Dalawang abuela

I very closely resemble my mom, and in turn she looks very much like her mother, my lola Elena who recently passed away. Lola Elena, now she was a tough cookie; she was known all her life as being something of a fishwife, and by that I mean no disrespect whatsoever, only an honest recognition of her nature. She did sell fish--making the long trek from the Malolos talipapa (wet market) all the way to Manila every day--and she did always have plenty to say. About nearly everything! Her attitude towards life was robust, forthright, and a broad streak of asperity colored all her dealings with others - her family and clan as well as friends and neighbors.

Palaban, ika nga. Walang pinangingimian. A very different kettle of fish from my lola Bebeng who was the soul of gentleness and discretion....Incidentally, my sister Vicky looks very like Lola B, from the long straight nose to the cast of the forehead, while I have Lola E's facial cast and shall we say very petite stature, as well as her ringing laughter. But I am more peaceable, like Lola B I think!! Whereas V is a war freak :-p

In any case both my lolas were women of admirable fortitude. These were people who survived World War II. When I was little, some of my worst dreams involved being caught in war, where I was always enveloped in a cloud of indefinable dread. My grandmothers lived through those times and flourished, eventually raising large broods: Each had seven children who survived to maturity.

Many ancient ones, when they pass on to the hereafter, leave heirlooms behind. While I have nothing material from either lola I like to think they left me and all their grandchildren and great-grandchildren something even better: personal grace and the sheer stubbornness that sometimes is the only thing that will see you through life's rough patches. To know that I am part inheritor of lives very richly lived--it's the best legacy ever. (Though a baul of vintage clothing wouldn't have come amiss. Joke!)

My Islands

Even as the bough breaks
from the sheer weight of song
so does my heart break with love,
so will my rivers flow
to kiss the sea's warm eternal breast,
so will my islands poise their hills
against the sun.

My heart is proud
of this dream and prouder yet my rivers
of the faith that keeps the pace
of tides and moons, and prouder
still my islands of their hills.


From - who else? - the late great NVM Gonzalez, National Artist. I confess I found his A Season of Grace hard going; my mind is not built for the patient reading it requires. But I always always loved My Islands, which I first encountered in one of my first- or second-grade textbooks back in our Malolos days. Often when I read this verse it calls up an image of a sleepy bamboo grove somewhere in a barrio. In this mind's picture, it is always noon. The sun is a white glare in the sky. Someone -- a tired farmer, perhaps -- has wiggled into that leafy refuge for a midday nap. His hat is a crushed pillow cushioning his head, and his limbs are asprawl in slumber. He snores. Around him all is quiet except for the friendly hiss-hiss-hiss sounds that bamboo makes when the wind stirs it, and the gurgle of a nearby ilog.

Ewwwwwwww

Seen on www.scmp.com this morning at around 9:30:



Sure hope the French chef doesn't actually plan to dish that up.

However, fear not - in another page in the same section, the webmaster got it right:

Words

Words. Sometimes they fail me. Sometimes I post trivia, I swipe videos from Youtube, I photograph cupcakes and cookies, because I need the light relief. April and May, the months of spring--they’ve brought lightning too. Two grandmothers passing away after long, well-lived lives. Remarkable women; but when was being a grandmother or a mother anything less than remarkable? When is that profound decision to bring life into the world, to start a new branch in your section of the human tree, ever anything less than insanely brave? (Or breathtakingly foolhardy, as I sometimes think.)

Continuity. Moving forward. We make that decision every day. Someone who is like a sister to me recently had a medical diagnosis that made this a very real issue, because as it turned out her condition would be immensely alleviated by having a child. A solution with its own complication.

New generations. Four kids, each different, each a wonderful sapling. Vicky’s eight-year-old AJ, precociously articulate. Lee’s sturdy Geoff, fairly vibrating with mischief. Betchie’s comic Jill, who likes more than anything to make faces. And my goddaughter, Erika, growing up enfolding everyone in her big-sister embrace, and yet the most fragile of them all.

What do you do when your cup runneth over with love for these creatures, whom you had never imagined could exist?

