A Book for Those Who Love Cats

How does a pet lover grieve when a cat in his menagerie passes away?

It was the wrong question to ask of a pet lover like Victoria Rico Costina, author of the recently launched book Those Who Love Cats and a literature professor at the University of the Philippines Baguio.

Costina looked away, her eyes filling up with unshed tears, paused for a few minutes before slowly answering, "Someone once said that when cats die, the place to bury them is in your heart."

She had taken leaves without pay and a sabbatical to attend to her manuscript, find the right artists to illustrate the cover (Czarina Calinawagan) and inside pages (Rishab and Costina's husband Ruel).

She is not above declaring that her late cat Ziggy was her soul mate along with another cat, Chico. She has a "heart connection with them that is maybe stronger than what I feel for my husband," she says with a laugh.

The book derives its title from a verse by poet Francis Scarfe: "Those who love cats which do not even purr,/ Or which are thin and tired and very old,/ Bend down to them in the street and stroke their fur/ And rub their ears and smooth their breast, and hold/ Their paws, and gaze into their eyes of gold."

The professor in Costina cannot help but discourse on the flyleaf's inscription, saying, "It refers to cat lovers who're drawn to the scrawniest, dirtiest cat they can find on the streets, and yet they get to see the cat's eyes of gold that are its quintessence."

The book also carries a strange dedication. It's normal for an author like Costina, an only daughter, to dedicate her first book to her mother Nenita, but a cat book to a dog named Hubert?

Costina explains that Hubert, a long-faced mixed-breed dog with a gash on his leg, was adopted by her family after it hung around their gate waiting for the scraps of her cats.

When Hubert became part of the family, the cats would sleep on him or lie on top of him. He was with them for 10 years until his death.

Costina has divided her slim book into four parts: 1) personal essays of "a life spent on cats;" 2) profiles with matching pictures of special cats in her life, including those who have moved to cat heaven; 3) a review of assorted books of cats, including children's books by Filipino authors and illustrators, May Sarton's The Fur Person and Marge Piercy's Sleeping with Cats (the last two being full-length creative non-fiction about the esteemed writers' co-habiting with cats); and 4) "Basic Cat Care for the Filipino Home" where she persuasively argues for euthanasia for over-aged, incontinent or seriously ill cats who can no longer eat or drink.

She writes: "…(T)he humane thing to do is to have it put to sleep by your vet. This is a very difficult decision to make, but is likewise the more merciful option to prolonged suffering for your cat…Stay with your cat. Caress its coat, speak its name, your love and thankfulness, to the very last."

To Those Who Love Cats is also a revelation of what a fine essayist Costina is. Our favorite of her essays is the first, "Three Homes in Baguio," which follows the odyssey of her family in the small city of Baguio.

The first cats in the young Costina's life were the ones inherited from a Spanish mestiza neighbor who used to feed the hungry child strawberry jam and butter sandwich to which she became addicted. She became a fixture outside the neighbor's door, waiting for her sandwich ration.

When said neighbor had to leave, Costina writes, "Mrs. Ryan's legacy was one of kindness to a little girl and a spread of cats."

As she matured, Costina acquired the solitary habit of taking walks that took her to the boundary dividing Baguio and La Trinidad. She writes with such vividness, "A long line of cats followed me each time, lifting their paws in the tall grass. I would stop where the afternoon breeze was strongest, overlooking the hills much farther off. Then we would head back home, the cats taking their time, smelling the air."

She narrates the under-handed schemes she has done to rescue mistreated cats that are tied, mishandled, underfed. She has already rescued one such cat under the nose of a police sub-station.

What Costina has done with her life and her book is to follow the instruction in the Book of Job which she quotes as saying: "Ask the beasts to teach you, the birds of the air to tell you. Who among them does not understand that behind all this is God's hand?"

Photo shared by IAN DAUIGOY

Reprinted from VERA Files/Yahoo Philippines. VERA Files is put out by veteran journalists taking a deeper look at current issues. Vera is Latin for "true."

Aspiration: To Achieve Cat-like Insouciance

Victoria Rico Costina, my friend who has acquired the shibboleth of "Cat Woman of Baguio" and a literature professor at the UP Baguio, will launch her book Those Who Love Cats, essays, profiles, reviews and basic cat care tips for Filipino homes (she's too modest to claim it as her autobiography) on March 4 at the university's student alumni center on Gov. Pack Road. The slim volume (82 pages) will soon be available at Baguio book shops and at National Bookstore branches. Coinciding with her book launch, Vickie invited UP Diliman journalism alumna Angie Salanio to exhibit her watercolors of cats at the same venue.

Vickie asked me to introduce  her book with some urgency while I was holidaying with family in the US. I responded with equal urgency, but then she had some difficulty finding a welcoming publisher until she took matters into her own hands. Recently, she asked me to act as program emcee. I've begged off from that duty.  But I'm returning the honor by reproducing the intro as my contribution to the book's marketing.

I'm especially proud to be connected to the book. Firstly, it's a Baguio production through and through--from the writing to the illustrations (by my fine arts classmate Czarina Calinawagan and fellow visual artist Rishab) to the layout and design by Frederick Pedragosa to photography by Vickie's husband Ruel and printing. Secondly, like I wrote in the intro, this book may be some kind of first in Philippine publishing. Thirdly and more importantly, it marks Vickie's coming out as a writer. So enough of false modesty, Vickie. Please follow up this book with a second one. Congratulations and much affection!

