Better than a box from Tiffany & Co.

For a week now, I've kept my ears peeled to the sound of a motorcycle or a truck. There were book deliveries due, and they have kept my level of excitement high during this ho-hum pandemic. Every time a delivery guy stopped between our house and the neighbor's, I'd yell from the second-floor window, "Is it ours?" Yesterday and today the packages arrived, and again Rolly was there to receive them. The first book I cracked open was Maria Virginia Yap Morales' Ascending the Fourth Mountain: A Personal Account of the Marcos Years. The author sought to carry out feminist Indai Sajor's exhortation: "Write about the patriarchy within." Indai was referring to the Communist Party of the Philippines. Morales' book is her attempt to say, "Yes, I will do that." The second book in the well-packed Ateneo Press bundle was the posthumously published Biyaheng Pinoy: A Mindanao Travelogue by Edilberto Alegre. In his "By Way of a Preface to These Travels," the author wrote, "After eleven months in the US, I had to face the truth: I was not where I wanted to be; I was not doing what I wanted to do. And there was nowhere else to go. I faced up. I packed my rucksack again. It was time to discover new worlds." Promising reads, indeed. The last two books were tucked into a medium-size balikbayan box full of goodies from my son-in-law Jordan and my daughter Ida. She almost returned the Julia Child collection of aphorisms to Amazon, thinking the book too small to be worth the price. The first page my eyes landed on had these words in all caps: "I HATE HEALTH FOOD." This after eating a breakfast of fried egg with Trader Joe's 21 Salute Seasoning, three pan de sal and two pieces of Goldilock's classic puto. I felt more reverential opening Joan Didion's latest collection of old essays. She wrote about Hemingway, "The peculiarity of being a writer is that the entire enterprise involves the mortal humiliation of seeing one's own words in print." I'm about to press "Post," and witness another round of "mortal humiliation."