright red bits by a Super Lolo a day after Christmas.

On Christmas eve, Boknoy and friends came upon this illegal explosive, discarded in a trash heap, during their wandering.

After the overnight carousing on Dec. 25, while most adults were still asleep, the friends slipped inside an empty lot and tried to ignite the canister with a firecracker.

The first two tries failed.

On the third attempt, Boknoy, hearing a faint whistling coming from the core, picked up the canister to throw it away.

According to Bobby, his uncle, the explosion in the empty lot was heard as far as the barbershop, blocks away.

Nisang, Boknoy’s maternal grandmother, who was peddling her native cakes then, shrieked. An explosion that loud must have taken off someone’s head, she was overheard to mutter.

The need to earn for herself and her grandchildren explains why Nisang had already left the barberohan for the next suki (regular customer) when Boknoy pushed past the grimy glass door of his uncle’s barbershop , cradling what was left of his right hand.

Like a king indulging his courtiers, Boknoy allows the men around him to tell his story. Whenever someone walks in and the storyteller rewinds the tale, the kid allows the braver ones to look at the purple stump.

With eyes as huge as his, he doesn’t have to say anything. In the presence of those eyes, I can’t say anything.

Natan and company make up for our lack. They’re so proud of him, they use the hardest, crudest jokes to jostle him, expecting him to hold steady because he is after all Boknoy, survivor.

Sleeper: It’s a good thing that it was only the older kids with him that morning. What if it had been the smaller ones? They follow him as if he gave birth to them.

Bobby: He looked a little pale but he never cried. Even when I got some cloth to wrap and fold what was dangling. The district doctor said that if the bone fragments were any finer, he would be now known as Boknoy the Sandman.

Natan: When he first arrived with his grandmother and sister, he had no teeth. Now, he has one and a third of his fingers missing. Does anybody have better luck than Boknoy?

Nine years ago, Nisang returned to Cebu with two of her grandchildren, Boknoy, aged one, and his sister, Maritel, about five. In Manila, Nisang’s daughter and her partner often “pawned” Boknoy for shabu. When Maritel complained of hunger pains, her parents got the child to snort.

Scared that her daughter might eventually sell her grandchildren, Nisang left Manila. She sells native snacks, works for a store and washes clothes for a living. Helped by relatives, the grandmother keeps Boknoy and his sister in school.

After that unfortunate comment during the explosion, Nisang treats her grandson to takeout spaghetti. “Boknoy feels he’s so much loved, he’s thinking of blowing up his other hand,” says Natan.

Before I leave the barbershop, I have to ask those eyes: what’s on your mind?

Boknoy of the most long-lasting luck complains: “My penmanship is so ugly.”


mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* First published in the Jan. 10, 2010 issue of Sun.Star Cebu's "Matamata" column

Over the top

MY SONS’ school just concluded English Week. One of the activities was a book fair.

Now on his second year of purchasing the Geronimo Stilton series, my 10-year-old son casually threw in, along with a suggestion for new titles, a request for permission to purchase a Beyblade.

I was stumped: what was a rebooted, heavily accessorized “kasing,” or spinning top, doing in a book fair? The “Beiburedo” hogged the toy market in mid-2000 when Hasbro, a giant toy company second only to Mattel, was granted a license by a Japanese firm, Takara, to market the toy internationally. The craze for the toy coincided with the release of a TV series pegged on Beyblade showdowns and much later, publication of a comic book series.

Marketing directed at kids (and obviously, their parents, whose purchasing power is the seam of gold connecting all childish desires) intrigues me. Though I dutifully staked out toy stores for the originals and then roamed the deepest recesses of Carbon market and Manalili for their less ridiculously priced imitations, I drew the line at buying accessories like the Beystadium, which looks like our dented wash basin but costs 15 times as much.

According to my son, Beyblade metal fights are held in this Beystadium, with the victor declared after he succeeding in knocking out the loser’s Beyblade from this arena. Though fascinated by Japanese pop culture and American marketing—the latest zeitgeist of neo imperialism—I believe the Filipino “kasing” can more than match this Japanese/American import.

Then a non-government organization gave me a “kasing,” along with “takyan” and other traditional toys, one Christmas. When I brandished this find to my son, he just turned over several times the plain wooden top, as puzzled as I was when I fingered tentatively my first Beyblade and its original four-part blade system, later upgraded to five.