A friend's child celebrates his first birthday. He is beautiful too, this boy. Soft, plump, a ball of tenderness, lavish with his smiles.

Life overflows. I am enmeshed in ties of blood and connections. Parents, sisters, brother. Uncles, aunts. Cousins and cousins’ children. Lost grandparents. Carriers of pieces of my own genetic code. Friends, comrades, neighbors. Strangers. All builders of my social DNA. I am caught in a web of need and loss, love and animosity (and insecurity, and pigheadedness, vanity, pettiness). But it is all to be cherished. I am grateful to life, in all its events. Even when it drives me inchoate or leaves me speaking in code.

Stuck!

This is what I do when tormented by writer's block (or not a block really, since it implies that there is usually an uninterrupted Zen-zone of flow in my writing, instead of the spasmodic fits and starts, let-me-just-pop-a-bowl-of-popcorn or have-a-drink-of-water getting up and sitting down that characterizes the process 90 percent of the time)....I trawl the Web for inspiring bits of prose and verse written by people 1 thousand million gajillion bazillion times better than I ever will be:

Litany

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine...
-Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.
But don't worry, I'm not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and--somehow--the wine.


Billy Collins

Infuriating

Are they for real?

Another cockeyed proposal that mistakes the symptom for the problem! The government's too tax-happy as it is. If implemented, it will result in ALSO penalizing overseas wage earners who will very likely be forced to send more to compensate for the taxation. The taxation system is already corrupt and inefficient--one wonders where the extra taxes will really be used efficiently or whether it will be swallowed up by the same usual mysterious channels. And why for heaven's sake shift more of the burden of sustaining the economy to the struggling lower and middle classes??

Paling na naman!

MANILA, Philippines -- The government should tax income remittances from overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) and use the proceeds to shore up the productivity of workers left behind, a study by De La Salle University’s business and economics experts has proposed.

The research, titled “The Economic Impacts of International Migration: A Case Study on the Philippines,” written by Tereso Tullao, Michael Angelo Cortez and Edward See, said: “The possibility of increasing and internalizing the cost of international migration may be considered to reduce the economic ills it has generated. Such a move can arrest the possible hollowing effects on industries and mitigate the loss in international competition.”

The study suggested that these same remittance incomes pouring into the country had nurtured dependence, contributed indirectly to the contraction of industries and developed a culture of migration among Filipinos.

One way of compensating the country for the loss of migrants who attended government-funded state universities and colleges, the study said, would be to oblige them to compensate for the cost of their education.

“Another option is to impose some form of exit tax on migrating workers like nurses whose massive exit has affected nursing education as well as the health sector of the country,” said the study, which was presented during a recent international forum on labor migration conducted by the National Economic and Development Authority.

It acknowledged that the huge amount of remittances sent by OFWs as captured in official central bank statistics and a substantial amount unaccounted for that flows through the various informal channels had contributed significantly to the growth and stability of the national economy in recent years. But instead of alleviating unemployment, it argued that international migration has reduced the demand and supply of labor.

“International migration has increased the reservation wage of individuals coming from households with remittance income,” the research said.

The study also said that temporary overseas employment had the potential of depressing domestic industries and contracting employment similar to the consequence of the “Dutch disease,” referring to a situation in which dependence on a natural resource could erode competitiveness.

“The phenomenon of international migration, more particularly, temporary overseas employment, has also reduced self-reliance among individual members of the households. This has been shown in the long-term consumption pattern of households,” the research said.

It added that the reduced labor force participation of family members with remittance income can be interpreted as another manifestation of dependence.

Nawa'y maayos

Halalan ngayon sa Pilipinas. Sana mapayapa at di (masyadong) magulo.

http://eleksyon2007m.inquirer.net/running/

Sunday afternoon in Aberdeen

Aberdeen is an old old town in the southern district of Hong Kong and was reputed for its fishing trade. These days the fishing industry remains significant -- a third of Hong Kong's seafood supply is said to come through Aberdeen -- although few of the fishing families live on their boats now.

