Kai and camera

Satchi, Kai's playmate, at rest

Grandmother caught dollying herself up even if she's just working from home

Selfie with Satchi's snout

Kai, the nine-year old in our house, has found an old Canon digicam to keep her busy. She snapped away but was careful to compose her shots of Satchi and me. She would immediately delete anything that didn't meet her standards.

I asked my husband Rolly where she learned all these things because I didn't go out of my way to teach her anything about how to use a point and shoot camera. He claimed that it was all his doing.

Kai perked up on hearing we were discussing her doings again. "No!" she said. It was her Tita Maria Klaridelle A Reyes who taught her how to work a real camera, not the toy dangling by her wrist.

Thanks, Kla, the fruits of Kai's apprenticeship are evident in these pictures. Why, I've even requested her to take photos of the books that I've lined up for reviewing.

Days like these...

...you wish you have your own fishbowl. Of course one that can fit you and me. The heat is on!

These are photos from my first, and in all probability my last, trip to Batanes in March 1998, the Centennial Year of the Philippine Republic. I was with a group of scholars (Del Tolentino, Ben Tapang, Weng Boquiren, Nela Florendo, and Rolly Fernandez when he was still actively teaching and not gardening).

I did get around to having these panoramic photos printed to illustrate an article in Chato Garcellano's Travel page in the Inquirer. It's among the selected essays included in my collection Catholic and Emancipated (UST Publishing House). Call that previous sentence an outright plug. (Copies are still available at better bookstores.)

The next time the pictures were printed was when old friend Jerry Araos, who founded the artists' guild Salakai, organized "Alay sa Kawani," simultaneous exhibitions of the members, including this wanna-be photog, at the GSIS Museum on Roxas Blvd.

I called my photo show that included poetry "Lost in Batanes." Jerry wanted to do an on-the-spot translation of my poem with the same title in Filipino while he was choosing the photos that would be enlarged by a friend of his who lived in Forbes Park, Makati. But we were in the thick of preparations. I even had to frame my photos with help from Jerry and Melen's daughter Roja who did the matting. How's that for hands-on training?

Call these the pinagpilian or the outtakes. Some I have also been given away as mementos to friends who were interested in them.

Okay, since my blog has had over 230,000 views, I'm giving the rest of these pictures away to the readers who happen by. Just write to me in the comments section, leave your email, and I shall find a way to reach you and mail the pics. These are my thank-you gifts to you, dearest reader, for sticking with Brookside Baby. The first eight who comment receive a photo each.

These are the only prints left. The negatives are lost to Forever and a Day.

Game!

All photos by Babeth Lolarga

The ordinary and the ecstatic

Do not ask your children to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable, but it is the way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting tomatoes, apples and pears.
Show them how to cry when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.

-William Martin

On an ordinary day in the week just ended, I got up after hours of reading, sitting and trying to put words together to stretch a bit, see what's going in the world outside the nook where I do my work.

From a corner of my mother's kitchen, I saw this play of light and shadow. If I only knew how to turn on the video component of an old digicam, I would've recorded the dancing shadows of the atis tree from outside, how the sun during the sunset hour caused this shadow play to happen.

Yes, Mr. Martin, I feel like that ordinary child who happened upon something extraordinary.

Thank you, oh Divine Master, who leads us not into temptation but to visions of the ecstatic in the every day.

Photos by Babeth Lolarga