Uncertainly, he untwirled and then retwirled the coil of twine wrapped around the top’s protruding nail. Under several layers of grime and day-old scabs, my cousins and I sweated during long summer days, trying to perfect how to wrap the “tail,” as well as how to “sight,” angle, throw and release the “kasing,” determined to make our top carved from indestructible “kamagong” (ironwood) into a giant killer, not a wimp.

For Juan and his friends, classic launching and spin-winning rests on a power Turbo Winder and clutch lock system, which taps a bewildering arcana of mechanics and engineering I would not have guessed in six-year-olds.

When he asked permission last Monday to buy a Beyblade version (“only P10, Mom”) from the book fair, I looked for my classic “kasing” and couldn’t resurrect it. My guess is the top rests in some toy purgatory, where my kamagong yoyo and prize-winning jackstones should also be.

So hubby and I fixed an afternoon date with my sons at the school book fair. Only one out of four exhibitors sold toys. The bulk of the students were sitting on the floor, leafing through books. Among them was my son, brushing up on the latest misadventure of G. Stilton, publisher of The Rodent’s Gazette, best-selling paper in New Mouse City.

An hour later, we settled amicably. Aside from Geronimo’s illustrated tales, my sons promised to read three classic fantasies, with illustrations limited only to the cover and back. On our way out, I sidestepped the Beyblade my ten-year-old negotiator threw under my feet.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Feb. 22, 2009 issue

Better than plastic

IN THE hinterlands as in the cities, plastic and human lives intersect.

But while plastic swiped makes the mall lines move, the plastic dominates the slopes and uplands of this country as plates, recycled mineral water bottles, and reused soy sauce containers that hold the lunch and drinking water that keep a student in school until class ends in mid-afternoon.

Walk into any public school in this country. There is enough plastic to make an environmentalist cry.

From joy. Out of the sheer humbling sense of inadequacy. Advocacy for Mother Earth's preservation is redundant when poverty dictates that nothing should be discarded for self-preservation.

Plastic is a savior for children that walk two hours to attend school, and another two to reach home, where, before they can eat or study, there is work waiting to be done in farms, with livestock, to accomplish chores without end.

When city visitors of a school sponsor lunch, plastic is what the children hold out. It is not just convenient; it is not only reliable. It is the only one that most children have.

Some of the children pair off, receiving their share of lunch that's good for two or three on a plastic plate or container that barely holds enough to satisfy one.

Among city career girls, lunch in a tiny box is a concession to diet and the anorexic trend among wristlet-bags.

When children in the uplands "make do" with a matchbox-sized lunch, they eat half now and reserve the other half for a later meal, the security of later satisfaction more preferable to one-time fullness.

Visitors ladling out the hot meals are confused when a small hand reaches out a plastic bag that's been used and washed. Just as plastic littering landfills is not uncommon, plastic bags washed and air-dried attracts no comment in places that are closer to the vault of the sky than to a store.

But not even plastic can hold interminable dominion.

Dispersed among the synthetic blues, greens, yellows and pinks of food containers spotted in the lunch line is the natural green of banana leaf.

Some parents strip off nearby plants to give their toddlers and other children too young yet to be in first grade any available container to allow their inclusion in the lunch line.

Juxtaposing the residents' spontaneous impulse with the visitors' plans, the banana leaves change the tenor and texture of lunch.

Instead of organizing a feeding, the visitors end up learning.

The initial awkwardness of twirling a pliable but shifting leaf is considerable but easily overcome.

In finding their rhythm of folding a rippling green skein of leaf into a spill-proof lunch pack that's better than plastic, the visitors discover an act akin to handing to each child a blossom plucked from the first Eden.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Dec. 21, 2008 issue

Secrets of children

CORKSCREW-HAIRED and chubby-cheeked, the tot ate crispies from a bag while the woman beside him, who might have been his mother, played with a Play Station Portable.

Waiting to board our flight, the rest of us adults were too preoccupied with a million thoughts to spare him more than a glance and, from some of us females, a smile or two.

But a portly middle-aged man pulling a trolley bag stopped before the munching kid. Stooping a little, the Caucasian held out his upturned palm.

My companion, Cherry, said the child gave the man some of his crispies. Cherry found the child, in the spontaneity of his generosity, to be uncharacteristically child-like. I, on the other hand, said the child was just being his age.

Perhaps closer to truth might have been the observation that children act as others treat them.