In daytime and on weekdays, it seems that Aberdeen is a town of old people. Nearly everyone you see strolling about in the town square is a sexagenarian, if not a sept- or an octo-. The town comes alive only in the afternoons when the children are let out of school, in the early evening as office workers get home and the char chan tengs and roast shops do a roaring trade in dinner, and on the weekends.

The promenade beside the harbour is especially attractive. There's usually a cool breeze blowing even in summer, and the sight of sampans, kaitos, trawlers, pleasure boats and other watercraft is soothing to anyone sick of office blocks and cramped cubicles. Just don't fall into the water.

Fantasia Barrino - Summertime

Bebiana

Today we bury my grandmother
I am far away. Seven hundred miles as the plane flies
But I see the serried ranks of baked white headstones
Jostling for a glimpse of the regnant sun

She was as flint richly seaming
the cracked seared earth of La Union
Hers was the faith in small daily graces
And the constant redemptions of the mundane
Scraggly vegetables plucked from the unyielding soil
Rice roasted and served in tin cups for coffee
Black thick-bristled native pigs slaughtered for a feasting
Thrifty stream alive with sturdy brown children
Circled by the pungent scent of flue-cured tobacco

She was my grandmother from the north. I never
really knew her, did not speak her tongue.
I should have.
She would have known the many tales of the tribal north
The lover who stored his woman’s breath in a bamboo tube
And waited to be reunited as she floated down the river
She would have known about the trees, the grains and fruits of the land
The fish and the beasts
The songs, the rituals, the faith
She would have known what it takes
To birth a child and bury him
To dream of love and bury that too
To stay the course through ninety-odd years
Rising daily, waking at dawn, turning one’s face to a burning sun
Still smiling that Mona Lisa smile.

For my grandmother, Bebiana Amoyen, 1914-2007

The trip north

La Union is where half of my heritage lies. This is the place my father called home before he and Mom decided to raise their kids in the province of Bulacan in central Luzon. As a result my sisters and I never learned the language and the traditions of the north. I know my father still misses his hometown. But I, despite the occasional summers spent there as a kid, have only fragmented images of Sudipen, that town in La Union where Lola Bebeng and Lolo Caloy, his parents, spent most of their lives.

Lola Bebeng died April 26 at the ripe old age of 93, having outlived her husband by more than a decade. I flew home to pay my last respects, but could not stay for the funeral.

She had a harsh life. Coming from a landed family (the Amoyens had been well known in the district for many many years), she eloped with an adventurer and had seven children by him -- my Dad, Ariston the eldest; Carlito, who looks so much like his father; Ruben, with whose family my sisters lived in Baguio City during their college days at St Louis University; Nene, my aunt who lives in Hong Kong; Gloria, who married an American and has made Oregon her home for the past 13 years; Helen, who has four kids and lives in the family compound in Sudipen; and Romeo, who went into the Philippine army and died fighting rebels in Mindanao. In the early days money was hard to come by and she had to sell off her inheritance--land--parcel by parcel to support her children's education.

Her children have all made good, and helped make her old age more comfortable than her middle years. But this prosaic summary does not do justice to the grace, dignity and astonishing fortitude she showed in life. Lola Bebeng's history, the history and legacy of this side of my family--I still do not feel equal to writing about it adequately. I simply do not know enough; after all, I paid it no attention for decades. But I hope to one day soon find the words to honor and celebrate such a life well lived.

In the meantime, some pictures. In April, the Ilocos region--and much of the Philippines--bakes in 36 to 40 degree heat. High summer is the cruellest time. The air hardly moves, the fields are seared; animals look thirsty and take refuge in drying rivers; in many households water supplies run low.


But a tributary of the Amburayan river from the Mountain Province runs through Sudipen and the townspeople take full advantage of its cool clear waters to escape the summer heat.





When she was still strong, my lola would have bought these onions and garlic at the town market. Maybe the field snails too:




And she would cook on these clay stoves so typical of the region:



I found this interesting history of Sudipen. The town has undergone a number of political changes this century. It even used to be part of Mountain Province. There is much to learn and remember.