The good life

WHAT would Walter say to the fat cats of Singapore?

On the family’s first overseas journey, we stopped overnight at Singapore. I would have been content to explore again Changi Airport, the airport city, but the older son brooked no slacking or clinging to safe harbors.

I got plus points from him for collecting all the tourist information materials after clearing with the immigration. Sucking a candy—free also from the poor young man, too tired to do anything but express a soul-deep weariness with his entire body, one of the many processing all the foreigners streaming into this multicultural state—I scan the lushly printed guides and am convinced that I have done enough sightseeing and am ready for bed.

Bedtime, however, is not yet within sight in our itinerary. If one leaves from Cebu at 3 p.m., it’s 7 p.m. and still bright as midafternoon in Cebu when the plane touches down at the Changi Airport.

Having a long work day must be why Singaporeans tend to be brisk to the point of brusqueness. The driver of the coach ferrying us from the airport to the hotel in Tiong Bahru Road barks in a curious mix of Singlish and English.

I notice he restricts himself to the by now familiar body language of silence and strain when a Caucasian family comes on board. The older son, better travelled and more tolerant, observes that as Singlish, the local lingo, is spoken with a clipped, abrupt tone, their Singlish-accented English must come across as cold to foreigners.

Anywhere in the world, people remain the most exotic. I think of this as we drive up to our first view of the Gardens by the Bay.

Silhouetted against a velvet evening horizon, the Flower Dome, Cloud Forest, and Silver Garden are unlike the humble gardens back home. The coach drives by at 8:45 p.m., in time for the second scheduled switching on of the Garden Rhapsody, which displays the Supertrees, more architectural than horticultural marvels shooting 22 meters above the ground.

My glimpse of Singapore emphasizes more than anything the Otherness: streets and sidewalks washed clean of people. Tourist brochures with more information than one thinks one needs about Singapore; night-shift workers who release only the minimum data to keep transactions functional with the city’s transients.

Searching for dinner, we ended up by mistake at the back of the kitchens of a local hawker center. Two tabbies lolled, replete, on the pavement.

These street toms dragged bellies that scraped the ground. These ones never chased rats, if such deviants had a niche in this socially engineered city.

The cat in our campus, Walter, who keeps several human pets, might be keen to swap stories about the good life.


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


* First published in the April 9, 2017 issue of the SunStar Cebu Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Toomuchismo

MY late maternal grandmother would probably say that the scandal entangling House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and Davao del Norte Rep. Antonio Floirendo Jr. only proves that men, like women, discover gardening with age.

Once, while we were discussing oregano in her garden, she observed that I was finally showing my age.

I confirm: after passing the first half of a century, I enjoy more time spent in the garden. I like to focus on the physical exertions demanded by weeding and pruning while leaving my mind free to appreciate quiet, the signs of life thrusting out, and the calming sense of decay and going back to earth.

The horticultural must also be on the minds of the congressmen, who, in the latest controversy, seem to be of the garden variety of politicians.

Although the issue initially focused on the graft charges filed with the Ombudsman by the Speaker against his former bosom buddy, the public’s attention has shifted to the catfight involving the congressmen and their women.

Both men no longer live with their wives. Their common-law partners or girlfriends accompany them publicly, including on official functions and social media posts.

Article 147 of the Family Code of the Philippines recognizes that many couples enter into a live-in arrangement, also known as a “common-law marriage”.

The Speaker has also admitted fathering several children out of wedlock.

He has dared critics to seek his disbarment, and expressed disbelief that anyone would raise his affairs as an ethical violation: “Come on! Who does not have a girlfriend?”

His incredulity must be genuine. By now, “telling the truth” must be accepted as “manly” and normal not just by womanizers but also by Filipinos used to the confessional rambling and sexist jokes of President Duterte.

In the code of machismo, men dominate by observing double standards: different sets of morality for men and women. In this macho binary, women are either for “casa (home)” or “calle (street)”.

The first kind washes his clothes and bears his children. The second promises pleasure, variety, and stature with his friends.

A Stanford paper cites a Mexican joke about a wife’s three prayers. “Lord, let my husband remain faithful,” prays the bright-eyed bride. “Lord, let me not discover his unfaithfulness,” prays the realistic wife. “Lord, let me not care,” she prays, finally, for sanity and peace.

For the Speaker and his ilk, I will not bend the deity’s ears. I prefer the clear sight of my late grandmother:

Just as women turn to gardening when their wombs go barren, some men collect orchids: the young and the beautiful to decorate and camouflage the stumps of what used to be trees.

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

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s April 2, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

Fellowship of the bookcases

SIX of us gathered around a couple of tables.

Meet our fellowship. Cheking is the preternatural idealist. Farseeing, he is donating journalism books to the Cebu City Public Library (CCPL).

Three of us teach. I assume the others presume teachers know libraries the way priests in confessionals are intimate with every bared soul’s warp and stain.

Newsroom colleagues, Kent is yang to Cherry’s yin. In the duality of interconnectedness, yang is light. Kent will design the shelves to hold the books after the fellowship makes up its mind.

Until this miracle comes about, it is Cherry’s task to guide us out of the dark of confusion. In another life before editing, Cherry must have been a wartime general.

Stratagems should be Cherry Ann’s third name. Her three-page email summarizing shelving options for the Cebu Journalism and Journalists (CJJ) Books Project shames my skills in planning, writing, and housekeeping:

“The distance of the short beige cabinets from the tall gray cabinet on the left is 17 inches, and from the brown wooden cabinet on the right is 10-1/4 inches. This means if we put short cabinets that are wider than the cabinets now sitting there, these short cabinets may occupy a total width of up to 100 inches only.”

Other members in the fellowship include CCPL librarian Mrs. Rosario Chua. According to Cherry’s lean, no-word-no-nail-wasted Mar. 18 report, Mrs. Chua “nixed” the idea of purchasing bookcases with glass doors.

Open cabinets expose the books to air, she advised. Don’t let molds move in.

I have donated books to libraries and not once have I thought of the space that will hold them. A sentimentalist, I imagined the books would fly off the shelves and become bedtime companions or storytime staples.

So this old heart skipped several beats when I read Cherry’s report and saw the pictures of the library “abandoned” when the SunStar editorial team moved offices.

I remember when editors grudgingly walked away from their monitors to open and pore over the library’s dictionaries and maps. Dust made one editor sneeze her head off; she checked anyway.

Will journalists in the future ask a librarian for vertical files? Will a librarian still be around to be asked?

Like a good general who discards sentiment for tactics, Cherry suggested recycling the cabinets, for which she had to “step over some dead roaches” to measure.

As of this writing, our fellowship is mulling how to classify the books.

In an age when a smartphone holds hundreds of titles and scanning has displaced reading, this odd company heeds an ancient nesting instinct to provide for arguably the best human invention: books.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s March 26, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”