Mermaid’s tears

TRAVEL puts you in the mood for the unexpected.

I chant this to myself when, at the end of the road, is not a bath and a book but a “No Vacancy” sign.

This mantra usually works unless there’s a triple whammy of the unanticipated: a frustrating chase for a fact that might be camouflaged as fiction, a favorite room found to be taken, mosquitoes that end up as surprise roommates.

To be fair, the mosquitoes—long-legged beauties with hungry whines—were as taken aback as I was when I opened the tiny bathroom attached to our room. It was too late to fuss then about the in-house bloodsuckers: notebooks used in the fieldwork had to be sorted out; Juan demanded to swim.

At the pool, we found the staff applying chlorine. Best to wait for one more hour, they advised.

As my son’s grumbling was beginning to sound as maddening as the creatures we left in the room, I told him we could walk along the shore and look for mermaid’s tears.

A National Geographic article read some time ago ran a photo essay about sea glass. These are the small, frosted remnants of bottles and other glass items that end up in the sea. Sand and sea water break them down, smoothen and mold them, even etch patterns on the surfaces.

While looking for sea glass is as popular as and even more politically correct than taking seashells and corals, collectors covet the colors of red and black, which are more unusual since present-day beer bottles are usually green, brown or colorless.

But even the most common shard of sea glass, when it is slick with the sea or glinting with reflected fire, is not difficult to imagine as pearls of a weeping sea maiden or, found once on a beach in Dalaguete, a glass slipper just waiting for a royal foot.

A beachcomber’s dream, this coastline is a trifle treacherous for swimming because of the white-capped waves that slap and curl around the slabs of stone. Juan and I took a close look at the undisturbed hoard strewn along the coast. It is nearly beyond human capacity to fully appreciate even just a square inch of the shore. Just when one thinks the shade of this stone is unlike any hue seen before, the sifting of sand will reveal a tiny periwinkle with a shell design more intricate than any pattern woven by human hands.

Yet, sea glass remains my favorite as a showcase of nature. Where is the maestro to rival sand and sea in creating art from the meanness of garbage and negligence?

If only life’s surprises were all as delightful: a few hours before retreating to this place, my husband and I listened to a resident recount stories of a war I only read about, even grudgingly, from course-required references.

To reach the beach after the interview, we drove past a patch of trees. It looked the same as always: canopy shadows dappling the ground, a sleepy breeze ruffling the overgrown grass. Passing by this place countless times, I’ve never really seen it.

I could not now look at it, remembering the source’s stories of children tossed in the air while soldiers made a bet to see whose bayonet could impale the most number of bodies. Whole families were executed once fingered by the hooded informer, star and sole witness in the town’s juez de cuchillo (justice of the knife).

It is said that something nameless still flits across the faces of oldtimers when the name of the war collaborator is mentioned.

When a name was finally given in answer to our question, I was slow to react. Perhaps the hours of listening played tricks on my mind. Maybe I had been asleep in actuality, dreaming only that I was interviewing. It is hard to wake up when you are working so hard to convince yourself that you are awake.

Like a pretty glass washed ashore, memory can become anything. Increments can compress to bear down, reduce bottle into shards into a fairytale slipper or pearls rolling from a sea maiden.

When a name was uttered that afternoon, I remembered the stern face of a senior who said, write as if you are chasing the truth, while another recalled bodies transfixed on the lance of an unforgetting, unforgiving memory.

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

* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 31, 2008 issue

Art of living

PICASSO takes my breath away, but he is nothing compared to my grandfather’s youngest sister.

After a New Year visit with their family, my Tita Niting gave us going-away presents that included ribbons of pastillas in a clear plastic bag, which, after reading its print upside down, I discovered as originally wrapping the two-ply bathroom tissue my tita buys in cost-saving packs from this grocery chain.

Now I will not argue that Picasso was a great artist, but I draw back at using the same adjective for a man who ran through so many women before God took him back.

A constant gardener, my tita is an artist, too. But in her garden, nothing goes to waste: plants are grown, put on the table, shared with family, composted, planted and harvested again.

Her gift of pastillas bore the idea that artistry comes from taking a good look at what we have and reusing them.

So to jumpstart this year’s resolutions, I harvested a sheaf of figures and more from old newspapers.

Not only did I amass a goodly number of smudged fingerprints and ink moons, this list is in praise of my Tita Niting’s virtues and that of other “life artists” elsewhere.

Waste not, want not

Before 2006 closes, securities analysts project that Google Inc.’s share will be $600, up from $20.37 to $435.45 by the end of 2005. That’s because the company will be tying up with television and software products.

This $10 billion worldwide market makes me appreciate the principle behind the search engine’s success: link information and get its meaning. Thus, even a pile of moldy newspapers can yield useful advice for living.

Dwell in the moment

Unforgettable was this paper’s Jan. 5, 2006 page on world news: all three major news articles featured harrowing tragedies. A suicide bomber in Baqouba, Iraq killed 30 people and scattered body parts of another 36 when he detonated a bomb during a Shiite funeral attended by more than 100 mourners. In Indonesia’s Java Island, landslides triggered by monsoon rains killed or left missing more than 270 people, most of them in a single village.

And in a reversal that traumatized the families left behind, 11 of 12 coal miners trapped in Tallmansville, West Virginia were found dead, hours after they were first reported as alive and safe.

Unlike lightning, tragedy can strike more than once. All the more reason then to live in the moment. Unlike the past and the future, the present is truly ours.

Listen more to the young

Four feet tall, eight-year-old Aidan Gold has climbed the Cascades, the Alps and—just last November 2005— the Himalayas.

On the first day of this year, a 16-year-old teenager came home from a three-week Middle East odyssey, taken despite a State Department advisory warning Americans not to visit Iraq.

Farris Hassan, a Miami schoolboy, went solo, inspired by a classroom lecture on immersion journalism. He thought the trip to see and better understand what the Iraqis are living through was worth going “the extra mile or rather, a few thousand miles.”

Certainly, it yielded a more enduring lesson than what Farris skipped, a family trip to Colorado for holiday skiing: “When you go back home you have such a new appreciation for all the blessings you have there, and I’m just going to be, like, ecstatic for life.”

Whether it is leaving tracks beyond comfort zones or looking longer and harder at what they are taught to hate, young people bear listening to.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com or 09173226131)