Some things I miss

On this throwback Thursday, I look back to the year 2015 when my family and I took eating out for granted. I also took for granted that the natural curls on my grandchild's head would stay there for good, but we enjoyed them for less than a year. The minute she had a haircut, the curls refused to grow back.

That was also the year I wore my "Mrs. E sunglasses" all over the place until one day at the UP Infirmary in Diliman, while I was distracted, I placed the pair down a side table and forgot about it.

Wearing Mrs. E (as in Epistola) sunglasses with curly-haired Kai behind me

Al fresco dining at Chaya Baguio

Matcha ice cream with red mongo

Baguio used to be known as a restaurant hub until COVID-19 put a stop to our frequent dining out. Although we're glad to learn that CHAYA Baguio remains open for take-out and delivery, my daughter Kimi, the expert on the subject, says Japanese food isn't quite as good as when you eat it in situ with all the elegant ceramic ware. The food doesn't travel well, and we live outside city limits.

What I terribly miss is the free after-meal matcha ice cream that Chaya serves in a mini bowl with a sliver of red mongo beans. Don't even say the word "sukiyaki" or else I will weep copious tears.

A month of Sundays

"It feels like a lot of Sundays! And isn't that nice. (sort of) (not really) STILL MUCH TO DO- but yay, alive." ~ Gang Badoy Capati in her FB status

When I got out of bed, I had to declare to my siblings who were still in various states of sleep and semi-wakefulness, "It's Sunday!" I felt that I had to tell them as though the fact had to be declared loudly after our near-languish in this eternity of days that has the stupor of Sundays, that we shouldn't be in a great hurry to waken.

With daylight flooding the room, we had to get up even before eight, stand up, prepare brekkie (tuna salad with bread so it also felt like a Lenten Friday), talk again about the invisible war the world is waging against COVID-19, where to get a piece of palm to commemorate Palm Sunday.

I suggested a banana leaf since we had banana plants a-plenty. The suggestion was laughed off the table. I returned to sipping my Sunquick juice and munching my tuna sandwich and thinking how I'd creatively "waste" my day.

I skipped exercising and headed straight to my "office" space to check on my mail, deluding myself that there were still urgent messages that needed a response from me. But there was nothing but forwarded mail about staying healthy during this period. Nothing that I hadn't read in various permutations in other people's FB status. We're already being told to be wary of such generalized attribution of sources as "According to a Viber source I belong to" or "A doctor I know shared this. Please copy and paste."

Thank goodness for sites like Interlude and ParisReview.Org wherein I could bone up on the lives of my favorite artists like Maria João Pires, the Portuguese pianist and masterful interpreter of Mozart and Schumann, and Vita Sackville West who we shouldn't simply remember for her relationship with Virginia Woolf or the fabulous garden she tended. Sackville West was an author in her own right--by age 18 she had written eight novels and five plays.

But let me not get ahead of her narrative. The site I mentioned can be visited here:
https://www.theparisreview.org/…/the-fabulous-forgotten-li…/

As for Pires, you can follow what I want for my funeral music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch…

And you can sail my mortal remains down Bohol's Loboc River in a barge with palmeras covering my coffin. Photo gives a small glimpse of the river through the interstices of a palm.

Ahh, such Sunday thoughts and dreams when one is not sufficiently caffeinated!

Willful gladness

"In the darkest times, we are the most starved for delight – for the self-permission for delight." ~ Maria Popova

The title phrase is also Popova's. This is a tale of willful gladness in a woman's and a child's search for meaning during uncertain times.

My grandchild Kai and I Facetimed last night before she called it a day. She's based in Baguio, I'm trapped by the lockdown in Pasig. Worse,my eight-year old talk and text cell phone picked the wrong time to die on me. Can't go out to a shop or mall to look for a replacement. COVID-19 took care of all our best laid-out plans.

But thanks to Facebook Messenger, Kai remains in constant touch, complaining, like me, about nearly going out of her head looking for ways to fill up her time. She feels bereft of a gin rummy partner (me). We play a game of two or three nightly, our routine at home up there. I taught her the rudiments of the game, and she has been defeating me consistently. Not that I don't try hard enough in the only card game I know.

My daughter Kimi Fernandez recently got Kai out of her holiday languor by encouraging her to make Spam sushi rolls. Kai has odd tastebuds--between the sweetness of ice cream and the sourness of yogurt, she'll pick the latter in a heartbeat. Here she is a picture of concentration.

