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."

I haven't the vaguest idea

"Interviewers and students of literature like to ask poets to reveal the secrets of their trade, as if they were famous chefs on television cooking shows eager to share their recipes, and say something like: Buy an Oxford English Dictionary, featuring 600,000 words and 3 million quotations at a reputable bookstore. Have your butcher trim a 4-5 pound roast from its pages and place it in a roasting pan, etc… And are disappointed and visibly annoyed when informed by the poet that he hasn’t the vaguest idea how or why his poems were written." - Charles Simic in "Short Days and Long Nights," http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jan/21/short-days-and-long-nights/

It was a choice between a banana and a fried bangus with some rice this breakfast. But I espied a can of 555 sardines, spicy and hot, and decided to pound a few pieces of garlic that I later fried in virgin coconut oil. After I poured the whole simmering red glob into a bowl, I squeezed two pieces of calamansi over it.

I relished everything as though it were again a last meal and thought of the manuscript I had to mend, the students' compositions I had to check.

The world is constructed that way. It is equipped to interrupt at certain times one's inner equilibrium with its demands on one's time. But I heed the world's voice because how am I to pay my share of the bills, how am I to keep myself in the style I am accustomed to (hearty ha ha ha there)?

I haven't the vaguest idea why I do this. It's enough that I still haven't run out of something to fill the box of a blog, and the blankness of a page doesn't intimidate me as much anymore. Maybe because I'm heeding Julia Child, too, who I love as a writer and character (I draw the line on signing up for French cooking lessons though).

Let me just say there's joy in doing this although Mr. Simic may not exactly agree to my typing out words while a Korean lyric soprano sings a heart-rending "Once Upon a Dream" from Jekyll and Hyde.

This blog is brought to you by Charles Simic, Julia Child and Sumi Jo in that happiness-is-a-Wednesday-with-some-music order.

In the same essay I quoted earlier, Sumic wrote: "I’m always scribbling something in secret. Once my wife caught me chewing the end of my pencil and said to me: 'I hope you’re not writing more of that boring doggerel you call poetry?' 'No, sweetie,' I replied, 'I’m just balancing our check book and getting ready to write you a little love note after that.'" Photo©Richard Drew

Here's how I visualize operatic and crossover superstar Sumi Jo flying down to Manila next week for her Feb. 1 concert at Samsung Hall, SM Aura Premiere.