Bone Marrow & Tawilis-Induced Bliss

“It’s like the States.” Our parents would usually say whenever we drive along the Skyway. Many years ago, they’ve travelled the US coast to coast by land and the view of the interstate highways must have summoned a similar image.

We packed the sandwiches D. made and snacked on them in the car for a short trip that would take us to Tagaytay, then to Nasugbu. We are attending a friend’s wedding as candle sponsors, followed by an overnight excursion with little one, Lolo and Lola. Since they would graciously take care of I. while we attend the wedding, we insisted on getting the tab for trip. They will, after all, get everything on a 20% senior discount. Along with the life-long free movie pass, a senior card was one of things that made us look forward to growing old together.

We checked-in at a zen-inspired bed and breakfast called T House. The shampoo smelled of green tea. A comforting silence came about with a cool highland breeze. There were plenty of deck chairs, quiet spots, and white outdoor sofas. They served tea and cookies to the room right before bedtime.







The weather was perfect for the bulalo we sipped at the restaurant for lunch. At dinner, we inhale more of that crisp mountain air and go out to the city for tawilis, sinigang and beer. At breakfast the following morning, we had the most neatly-arranged beef tapa with a fruit bowl, bread bowl and free flowing coffee.



We talk some more, read the papers and take pictures. I started on a new book. A little while later, lunch followed and we had more tawilis at another restaurant with a nice view of the lake and volcano. Before we back to the city, we shop for Pasalubong – ube jam by the nuns of Good Shepherd. Before heading home, there’s another side trip to the Mahogany Market for more beef, potted plants and herbs.

D. and I probably had the most food on this trip, as we also had the buffet at the wedding. The caterer served an excellent Blue Marlin, which probably tasted better because we were witnessing two friends be bound together by love. We also saw the most successful money dance we’ve ever seen. Their choreographed dance number was amusingly executed. This was a very well-attended wedding but the guests mostly aren’t all necessarily from Manila. They were from around town and it guests that made this wedding big gave it a warm, country feel.

A wedding, and staying in a B&B made this a Tagaytay sojourn. We engaged in long conversations with Mama and Papa, let the little one run around or carry him around, told him to say “tree” or “bird” as we sip coffee or finish breakfast or lunch. I was looking at everyone, wordlessly speaking or gesturing a zen mantra with a sweeping, enlightened smile: this is this.

We took the Skyway again on the way home. I wondered if anyone of us still thought if this was anything like the States. I’ve never been to the states, and they must have have better highways. Someone might have thought whole thing was cliché, or even cheap, but I sure love my own.

When We Began This Read

The December sky has the grey that won’t sadden you. Though the frivolity of Christmas is hushed, there is a kindness, an imposing thankfulness and satisfaction in the air, you can almost hear it, as though it was hummed by children in a chorus. In these last few days of the year, the daily grind is crushed to a temporary halt. We go out for lunch and the restaurant tables are packed with families but no one’s rushing – the Christmas frenzy has quelled and there’s barely anyone here on business.

I was able to dance little I to sleep just before our orders arrived. D. lays him closely on side. The silence was restful and we cherished that as we look forward to his awakening. This was a Vietnamese-inspired place and we got him the glass chicken noodles, D. had spicy shrimps and I had a plateful of curry noodles.

We ate quietly, except for the occasional resonance of “mmm” as we savoured and chewed, accompanied by a nod of approval. As there was barely any space between the tables in this packed place and we overheard the two families from the other table, boasting about their latest Singapore, Boracay and Subic trip to each other. They glowed in enthusiasm during that exchange, and yes we’ve been there too, but I truly hoped that we didn’t sound like that if we ever talked about those places. Our eyes met and there’s an invisible laugh.



I buy D. a chocolate mint gelato from a nearby shop and I begin my new read, On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. The jacket reads, “In 1962, Florence and Edward celebrate their wedding in a hotel on the Dorset Coast. Yet as they dine, the expectation of their martial duties weighs over them...” It’s their honeymoon, and even at page 40 of a short 203, Florence and Edward barely made it to second base. It’s a gripping, non-complex storyline that’s masterfully written, as though every world was so thoughtfully packaged and reading every sentence was like opening a Christmas present. “She was no lamb to be uncomplainingly knifed. Or penetrated.” You have to pause and respond, “wow.”