Then visiting friend Precious Leano was impressed when we once went to Hill Station on Upper Session Road, Baguio, and Kai straight away ordered the artichoke dip with Melba toast.

My sister Pinky Lolarga Susi once brought Kai and her cousins Machiko Skye and Jared Franco to an Asian grocery. While the other two kids bought popsicles and candies, my grandkid chose a packet of salty nori wrappers. I think this may be the same packet from which Kai is making the sushi.

As a baby, she also had a pronounced taste for certain types of viand. Martin Masadao noted, while observing her on her high chair feeding herself, that she knew the most delish part of daing na bangus--the belly!

She loves "stinky" cheese, and when the Christmas queso de bola is sufficiently aged come the New Year, she requests slivers of it cut and popped into the microwave oven for what she calls "cheese puffs." They're as salty as any Jack and Jill product.

Cheese is a standby in the house along with eggs. Should Kai not find the food served come mealtime to her liking, the go-to dish is a cheese omelette enriched with milk.

I don't know how her food likes and dislikes are doing these past days. Hoping that my husband, her grandfather Rolly Fernandez, and Kimi are inculcating the lesson of being grateful for every meal served. And I hope they all gather around the table for a shared repast.

Our not so little Kai is turning nine years old in two weeks. Apart from making pancakes and omelettes, she has now added Spam sushi rice or Supamu sushi meshi to her repertoire of recipes.

So you see, Kai, if you can feed yourself and feel good about it, you can also extend your hand to feed others. Happy birthday soon!

The world and its woundedness

"The morning air is all awash with angels."
~ Richard Purdy Wilbur

While my doctor brother Dennis was dressing my knee wound this morning, I had a brief time to ponder on the world's woundedness wrought by Covid19.

(BTW, my stitches have dried and no longer require waterproof bandaging. Dennis sprayed a medical disinfectant, applied some ointment and instructed me to tape Band-aids on the top and bottom parts of the vertical line of stitches. I'm a cooperative patient and after doing as told, I walked within the house a bit, trying on my newly liberated knee. It felt grand!)

I also thought of the opening lines from W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts": "About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: How well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along..."

We spent hours pouring over and discussing that ekphrastic poem in the comparative literature class of Dr. Gemino H Abad in the mid-'70s at UP Diliman. I remember thinking then how a Master like Auden could pull off a stunt like that--open a poem with a prosaic, almost forgettable observation. It led me to think that one doesn't have to always have a lyrical first line.

When super-typhoon Yolanda walloped Southern Philippines, particularly Leyte, in November 2013, poets were also called upon to do their own brand of "relief work" with the composition and immediate publication (uploading online) of poetry that soothed or raised a protest against what was perceived as a slow response from the powers that be.

That calamity enabled me to concentrate on renewed versifying, something the Bard of Pasig Pablo Tariman is doing in the time of today's plague. I wrote "Plane Manifest," partly inspired by Auden and taking off from a photo of a surviving father rescued and evacuated from Tacloban. His farmer's demeanor belied the dark color of years spent under the sun, his eyes a-brim with tears as they grieved for loved ones who didn't make it. The estimate then was 10,000 people dead.

I posted my relief response in FB and when the call for an instant visual and literary anthology called "Surges" was made by Rossana Golez and Joel Garduce, I was prepared with my submissions. Here is that poem in its entirety.

Plane Manifest

in the quieter network
where i get my news feed
for the day
where members
aren't so overwrought
and telling others
what to do
what to think
in a calamitous country

this image
and description
of a man
spoke for all
who had lost
someone
(never mind the some things
that are always replaceable
in some ways)

but to lose someone?
or maybe three four
six seven eight?
and see them
on some broken pavement
laid out straight?

the horror the horror

the awareness
that here he was
left with this one life
and some clothes on his back

haunted perhaps
by the thought
that he would've
given it all up
for a wife
a child not yet fully weaned
a mother who raised him up
to be as hardworking as she

he trembles
while seated
in this freight plane
of human cargo
flying him where?
to what sort of new life
in some strange place
will he rebuild
without those he knew
and touched as

love
made
manifest?

Truly, we are called whether it's in a time of crisis or a time of increasingly elusive peace and wellness in the world. To paraphrase the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, the darkness is vast so we are all called upon to supply our own unique light.