Get Shorty

For Cousin Shorty (Joseph Server) on his 70th birthday tomorrow

Shorty has always been in the periphery of my consciousness as far back as I can recall, he being the eldest cousin on my mother's side. Even then he was already Mister Funny Guy as opposed to his brother Fritz's deadpan humor. Shorty was hahaha, break-the-ice funny, especially in solemn moments, including his sister's wake.

I have memories of him as a slim, tall, bespectacled guy, his face covered with zits. Despite the geeky look, he was quite sure of himself then. He was still a bachelor with a nice waistline, but my Dad already predicted he would grow a wide girth like Daddy Dodo’s (Burton Joseph Server Sr.).

It was from Shorty that I heard the song “Maria” from the musical Westside Story before he and his sister Jane, my godmother, took my sister Evelyn and me to watch the film version at the Rizal Theater. Back in the old Server home on McKinley road, he had no qualms about singing at the top of his voice: “Maria, I just met a girl named Maria….” What sunk in my impressionable mind was if you feel at home right in your own home, what’s to stop you from singing aloud, even if you had a house guest, especially a kid like me who loved to observe people quietly?

So at home was he that he had friends from the Ateneo who had sleepovers at the his home library. One morning, they all trooped out of the door in their shorts and undershirts. A stark memory I have of that time was of this mestizo fellow, his curly hair standing up, looking dazed and unwashed. I learned later he was Xavier Loinaz. I vowed someday I’d have a house (for our family was gypsy-like then in its constant moving of houses), no matter how modest, where I could bring home my friends and later, my children’s friends, and host sleepovers.

One time Shorty dropped by my lola’s house in Sampaloc, Manila, where my parents, younger siblings, cousins , uncles and aunts and I were living in one big extended household in the early ’60s. It was our bedtime, but he hustled us kids into his big long car with no time to change into what my niece Bianca calls today “leaving” (pang-alis) clothes. I have a distinct memory of me in red flannel pajamas being treated to buko sherbet at the old Milky Way in Aguado, Manila, near Malacañang Palace. I don’t remember now what the occasion was, but it was he who brought us all there.

Early in his marriage to Lita Lotho, he addressed her “Palangga.” Of course, it was new to my ears so ever curious, I asked what it meant. His straight-faced answer was it was short for palanggana (wash basin), and I truly believed him. In my child’s mind, I linked palanggana to cleanliness, and Lita was, before she became a fulltime homemaker, a registered nurse after all. It was much later, when I got exposed to other Philippine languages, that I realized it was a term of endearment that means “beloved”.

When the German Hans Banzhaf came to live in Forbes Park as the new Server in-law, Shorty would make fun of the way he pronounced certain words in English, interchanging the “v’s’”, “f’s” and “w’s”. So Shorty would say over breakfast, “Babeth, please pass the weeneegar.” I was surprised that Hans never got pikon.

And the camera, of course! How can I think of Shorty without seeing a camera slung around his neck? He devotedly documented intimate and big family reunions. The stuff in our own family’s albums from the ’50s and ’60s could only have him as the source.

And when his own children arrived, I could see how much love he poured into his portraits of them as babies, toddlers and now, as parents with their own children. He even built his own darkroom. Having worked with newspaper photographers in darkrooms, I see now why he wanted to be involved in the process when he could easily afford to have the printing and enlargement jobbed out. Imagine a dear child’s image slowly emerging on photographic paper as it is placed gently from basin to basin until it is clipped on a line to dry.

It was from Shorty that I learned about quick response to emergencies and calamities. In 1968, the Ruby Tower collapsed in Sta. Cruz, Manila, after a strong earthquake. Many people were trapped in the rubble. I learned from Daddy that Shorty was out there, digging with other volunteers and rescuers. The image and lesson stayed with me—that one can risk life, the comforts of home and family and a cushy job for total strangers. That to be a person for others is what gives this brief journey on earth a semblance of time well spent.

Photo shows Shorty with camera (from Joseph Server's Facebook album)