BWG reloaded: Let's volt in

Congratulations and best wishes to the new officers of the Baguio Writers Group (BWG) that has opened itself to wider membership to infuse it with new and creative (read: out-of-the-box) ideas. All towards strengthening writing in this northern region and keeping its reputation as a voice in the Baguio and by extension the national community. Hip hip hooray to new BWG president Jenny Cariño who presided at the general assembly at another Baguio institution, Mandarin Restaurant on Session Road.

We started Saturday afternoon with a small table. From left are: Frank, Jenny, Grace Subido, Scott Saboy, Roland Rabang and Martin Masadao

Then more streamed in: Luchie Maranan, Baboo Mondoñedo and Junley Lazaga.

Among our recruits are Rose Urquico, Toottee Chanco Pacis and Auring Bautista

Audrey Beltran, Desiree Caluza, Pryce Quintos, Merci Javier Dulawan, Padma Perez and Frank again

Same gals from above listening to others introduce themselves this way: what I write, what I still want to write and what I expect from BWG and how I can help it

Retired economics professor Ben Tapang (seated fourth from left) says there must be more to life than the field he spent 50 years of his life on. This must mean that creative juices are still roiling within, waiting to be expressed. Photos by Babeth Lolarga

Thank you, Frank Cimatu, for graciously hosting a merienda of pancit bihon (with extra pechay toppings, as per his instruction to the waitress), lumpiang Shanghai and a round of drinks.

A spread like that is conducive to the concoction of plans. Among these are reviving the Kulitan workshop (these are bi-monthly manuscript clinics fueled by coffee for the critique-ing of works in progress by the literature profs and literary critics in the group), young adult writing workshops (open to 12 to 16 year old kids, one is coming up May 24-25 at the Frangeli House on Bakakeng road), a spoken word workshop that'll train young poets to perform and pit themselves in the Third Monday from the Sun readings/performances at Mt Cloud Bookshop (Jenny is worthy resource person for this activity), an online and refereed literary journal, among others.

We started the meeting with one large round table. As Saturday afternoon wore on, Luchie Maranan exhorted us to "let's volt in." It meant connecting two additional round tables but still it was standing room only!

What excites me about the enlarged composition of BWG is the variety of experiences, knowledge and skills that the new members are bringing in. Some of them come from civil society (human rights and indigenous people's orgs), others from the worlds of visual arts (steeped in art and comic-book writing) and local journalism. There is one who writes for an evangelical magazine as she is a theology teacher. We didn't limit ourselves to purely creative or literary writers.

Shall we sing "Happy Days Are Here Again" or "Ain't No Mountain High" to Jenny, Junley Lazaga (vice president), Scott Saboy (secretary), Merci Javier Dulawan (treasurer)?

Sumptuous lunch for a time in our lives

I sometimes ask myself if I have a real life at all, if it's being lived, or if I've found myself mired in simply documenting that life and those lives around me. I really don't mind taking the souvenir shots for a Sunday family lunch at Mario's on Upper Session Road. It is our times-of-our-lives place. It has seen us celebrating graduations, birthdays, anniversaries, Christmases. And today's Mothers' Day.

We reserved our table by phone yesterday but were told we had to be there on time; they could only hold the table for 15 minutes. So you can imagine the beeline to the shower room before departure from home.

My favorite sections of the restaurant's Sunday buffet are those set aside for the appetizers and for the desserts. Today I didn't depart from my routine of waltzing to the appetizer table: two generous helpings of the pritson (fried slivers of lechon and veggies encased in crepe-like wrapping), samosas with a dip of mint and tamarind sauce and the oysters Rockefeller. Then I was ready for the reliable staples of paella, callos Madrileña, the cochinillo with liver sauce.

Those deadly starters had to be offset. So my dessert plate had some greens. It
was repeatedly replenished with squares of orange chiffon cake whose icing reminded me of those heavenly caramel cakes from Estrel's in Quezon City. I sampled the mango cheesecake, warm bread pudding and chocolate fondue. But the orange chiffon was top of the class.

My dietary offsetting consisted of one helping of sayote tops sauteed with plenty of garlic. Call it guilt eating. My partner liked how the vegetable dish was simply prepared. He took note of the components and said we'd have it done at home one of these days.

It's Mothers' Day. People like me who like to observe and live life fully now and then through Sunday buffets are entitled to guiltless treats.

Food photos by Babeth Lolarga

Being Mommy Lolarga

In her most recent blog entry in http://cbrainard.blogspot.com/, writer Cecilia Brainard wrote both of herself and her mother Concepcion Cuenco Manguerra, "It's difficult for me to describe her accurately because I only saw one side of her. I remember her as high strung and dramatic."