The night before, our group nursed our drinks at an alfresco table at Malate. Halfway in our midnight celebration, a child whose top of the head barely reached our table’s edge pressed our companion to buy one of her overpriced red roses.

When her small head suddenly materialized near my elbow, I clutched my bag tighter. For this tot, no distracted, admiring glance was spared. Although I was alert to her presence, I couldn’t look her in the face. I can’t summon her face now as I write, can’t say if she was smiling or sullen-faced, cute as a button or ancient as other street veterans.

Sipping my P95 can of coke and munching the fried pork rind that came with the compliments of the café, I was distracted by this slight shadow from the shoptalk swirling around our table. Told by our companion that he will buy a rose later, the child decided to wait.

When I glanced later, she was lying on the sidewalk as a dog would have made itself comfortable, waiting for scraps to fall from the table. She had placed the cellophane-wrapped roses on her chest. I thought suddenly of the small, white boxes that hold aborted fetuses.

Later, the café guard dragged away the small, unresisting figure. He was stocky, broad of shoulders. To him, she could not have been more cumbersome than a sack of potatoes.

I didn’t see where her roses were while the guard dragged her away. I decided then to sip again from my glass of overpriced coke.

Although I have two boys of my own, I can’t say I know the secrets of children. That information would be, in market terms, worth a lot. Lost in a maze-like mall in Roxas, I reflected that knowing what children want will bring the most piercing ecstasy to anyone caught in the whirlpool of expectations and second guessing.

Parents who want the best for their offspring; school owners trying to convince parents their institution offers the best guarantee for their children’s future; product merchandisers persuading buyers that this brand or style offers the best value for money or best impression on school opening day—every one chases after figments or shadows, hoping to come upon the key to unlock the secret to young hearts and minds.

Lost in our dreams, whether for “value-based education” or the hippest school accessory, we miss the obvious.

The outstretched hand, encouraging smile, averted glance, the lunge to secure one’s possessions, the indifferent hauling away of a street eyesore.

With such obvious gestures is a child taught best the lessons that will never be forgotten.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 1, 2008 issue

What Aesop skipped

SUMMER: when your kids are parked at home, think quickly to avert a situation.

Juan announced that by the end of March, he would be done with his final exam and scouting camp.

Replying to the unspoken but important implication—unlimited computer time—I started to mouth, “Wa ka kuyapi? Over my dead…”

But the nine-year-old beat me to the draw. “I know too much time playing computer games”—I looked at him with narrowed eyes—“will destroy my eyes and vocabulary”—I didn’t blink, didn’t look away, in case I missed a trick—“so I was thinking of raising a pet”—I relaxed, was about to smile—“can you afford a calf?”

I blinked. On the opposing wall, a pair of watercolor trees he painted years back when he still spelled, “Moomy,” resembled a meadow devoid of something.

“Calves”—I cleared my throat—“are drawn to greens”—like pastures, bank accounts, agribusiness fortunes—“why would a calf anyway want to live in our garden”—I look out of the window, for inspiration or in desperation—“when it smells of cats?”

Thankfully, my generation is a bit better read. So, before he suggested we trade in the cats for a chocolate milk-producing cow, I told him about a dude named Philip K. Dick who wrote about life after the war that ends all wars.

All the living things are dead, if not killed by the war then by the radioactive dust settling after the fallout. While technology can create the simulacra of any living thing—from humans to animals—the survivors covet what is nearly impossible to find: real pets.

In the radioactive shell that is San Francisco in the year 2021, most humans have fled to Mars (for new settlements like New New York). Among the stragglers living in nearly deserted buildings, there’s no need to compete for space. The new status symbol is a pet since, by definition, all animals are endangered.

According to the listing of “Sidney’s Animal & Fowl Catalogue,” anyone can buy a horse, theoretically. For instance, if a Percheron colt was listed in italics, this indicated that anyone with five thousand dollars could buy such an animal if three conditions were in place.

First condition: if, theoretically, a Percheron colt could be found. Second condition: if, theoretically, one had five thousand dollars to buy such a colt. And last condition: if, theoretically, one had money to spare since the italics indicated that five thousand dollars was the prevailing price then when a Percheron colt was still available and, were one to be found, a Percheron colt would no longer fetch only five thousand dollars.

That is the predicament of Rick Deckard in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Deckard abases himself when he has to confess to his neighbor, the exalted owner of a live horse, that his sheep is not really made of wool and guts.

