Light

SOMETHING about summer’s light stirs the sap.  

One morning, my feet uncharacteristically turned to the street leading away from our home. Kitkat, our feral dam, was chewing the kibble with her usual measured, contemplative air. A neighbor had risen earlier and cleared the street of dead leaves. 

What is it about a deserted street in the greyness of a summer’s dawn? I left behind our communicant cat, my broom, and canister of kibble. I left behind our home, a sleeping spouse, and dogs much affronted to be left out of the jaunt. 

I had in the backwoods of my mind my sons’ reminders to walk for wellness but I doubted if my feet were set on being dutiful the moment it swerved for streets unknown. 

Kitkat’s daughter Wiggy accompanied me for a few meters until she pounced away on her own exploration. The houses I passed had a closed-in shuttered look, with only dogs irked to be penned in cracking the eggshell-stillness of dawn, sharp and shrill in hectoring the intruder. 

I paused before a tree with kapok-like fruits hanging from its bare outspread branches. None of the wispy filaments were on the ground but I remembered the heavy, lumpy pillows I slept on as a child. 

Sometimes, a seed surfaced in the kapok fibers. At bedtime, I searched with my fingers until I found the seed outlined by the pillow cover and rubbed it like a worry bead. This was how I fell asleep, never finishing my prayers.

I reached a street sloping downhill, with a cement mixer making a gallant, though portly silhouette against the overgrowth and construction chaos. Remembering they were clad only in cotton, not chainmail, the legs chose prudence and turned for home. 

On the way back, I passed again some twine left on the street by men who whistled every afternoon for wind to send off their kites. The husband joined these long, intent discussions on whether a garbage bag is better than paper for kite-making, or if a bumble bee or a dragonfly soars higher.

Foraging for kitchen twine for a grand “tutubi na saranggola (dragonfly kite),” the husband suddenly remembered a childhood friend who taught him how to unfold the brown paper pouches used to hold pan de sal, cut off excess paper with one tug of a twine, and affix coco midrib filched from a broom onto the pan de sal wrapper with stale rice grains rubbed to a paste.

Keep the kite light so a breeze can send it off, remembered the naïve schoolboy, who had assembled Japanese paper, barbecue sticks, yarn, scissors, and glue.

Stooping for the twine to bring home, I saw that a third “string” turned out to be the old skin sloughed off by a foot-long snake. This sojourner shared my pickings: travel light.

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 21, 2021 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

K

BEDTIMES are best. At midday, all four puppies and three cats are sleeping in the outdoor kitchen. For the first time in 24 hours, our home is sane.

Though the husband made a shed for the K-zoo, this tiny kitchen is the paws-down favorite for R&R. Cool tiles, shade, and access from the garden must be the attractions in these hot times, with summer, coronavirus disease (Covid-19), and enhanced community quarantine (ECQ) showing no let-up.

A zoo, a godson calls the K-company. K stands for “kinit-an (abandoned),” with the cats walking in from unknown streets and a basin of puppies waiting to be lifted off the street.

K also stands for “kauban (companion),” which I prefer over “pet”. The latter means affection bestowed on the other, a backhanded way of social distancing.

Traced to the Old French “compaignon”— meaning “one who breaks bread with another”—a kauban involves an exchange of choices: to approach, to adjust, to stay perhaps.

Kitkat, purring louder than seemingly possible from such a small frame, appeared while I was washing plates. Feral veterans often slip in when there is no human around. Kitkat wanted to feed but she did not want to steal. After a few more meals, she returned with two kittens, then with her tomcat of the moment.

When Kitkat is in heat, several toms hang around. Perhaps misnamed, Big Tom is not a Romeo or a Kitkat groupie. He is an old gentleman with a luxuriant but bedraggled marmalade coat and a touching weakness for strokes and chin-rubs.

A slim princeling, Tigr, from Kitkat’s first kindle, tolerates Big Tom but keeps his distance from the K-pups. Cats greet each other by touching and sniffing noses. No such delicacy for the savage K-pups, who chomp on tails and sniff butts, imperial or not.

Unexpectedly, it is Big Tom who submits, even grudgingly, to the puppies’ eternally optimistic view that even for those who are locked down and forced to live together against their will, the sum of what we have in common is greater than the difference remaining from our idiosyncrasies and divergences.

Midday finds Tigr napping on the highest shelf, hidden except for pink paw pads hanging over the edge. Heavy with her latest kindle, Kitkat looks down from the counter on the barbarians sprawled on the floor.

Napping in the middle of this circle of yipyipping puppy dreams and hedonistic limb-stretching is Big Tom. The indignity of being assaulted by a butt-sniffing juvenile or the substitution of his tail for a chewtoy merits only the lazy swatting of a paw minus drawn claws.