_________________________________________

Do cats procrastinate and prevaricate? Put off things for later at the rate that I do and delude myself that nothing is as important as prioritizing de-stressing for health’s sake?

Author Victoria Rico Costina, in what must be the first book of its kind in the Philippines, described cats as pleasure-loving creatures. If I have a choice, I would like to be described that way—a pleasure-seeking adult who has never quite grown up. One time Vickie did call me a “lady of leisure,” but the image that entered my mind was of a matron with bejeweled fingers playing endless rounds of mahjongg with amigas.

I was raised with a killer combination of Catholic guilt and Protestant work ethic so I’m not quite there in the cat summit of perpetual pleasure seeking. I aspire to days of lazing on the bed, curled under a comforter on another foggy Baguio morning. I’d rise when I want to, comfort myself with a glass of milk, pad around softly in the house in my nightgown, go back to bed and siesta as much as I want. Then I’d stretch again, go down to the fridge, help myself to more cold milk, sniff around the bookshelf.

Come to think of it, I’ve been leading a cat’s life of some sort on the day I officially declared myself graduated from the workaday world. So much for guilt and working hard for the money.

I had a black and white cat in my youth. I called him Omar after the Egyptian actor. My kid sister Gigi never forgot how I got her to cradle him like a baby so I could take a picture of her in her sando and shorts. She never forgot the experience—she must have been less that six at that time. I was teaching myself to take a different kind of portrait with my new instamatic camera. I didn’t want anything posed so I instructed her to hold Omar the way a mother would. He would have none of it. For posterity, the photo captured Gigi flinching in pain as Omar clawed her. Perhaps this is why Gigi would rather care for mini pugs and pinschers and has had nothing to do with cats to this day.

Omar was admirably independent. I have no recollection of minding him, except for the time he came down with conjunctivitis. My cousin, a vet, advised me to put ointment on his eyes. By then I was working. From the office, I’d call home and instruct the helper in detail how to apply the ointment. My officemate overheard me and was smiling when I put down the phone. The smile read: “All that for a cat?”

Indeed, that can be said of Vickie’s book. I hope that it’ll be the first of many on singular loves.

To care this much for God’s small creatures, to allow them to take over her life almost to the exclusion of everyone else, affirms her humanity. She reminds me of another cat lover, Nieves Benito Epistola, also a professor of English and literature who reserved her gentlest cooing when she was caressing the head of one of dozens of cats that had the run of her house and garden.

Like Vickie, Nieves always used her cats for a reason for declining an invitation, even if it was a year in Greece with Anton Juan.

The Garcellanos of Kamuning, Quezon City, are in Vickie’s league. They count Kayenne as a family member. Whenever I drop by their place, I try to remember the “catiquette” observed there, one of which is not to talk about the cat when he is present in the room. Kayenne senses when he is the subject of the conversation. Kayenne and his deceased brother Bugsy are immortalized in Edel Garcellano’s poetry in the same way F. Puss the cat “nanny” is in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.

“The cat world has a lot to teach us,” Nieves once said in a professorial tone.

I wonder sometimes if the cats in Vickie’s life observe her as keenly as she does them. Like F. Puss, they may be her sitters and she the baby they protect.

Nov. 15, 2009
Torrance City, California

 Cover of book reproduced from philstar.net

Vickie's Turn

Prof. Victoria Rico-Costina of the University of the Philippines Baguio gave me another few minutes of fame at the opening of my second solo show at the Cafe of our affections. She was partly my inspiration in coming up with a title and a poem (in lieu of the traditional artist's statement) for my show--she has consistently shown compassion for God's little creatures, adopting stray cats, cleaning and fattening them up. I must really be a bundle of insecurities to cajole friends to go onstage and say these few words about a struggling painter:

My husband happens to work at the Camp John Hay Manor and so after Babeth Lolarga and the Baguio Aquarelle Society she is affiliated with set up their exhibit at the Hotel, I asked Ruel if he had seen Babeth’s works. He said that he had seen them, and commented: “Kasla nga ubing.” By then I had come to see some of the paintings, collages, pottery and other art projects that Babeth had been submitting for her Fine Arts classes at UP Baguio. True enough, one would see that the distinctive mark of a Babeth Lolarga work is happy: a generous, large-hearted, and intentional choice to see the colors, the imaginative possibilities, and telling details of things and subjects that surround her life as a journalist, poet and artist.

We at UP Baguio are proud of her work and the example that she has set among our fine arts students and faculty: that of disciplined and inspired work. Her work ethic is hard to equal--- while she has had to meet the demands of fulltime studies--- she has also continued to write essays, poetry, features and daily entries for her voluminous personal journals. She has kept a Baguio writers group going, doing writers workshops in various venues in the city.

We thank her then for sharing her many talents with us here in Baguio and at UP, and we especially thank her for the warmth and generosity of spirit that lights up her canvases. Of course, on a personal note, I must say that I couldn’t miss this exhibit because of the cats in her paintings.

We congratulate Babeth and we want to say that we look forward to more exhibits like this, here at the Café by the Ruins. We also congratulate her teachers Liza Ilagan, Fara Manuel, Manolo Sicat and Norman Chow. And not least: kudos to Rolly Fernandez, Babeth’s hardworking “wife” and financier.

To Babeth we say: may the cats in your fruit salad increase! Photo by EV ESPIRITU