“He wished to god he had a horse, in fact any animal. Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one.”

The neighbor assures Deckard that he will not tell his shameful secret to the others. He suggests the bounty hunter should bid for a cat, a cricket, or a mouse since this went for as low as twenty-five dollars in the Catalogue.

Deckard figures he’ll just earn the money to buy a horse, a cow or a sheep.

Quick to smell a coming moral—“to get what we want, we have to study and work”—Juan left my side to look for his brother.

Philip K. Dick was not yet done, but I didn’t call him back. The fable, which the classic movie, “Blade Runner,” is based on, is set in a future where humans have invented “andys,” or androids, to make life a little better.

When these human-looking robots rebel from serving mankind, they are hunted down and “retired.” Tests are later conducted to establish if it was indeed only machinery that was shut down or if a mistake had been made on a genuine article.

Theoretically, it did not matter, neither to the thing in its retirement nor to hunters like Deckard: “The bounty from retiring five andys would do it, he realized.”

mayette.tabada@ gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 30, 2008 issue

Rocky mountain high

IN THE end, it was the children who saved us.

To find an address in the mountains of Talamban, we did the practical thing: asked directions.

Improvements on a spillway had made the usual route impassable except by habal-habal (motorbike improvised for commuting in the boondocks). Preferring to use the family car, we took an alternative route but had to ask around whenever the road forked off.

At the first crossroads, a smiling fellow revving his habal-habal engine tilted his head to indicate the left road. He told us to go “straight lang,” pursing his lips for emphasis.

Anyone who's been around knows that mountain paths hardly go “straight.” But since we were looking for a sitio known as Pulangbato (red stone), the sight of that winding ribbon of red earth made us think we were on the right road or, at least, heading in the right direction.

Soon enough, our path diverged with children going home from school. A few of them clung, as if sticky-limbed, to habal-habal drivers, but many of them walked home, if not by necessity, certainly by choice.

Slowed down by the twists and curves, we found ourselves watching the children. They chatted, joked. Many “wore” their rubber slippers on their hands, walking barefoot. We swerved to avoid two boys, checking out the caimitos (starapples) ripening in the roadside trees.

Another group stuck the thick, matted tendrils of the orcalla tree in their heads so it seemed that they sported dreadlocks. I laughed aloud at their creativity while wondering at the speed some aspects of popular culture are communicated.

When the road stopped twisting, we gained speed and left behind the children. But noticing that the ground was no longer a red shade, we checked our direction again with a man nursing a bottle.

He said we had strayed into the next barangay. Pulangbato was near the school, he said and waved the bottle in the direction we came.

Although dubious now about bottles, pursed lips and unconventional direction devices, we remembered the children and decided to return to the spot where our paths converged.

The children were still on the road. When the Rastafarian boys spotted us, they puffed their chests and strutted. In no time, we found the school and our destination.

The school had the shuttered, abandoned look these places take on at duskfall on Fridays. I wondered if it had a computer lab or even Internet connection. In many places of learning in the uplands, even a typewriter remains a hi-tech craving.

How did the Rastafarian boys know about the dreadlocks? Did they see Bisrock icon Budoy drive by on his big black bike? Most likely, it was a habal-habal driver or a local boy, cocky with tales from the city.

The deserted school came back to me again while I watched that night the TV coverage of the interfaith protest in Manila.

In places like Pulangbato, what information about the latest controversy involving the Philippine National Broadband Network (NBN) filters through? The NBN deal with the ZTE firm would have meant faster, more efficient and cheaper Internet connectivity for government entities and through them, the public. Who knows? Perhaps the NBN plans might have included schools, traditionally kept in the backburner of development plans.

With a computer lab and Internet connection, places like Pulangbato can introduce children to exploding worlds of knowledge. The Rastafarian boys, for instance, can google “dreadlocks” and learn what's really cool from Wikipedia: started by the poor of Jamaica to express the Rastafari movement's “Young Black Faith,” this 1930s hairstyle showed that the wearer lived in “dread” or awe of a higher being; hence, the term “dreadlocks.”

But as greed and corruption for the P15-billion NBN-ZTE deal seems to have leapfrogged over the country's technological leap, the Rastafarian boys and I will just have to rely on learning, perhaps through osmosis with habal-habal drivers.

mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917-3226131


* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Mar. 2, 2008 issue