Reading in bed

RECENTLY, I rediscovered reading in bed.

I read in bed as a child. Growing up, we had an old black-and-white television in the living room. Until my father replaced it with a secondhand color set, this temperamental box required tedious tinkering with its antenna or wires to project a picture that had a mist of snowfall overlying the scenes, even those set in sweltering jungles.

Coupled with my father’s implacable rules—no TV on weekdays; the last full show on Fridays and Saturdays aired at 7 p.m.—it was no contest between a book and that artifact.

Even during the interminable summer, when a book was never not beside me during the day, I still read in the evenings until sleep crept up and stilled the turning of the page. For the young, sleep is a waste of time.

When I heard my father’s snores, I read by the glare of the family flashlight whose batteries were regularly replenished, my father decreed, for “emergencies”. Sudden brownouts then made reading challenging but not impossible.

Bedtime reading was a juggling act. I could not be caught reading by flashlight because my father worried about the abuse of my eyes. I made the batteries reasonably last because I could not imagine explaining to my frugal parent that the absolute need to discover what lay beyond a chapter’s cliffhanger fell under the category of an emergency.

In summer, when no novels could be borrowed from the school library, the book at hand had to last until the next batch of borrowed paperbacks.

Ah, but how else should youth be lived except on the edge? In spite of astigmatism (my father’s fear realized), reading in bed became a habit, a tic, a reflex, along with reading while waiting, reading in the toilet, reading during breaks, reading in the car, reading despite next day’s exam, etc.

Marriage and children paused the nighttime binges. I couldn’t withdraw into other worlds while starting a family.

Then graduate school and its regimen of reading made this trickle of fear: what if I forgot how to read? What was reading but retreating into other worlds?

Reading again fiction at midnight or dawn, I note these changes: I time these binges no longer under the cover of my father’s snores but only when I sleep alone and no one gets jolted by a book, instead of a pillow, or the beam of my smart phone, instead of the family flashlight.

But these nocturnal readings—of the fantastic or the mythic, read in silence or reenacted on bedroom walls as shadows eloping with the storytelling or segueing into other excursions—I would still very much consider as a personal emergency: tell me, how does the tale end?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in SunStar Cebu’s January 20, 2019 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Imagined

A LUNCHBREAK encounter brought my attention to a book my fellow teachers were holding close to their chest.

One more copy will wend its way to a friend in Australia, which, for once, was viewed as backward: its bookstores had yet to display copies of the Penguin Classic edition of Nick Joaquin’s “The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic”.

My friends’ expressions telegraphed the quiet exultation of having finally nabbed Nick, whose birth centennial was last May 4.

The new media has irretrievably changed why we read and how we read, but working daily with teachers and students, I confirm that technology leaves untouched an older, enduring obsession for books.

For knowledge workers, books are necessities. Yet, the books that occupy permanent, though cramped, space in our hearts and minds are the ones that open doors and windows to an imagined life.

I have no functional use for a black-bound book with tarnished gold-edged pages, picked up in a store of secondhand books.

Published in Amsterdam in 1905, “Het Boek der Psalmen” has all its pages covered in musical notes and Dutch lyrics, which I cannot read.

On the flyleaf of this hymnal is written the name of Minnie De Zeeuw. Handwritten under her name is March 27, 1908, Minnie’s 12th birthday.

I cannot imagine a 12-year-old plotting to get her hands on a hymnal, even in 1908. Yet, when I turn slowly the brittle pages, I can conjure up Minnie and her book of psalms.

That is perhaps why I keep between the pages of this 112-year-old book a handwritten letter my grandfather wrote to my father from his hometown in Magting, Mambajao on July 2, 1971.

Unfolding this letter, sandwiched between the indecipherable, I resurrect the man who was a dry cheek pressed against my sweating, flushed ones when his visits interrupted my playing.

In a June 17, 2016 interview by CNN Philippines, Penguin Classics publisher Elda Rotor explained the decision to include Joaquin in its roster of the world’s classics.

“The main joy is bringing an audience to a work that would otherwise lead a quiet life,” she said.

Between the pages of a book, up close and personal, has never been about absolute solitude.

Forty-six years separate now and the time my grandfather penned that letter. In that interim, four of the persons mentioned in the letter are dead, including my grandfather and father.

I will never be able to ask the questions raised from reading the domestic minutiae unraveled by the upright penmanship in blue-black ink: Did Lolo Tatay live to see the house he was constructing in two months? Were three of his teeth pulled out the following week, as planned?

I will never know but I can imagine.


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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s May 21, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”