I couldn't agree more. Of all the subjects I will ever come to write about, Gliceria "Nene" Lolarga or Mommy looms as the hardest one to tackle. She is still very much around and isn't everyone's idea of what a near 88 year old looks like.

Mother to eight adults who're mostly in their 50s

Having been orphaned early and raised by aunts and a much older sister, she had no real models on how to become a mother, the hardest job in the world, bar none. Nevertheless, she continues to be mother to eight grownups and countless adopted ex-youngsters, including formerly erring nieces and nephews in need of a step-mom kind of discipline. The security guards and street sweepers in our Pasig neighborhood address her as "Mommy Lolarga".

I sometimes think she over-mothers us, but then that is what mothers do: worrying to bits. She hasn't given up the practice of phoning the offices of her youngest children to check if they have arrived safely (a constant source of embarrassment for my sibs).

With six of her eight grandchildren in the 2010 Christmas photo. Not present were Calgary-based Sara and Christian Lolarga

In July 2013 with her great grandchildren Machiko Skye, Jared Franco and Kai Myknonos

She is also grandmother to eight and glamorous great-grandmother to three (she is Mama Mermaid). Being a grandmother has softened her as far as tugging the reins of discipline are concerned. After all, lolas are there to spoil and dote on the third and fourth generations.

She has never really retired in her mind. I've overheard her tell the help how she misses the routine of work outside the home. But she yielded to our request to stop for health and safety reasons. She reluctantly agreed to this; there is some regret there. Her activities with the local Legion of Mary have filled the void somewhat, but they still haven't kept her from muttering aloud how she misses earning her keep.

She has become active in Facebook and asking me to track down friends from childhood and adolescence, a near impossible task since she has outlived many of them.

Here's to you and your unique mothering ways, Mommy L.

Brainard is right: "Remember your mothers!" Always!

While chasing a sunset, we ended up with...

At a little past 5 p.m. yesterday, the Wee One and I tried to catch the sunset from a vantage point in our neighborhood. We've seen that big orange ball sinking slowly from the same viewpoint in the past. It had been a memorable sight, and she'd bring up the subject now and then. With no hint of thunderstorm, we thought we'd see the free Nature show, but a thick mass of gray clouds covered the sun. One image in the distance that I was able to bring home though was of the two radars atop Mt. Santo Tomas beamed at our Baguio. Another day, another chance of a sunset. Photo by Babeth Lolarga

Fisher to be followed by Jong

Mother's Day is a few "sleeps" away. I'm already thinking what I can send my co-mothers this Sunday or Saturday night, depending on how fast I can get the combining of meaningful words and images finished.

Meanwhile, my partner just handed his Mother's Day gift to me in advance but not before asking, "Have you read this yet?" This being Erica Jong's Inventing Memory, billed as a novel of mothers and daughters. It now tops my summer reading list. I suspect that after Jong's ground-breaking '70s novels (remember the zipless f_ck?) Fear of Flying and How to Save Your Own Life, this 1997 novel may be more modest. I hope to be proven otherwise.

Two days ago, I reluctantly closed the last page of Among Friends, M.F.K. Fisher's memoir of her childhood in a community of Quakers in Whittier, California, early in the 20th century. She referred to her parents as Rex and Edith, not Father or Mother or Papa or Mama. It gave me pause--what shall I call my own parents when I buckle down to write my own memories of them as a young couple shepherding eight children?

The educated Edith was often depicted as half-lying on a couch with a book in hand or upstairs in the master bedroom, most probably nursing waves of nausea from another pregnancy. The only time she cut a figure in the kitchen was when she'd sometimes bake a cake. She was the Kennedy family's "arbiter of culture" since she had some kind of education in Europe that enabled her to know the score of Handel's Messiah or play Chopin's nocturnes. Rex was a hard-nosed newspaperman who fancied himself an outdoors man, too.

What awed me most was how the author was able to extract in minute detail her earliest memories, sometimes going as far back as age four or younger. Every person mentioned emerged in full form. One formed an idea how someone smelled, how he/she dressed. If this were fiction, they were well fleshed out.

I know Fisher more as a food writer (not a restaurant reviewer or one who listed down recipes but a memoirist, a writer of long essays that gave one a sense of place, a sense of Aix-en-Provence or of Marseille, France, as though one were there experiencing those places with her and her daughters). There are broad hints in the latter part of Among Friends about the origin of the sensitivity of her palate, how the world came to her through it.

She wrote of life in the family's ranch where her friends and her "ate almost anything that we could put in our mouths without being burned or stung, and swallowed everything that our bodies would not reject. It was a good education for my palate."