In the age of incivility, Buddha is a patriarch sleeping with the enemy.



Siesta. Noki and Big Tom, Silang, 18 April 2020




(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 19, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The wilding

TINY yellow flowers carpeting the road. Glossy purple and green balls of caimito that drip sweet juice down one’s chin and leave one’s gums and lips caked afterwards in an odd telltale stiffness.

No one needs to tell me summer is here.

The traditional two months of release from school means that, even after I have long outgrown childhood, March still brings on a great restlessness, which the first rain in May only dampens.

I can see this same restiveness in nature. Leaves leaving trees in a great exodus, scattered into all directions by a wayward wind. Even the riotous grass withers and withdraws beneath the earth to a place I cannot behold.

This going away makes me wonder why I am still here.

This leave-taking is what reading becomes for me.

Reading looks such a placid, quiet preoccupation. Except for the flipping of a page, a reader is an enraptured creature, appearing to sleep with eyes wide open. The lips may just so slightly move, mumbling an incantation unheard or just breathing, keeping the reader barely connected with this world.

Inside, the reader is a savage, thumbing her nose at boring life and its petty fetters, escaping through the window of a scholar’s office to run wild and free, from roof to roof in the mythical Jordan College in the Oxford created by Philip Pullman and illustrated by Clement Oubrerie in the graphic novel adaptation of the controversial “children’s” classic, “The Golden Compass”.

This is the first novel in Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman’s mistrust for organized religion bars these books from getting within shouting distance of schools’ required reading lists.
His thesis—a troublemaker will save the world—will not endear the trilogy to parents who regard books as pacifiers for unruly imaginations and tools to churn out exemplars and leaders.

But if you can relate to the child Lyra Belacqua shouting “Long live savages!” after running away from a lesson on experimental theology, if you have ever yearned to hid behind bookcases to spy and eavesdrop, you will find yourself at home in a tale where beasts, witches, and daemons in animal form are less deceptive than scientists, theologians, and religious authorities.

Offering not just deviations but disruptions, fantasy and science fiction compose my idea of perfect narratives. Lyra’s daemon Pantalaimon says my favorite lines in the graphic novel:

“Are you mad? Why are you always imagining things?”

Uttered by a talking animal in a make-believe university of great learning, the lines are found in two small panels on page 3. As a counterpoint for all the insanity organizing our world, has the imaginary been couched in terms more casual, insidious, and heartbreaking?


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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 18, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Summer mysteries

CATCHING sight of the modest starbursts of yellow in our water apple tree, I realized that summer is here.

The tiny flowers with many stamens promise that the bell-shaped fruits will soon be out. I grew up thinking that the fruits saturated in pink verging on the red were the juiciest and sweetest.

The tree in our small garden, though, yields only the greenish white bells of the parent tree from which it was marcotted. Their pale jade wakes a memory of sourness, only to be dispelled when the first bite brings a watering, overflowing tart sweetness.

Like children and water apples, summers change. Of all the occupations I held, I stayed longest with teaching perhaps because it left me summers to enjoy.

Two months of freedom from school and routine challenged my sister and I to think of ways to rush sunrise into sunset. Long after we tired of eating, playing, quarrelling, and watching TV, the day was still far from over.

So I read. When I was finished with the books at home, I reread those I liked.

Then I got tired even with the ones I liked. So I wrote.

I discovered empty sheets in old notebooks, and converted these spaces into an impatient, furious confessional. Some stories I rewrote and reread to myself.

School interrupted. But there was always summer to look forward to.

Now, whenever I see summer’s flowers—white stars dotting the water apple tree, the dirty yellow carpet shed by trees growing on the wayside, orange flames engulfing fire trees—I think of the mysteries of reading and writing.

As a consequence of the shift to the August to May international academic calendar, the midyear term has affected summer.

Yet, it may take time for the rationale of improved competitiveness brought about by synchronization with the global community to seep in and transform summer, which, in this country, embraces not just climate but also culture and consciousness.

Recently, I saw on my table a story handwritten and illustrated on a ruled yellow sheet of paper. Its author is Athea, 9.

She loves to plant herbs with her two younger brothers. When she discovered how much herbs fetch in markets, she made up her mind to grow and sell them.

Athea and her brothers have mixed cement, sand, and water to help the carpenters building their home. She has also made up her mind to become an architect.

In a haste to grow up, Athea makes time to read Geronimo Stilton. She can only focus on her tablet for half an hour. Then she gets restless and looks for a sheet of paper and pencil.

Her tale of two friends and their floating pumpkin came from one such interval in Athea’s crammed, full life. And for her, summer—a lifetime of summers—has yet to begin.



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

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 5, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”