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”

Making memories

AMERICANS take to the road. According to a June 7 article in the International New York Times, lower gasoline prices and a shift inpost-recession values are spurring Americans to get behind the wheel.

The “great American road trip,” writes Clifford Krauss, comes on the tail of the 2008 financial crisis. Americans are savouring their money to “buy happiness” in the form of “adventures and memories”. Unlike “tangible goods that expire and wear out,” a marketing executive described memories as the ultimate acquisitions: “you can’t take away my memory”.

Contrasting with this view of a memory that can be fixed and insured from loss or theft is a line I encountered in Haruki Murakami’s short story, “Yesterday,” published in The New Yorker’s June 9 & 16, 2014
issue.

Murakami’s story about lost youth and lost love revolves around a confusing youth named Kitaru, his obsession (or not) for the too-nice-to-be-real Kuritani, and the confused narrator who was Kitaru’s close friend (or not) Tanimura.

However, “Yesterday” isn’t about the eternal love triangle. Murakami starts and ends the story with a meditation over Tanimura’s recall, broken by a16-year gap, of the Kansai translation Kitaru makes of the
Beatles’ classic, “Yesterday”.

When they were 20 and working in a coffee shop, Kitaru translated Paul McCartney’s lyrics into the Kansai dialect. Tanimura listened to Kitaru sing this version as he soaked for an hour or so in the bath: “Yesterday/ Is two days before tomorrow,/ The day after two days ago.”

Trying to make sense of this translation is impossible. I grew up with my yaya’s portable radio always blaring love songs while she ironed clothes and I was supposed to stay put and avoid mischief (and trouble with my parents for her).

So my memory of “Yesterday” is stuck on the groove of these lines, “Yesterday/ All my troubles seemed so far away/ Now it looks as if they’re here to stay/ Yesterday came suddenly.”

Kitaru’s Kansai translation is impenetrable, given my memory of “Yesterday”. Even if I comprehended Kansai (Murakami’s story was translated for The New Yorker by Philip Gabriel), I would not still be able to choose which was the better remembrance of Paul’s poetry: Kitaru’s or mine.

But I take solace in Murakami’s line: “As time passes, memory, inevitably, reconstitutes itself.”

Reading about America’s post-recession wisdom was disappointing. I understand how it is to lose one’s job and lose one’s home. I, too, would cling to something. But memories?

There is no recipe for making memories. I recently emailed my sister photos of my late father’s Beetle. She emailed me that seeing again the old dashboard made her cry. She remembers holding tightly on to the handle placed in front of the passenger seated next to the driver when my father was in one of his moods.

When I was sorting his things, 11 years after he passed away, I cried only once. My father watched over me while I delivered my first born. He scrubbed for exactly an hour. When I didn’t cry during the worst labor pain, he directed my doctor to open me. My daughter never cries, he said. Ergo, she must be in pain.

I found a paper bag where he saved everything he used in that dawn delivery, including the gloves. When I opened the paper-wrapped maroon scrub gown, I cried. I don’t recall him wearing red at all. Memories cannot be counted on.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in Sun.Star Cebu's June 12, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, "Matamata"

Script for life

NOTEBOOKS punctuate our learning more than we expect.

When a school year begins, we weigh down our shopping basket with this classroom staple: 90 or 100 leaves, sewn or spiral, iconic white-as-a-blank-tablet or politically correct recycled sepia.

At the end of the year, I see the notebooks again to weed out the used from the unused pages. When the boys were in the lower years, I recycled the remaining clean sheets to jot down grocery lists or mathematical exercises.

But as they grew older, the boys seemed to use fewer pages until it seemed, at the end of the school year, the notebooks looked as mint as they were when the year was about to start.

It’s not a surprise. Homework, readings, news, chitchat, photos, research, music, videos—from the Web unwinds the spool of their wired lives.

Computers, PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones: the young will sooner be parted from the womb than from the electronic extensions of their identity.

Will the digital age banish the notebooks of old to the trash-crammed pockets of last year’s knapsack?

I hope not. Notebooks, with their leaves of paper, are the spaces where we learn how to write. Recent research has psychiatrists and neuroscientists asserting that writing by hand lets children read more quickly and communicate more expressively.

In a June 2, 2014 article, “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades,” Maria Konnikova of The New York Times reported that a University of Washington study of children in grades two through five showed that those who composed text by hand produced more words and ideas than those typing on a keyboard.

In brain imaging, those with better handwriting showed greater activation of neural activity in areas associated with reading, writing and memory.

Other studies showed that, over tracing and printing letters, cursive writing has an edge, such as training self-control. This is food for thought for parents whose five- or six-year-olds are quicker than their elders to swipe and activate their personal tablets as soon as they are seated.

At the very least, it’s an argument favoring eateries with paper placemats that challenge adults to unscramble letters and their children to doodle while waiting for pizza.

The scientific link between penmanship and communication is even more significant for public school students. Reportage about the first day of classes this week has generally been dismal and frustrating: cramped classrooms, “alternative” classes where learning is dubious, even chairless classrooms.

In one TV report, primary students were sprawled on their sides or tummies, writing in notebooks. Chairs had yet to be delivered.

While the situation sorely tests the students’ endurance, not to mention legibility, the exercise with paper and pencil prepares them for a principle proven in laboratories and classrooms: writing by hand helps a person process a lecture and reframe it in his or her words.

According to The New York Times article, perfecting the art of penmanship in childhood benefits the adult’s skills in comprehension, encoding, reflection and memory. A Yale psychologist who is unconvinced by the link between handwriting and learning did admit that “(handwriting) maybe… helps you think better”.

I remember comparing research skills then and now with a college librarian. She said the Internet may have helped students come up with more pages in their theses. Yet, she observed that teachers have to work harder to review manuscripts for plagiarism.

I said the copy-and-paste garden variety of plagiarism must save a lot of library books from losing their pages. She retorted: still doesn’t mean there’s a lot of reading going on. Aye, that’s the rub.


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

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 8, 2014 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

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