The other Ian McEwan novels were embellished with thicker plots and surprising twists but in its simplicity On Chesil Beach takes an edge.

“How’s your novel?” she goes. I remember another Ian McEwan we both read from a while back. We weren’t married then, but we’ve been together a few years. It also was New Year’s Eve and you went all the way to Malate to meet with me. You wore a red shirt, we held hands and had a hot drink while we read in an empty, glass-ceilinged coffee shop and no one else was around. The year was also about to end and the world was ours.

Here we are, a few years later.

“Turns you on.” I say.

The little one wakes up and we start him with some soup. He doesn’t like it hot, but he eats noodles like he was born to eat noodles. In delight, we feed him and watch him eat.

I close On Chesil Beach and go back to this other one, --- this novel of ours that’s happening now. This may not have been masterfully written by McEwan, but this is the one that I will read again and again and again as I long to repeat it.

Selfishness to Selflessness

Regaining Weight

I’ve been regaining weight and I’m regaining a sense of who I was when I was obese. Strangely enough, it’s easier to be confident when your mind and heart is clogged with butter from bagels. The saturated fat does the talking for you.

On other parts of my life, I feel the lightness of being, the longing for repetition.

Worries, Errands, Bills, and other forms of Whining

I forgive who I once was, the emotionally immature who documented my useless ranting. I ask forgiveness from my wife, who years before (and maybe occasionally), had to endure all that I was.

From Selfishness to Selflessness

If I ended now, I would have been a good story to tell. I know. I know because I long to repeat every moment of my life.

Family is a blissful selflessness.

The Highest Highs

I.'s laughter. Mouth opening and eyes chinked in a smile. I. falling asleep on my shoulders. The nasal high of sniffing his scalp. Hearing him say the first few words of his life: mama, dada, banana, fish (he must’ve have read JD Salinger’s A Perfect Day for Bananafish in a previous life). Having family. Having my own family. Having I. Having D.

Having these highs and wanting almost nothing more.

(Pictures by D.)

2012

Let's not hurry and let's not worry about end of the world. Trust in the beautiful process of the universe. We will persist. We will perish. It will be sorrowful. It will be joyful. It never really ends.

Love all around in 2012.

Hemingways

In those days there was no money to buy books. I borrowed books from the rental library of Shakespeare and Company, which was the library and bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 rue de l'Odeon. On a cold windwept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, p.35

Whether it was chaos, repetition, or a pre-destined natural order I am thankful that the world brought me to a moment when a mint-condition copy of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast fell on my hands. I am thankful for having bought it in a glorious bargain from a second-hand bookstore, and how it brought me back to an even more glorious time.

Around the time he was writing The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald cruised in a Rolls Royce with his Zelda and hung out in Paris cafes getting black-out-drunk with “expatriate luminaries” like Hemingway. Gertrude Stein invites people over for tea at her 27 rue de Fleurus apartment. James Joyce, Ezra Pound can be spotted at Shakespeare and Co., the bookstore of Sylvia Beach.

Hemingway wrote his work in the nearby Closerie des Lilas, ordering café au lait or café crème or beer or wine. He wrote this posthumously published book in Cuba, and he still had Paris in him. I will not be foolish to even attempt to say anything scholarly about this book, so I account for how I take it with me when I can barely remember. I thought autobiographical books like these give you the right to judge the author’s character and reinforces your own. He revealed his complexities, compassion, weaknesses, brilliance and gentlemanliness without self-praise, pretension or the malady of blogs and biographies nowadays – sissiness and whining.

There's a recent Woody Allen called "Midnight in Paris" that took several references from this book. Salvador Dali was also in appearance. We never became expatriate luminaries (maybe except for H.) but a few High/Grade School friends urged me to see that Woody Allen film. I am glad we stay in touch in one way or another. And thanks to the advanced methods of piracy, I've seen the movie a few months before, probably even before it was released in other countries I told my friends: "All-star cast:Hemingway, TS Eliot, Fitzgerald et al. Most of who you read in high school to find out how to get girls. Paris in the 20s is our Manila in the late 90s. A moveable feast."