Thank you, Teach

Teacher Appreciation Week, which falls this week, must be an American celebration. It doesn't fall within the Philippine academic schoolyear because teachers and students are still on their summer break here (for university studes, it's one heck of a long summer).

Nevertheless, I want to share a short note from a former student (let's call him G) who was with me in the creative writing enrichment course offered by the Community of Learners Foundation in San Juan. He stayed in that one-hour, weekly class for four consecutive years (that's 16 quarters of a schoolyear).

He is a highly functioning special child. There usually is a separate rating system for kids in this category. But as time went on, I considered him among the regular students and evaluated him as one because he always turned in consistently good work, was prompt in doing so, and his absences could be counted with one hand. He may have sounded makulit sometimes, but I knew that he just wanted assurance that he got my writing instructions right. So neat was his penmanship you'd think it came from a sans serif family of fonts.

I will miss G, but I have this note to read and re-read when I feel tired and need refreshing from going through another batch of students' compositions in the coming schoolyear.

How often does a teacher hear a "thank you" from a student? We live for those rare moments.

"Good afternoon po, Teach. I read the message you sent me. I already graduated from COLF, and I applied at Kalayaan College. I'm also working out at the gym with my brother every morning and on weekends. I have gained my strength and confidence again, especially when I can lift the barbell. All my works in Creative Writing I typed them into my computer. The best and wonderful works I love and appreciate most, those are the ones I typed and saved. Teacher Ruth also felt so happy that I gave her a print-out of one of my Creative Writing works. She told me that I can type and save my other Creative Writing works so that I'll have a remembrance of what I've learned from COLF and especially from you. Thank you."

A pledge to show up here

Lately I've been asking the man of the house, my main and loyal reader, if I'm beginning to sound like I'm running out of things to blog about, that my universe has contracted to include his work-in-progress (the garden), our granddaughter and the less-than-extraordinary things that Mary Poppins (a.k.a. Suzy Lolarga) has uncovered from the house's corners and furniture undersides. Have I turned into a chronicler of home-bound goings-on and found trivia with photos for accompaniment?

I'm aware that I have been more than remiss from a bounden duty to write for a living. I seem to have fallen into the gentle trap of writing for its own pleasure. I promised myself and an editor that I would get back to livelihood writing (a.k.a. the composition of articles that will pay for themselves) in a few weeks.

Last night I discovered Lorianne DiSabato's blog and found comfort, strength in her words. She's an enabler and motivator, indeed, the show-by-example type. She reminds me to just show up.

Detail of a painting showing two women, one at a writing desk, by artist Isoda Koryusai

"Showing up at the page is like keeping watch at the bedside of a comatose relative: you watch, wait, and hold out hope because your patient might be present and alive in there, despite an unresponsive body. Just because your patient doesn’t seem to respond doesn’t mean they aren’t there: as Jesus said of a child he raised from the dead, “She’s not dead; she’s only sleeping.” On days when your own creativity seems dead, you show up and sit by the tomb, expectant. If today should be the miraculous day when your lifeless creativity should stir and then sit up in its shroud, you will be there to see it. There might not be anything you can do to help either the sun or the dead rise, but it is of the last importance that you be present just in case.

"Keeping a blog is a great exercise in showing up at the page. When you start a blog, you make an unspoken contract with your readers that you will show up and say something regularly enough to make their checking in worthwhile: a blog grown cold is like a closed and darkened house where a weary traveler had hoped for hospitality. Many days when you show up to 'feed the blog,' you feel like Old Mother Hubbard reaching into a cupboard that’s sadly bare. When you’re forced to concoct a blog-worthy meal out of meager scraps, you often end up with a stone soup simmered with bits of this and that: nothing fancy, just something simple and savory. Out of the leftovers of your days, what kind of sustenance can you cobble together if you simply continue to show up for your own life?" - Lorianne DiSabato, http://hoardedordinaries.wordpress.com/

Things that never really went away

These paper weights found their purpose again atop a stack of unsorted papers. One reads: "Know what I wish on every star?"

That's what these objects are. Once stored and forgotten, they were "unearthed" from closet nooks by our resident Mary Poppins, my sister Suzy who's a big believer in the maxim "a place for everything and everything in its place." She sorted them, trashed those that couldn't be recycled, and we spectators helped by re-purposing them.

If there's spring cleaning in the Western hemisphere, here in Baguio we're doing a massive and serious summer cleaning before the monsoon is accompanied by an attack of molds and mildew. Thanks, Suzy! Be with us again in Summer of 2015.

This mini basket is now home to paper clips and safety pins.

A stash of candles for those increasingly frequent BENECO power outages Photos by Babeth Lolarga