A Musical Plurality

I am going to generalize and say that nobody ever understood what the hell "indie" meant.

How many times have we repeated that the internet created this new space? I have to stop asking and enjoy the plurality by plucking out the music deliberately from this big, beautiful field of budding flowers.

In the advent of sharing links for downloading torrents, CDs may have been obsolete, too. So rarely do we burn them. There are always new ways of consuming media.

In the year 2011, I am three decades old but I listened to, for example, 20-somethings from France who called their group “Teenagers.” The music is sardonic, not always witty, but mostly libidinal and funny in a sex-typed humor. I’d like to think it’s an algorithmic result of my tastes that I ended up listening to the Bombay Bicycle Club or the Perishers – which did sound like music for organic soy, high Omega-3 tofu-eating crowd or College folk who look at the rain or autumn leaves on their windows while studying in some Boston campus.

I hear some of the latest pop from our maid and try to produce a balance it out by coercing her to listen to classical music whenever she’s nannying little I.

In this plurality, there are always the things I like. My late-nineties alternative/grunge nostalgia just won’t give in to amnesia. It all boils down to the final 30GB you saved on your iPod.

I remember a tweet from a November evening while listening to Jazz with my 17-month old son. It’s old, but it never sounds like a broken record. The tweet goes: Coltrane & Davis sounds better in warm white light, in a late November evening breeze where I can’t tell what’s random from what’s precise.

If I were 19 and read Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees

I have been more ambitious in dreaming about other topics which crossed my mind before. I thought of doing something on the demarcation between Philosophy and Literature, which will of course be post-structuralist, post-colonial, post-modernist and even deconstructive in discussion. When does a “text” become Philosophy, and when does it become Literature? This demarcation, this dividing of the line, will of course give birth to a web of implications and complications such as the politics of speech over writing. I planned to apply it on a certain text, something existential by Camus or Sartre, or even Nietzsche. I’m looking at Nausea, The Stranger or Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Well, I’ve decided to abandon this idea because I couldn’t handle it, of course. I am not too proud of my little intellect.

Yours truly, July 2000

What blabber! Now that I take myself less seriously, I laugh.

I was 19 when I wrote that bit. Whether what I wrote was stupid or brilliant, I could hardly tell and quite frankly, should hardly care. Perhaps it's a relief that nowadays my list of worries no longer include the demarcation between Philosophy and Literature. If I entered into a conversation about it now, I'll have very little to contribute. But relievingly, I would feel more eloquent about my silence.

If I were still 19, I would have read books differently that how I would now. Nowadays, I take a more recreational approach. I'm happy enough to figure out what it makes me think, not even what it is trying to say - I enjoy reading without falling into the trap of false profundity. But I don't think I miss out on the key points - if I do, I can be redeemed by Google or Wikipedia. Other than the knowledge in web-based sources, I am also only a thesis shy of a Master's Degree in Philosophy - from an overpriced University.

If I were still 19, I would would go an exposition about the book I've recently read - Italo Calvino's "The Baron in the Trees." I'd go on saying - this work is described as Philosophical Fiction, the kind that both tells a story and outlines a philosophical treatise. The Utopian Concepts that run on the philosophy side surface easily enough. The story makes itself believable with historical conjunctions to milestones such as the French Revolution, ornamented with a level of detail devoted to the botany of trees. The real and the imaginative exists in this gentle juxtaposition which makes for the simple and therefore masterful storytelling.

At Thirty, I am a loving husband, and devoted father to a charming 1-year old. I picked up the book not as assignment, or something I want my friends to see me reading, but because I saw it like a glittering gem among the bargains in BookSale. I go to coffee shops, not with the intention of reading, but to keep myself from getting sleepy while driving. When I get home, I read while my little I. sleeps, until I myself fall asleep. Somewhere between the time we sleep, I tell him about the book I was reading. This 12-year old boy climbed a tree and never descended. Up in the trees, he fell in love, became a baron, wrote, and shaped societies. I couldn't stop reading it, like I didn't believe that this idea of Utopia in the trees would have been impossible.