Small Town Vignettes

A Passion For Wood

2007-01-04T22:45:00.000-08:00

Jake is a second cousin on my mother's side and although he is two years older than me we are close friends. He is a really nice guy, very good-natured and considerate and to top it all possessed an artistic and sensitive soul.

His passion was for wood carvings of all kinds and his bedroom is awash with them, from small tokens and bric-a-bracs to several large pieces ranging from intricately designed wooden shields and native sword replicas to free standing decorative pieces resembling Grecian columns complete with carved leaves and vines with plump berries.

All were products of his artistic nature and dexterous hands. And on his headboard was a large, rather flat box, carved wood of course, that contained his most treasured possessions, his custom built wood carving tools, knives and chisels.

On the box cover, intricately done in bas relief, was the image of a young woman with flowing black hair, small yet well proportioned nose, round and mischievous eyes and a generously smiling mouth. And on the side of one cheek was the merest hint of a dimple.

Some years ago when I first saw the carving, I immediately ask Jake who she was. "Nobody," he answered. "Just a woman in my dreams." He then laughed self-consciously and we moved on to other things.

Jake's family owned a small plant nursery and orchid farm which did very well and he helped manage the business. He had a talent for growing plants, a "green thumb" as most people would say, but most of his free time was spent in a small shed in the back of his family's ancestral house in the outskirts of my hometown where he would spend hours carving decorative designs on wooden panels for walls and doors but he never sold any of them. A lot of people would have paid dearly for them but he had more than enough money and had no interest in selling his work pieces.

Then four years ago, he finally decided to get married to a girl who was a distant relative. The courtship was a stormy one, with both of the parents of the prospective bride and groom deeply opposed to the union of their offspring who, although could be legally married, had direct blood links to each other.

The wrangling became heated and threatened to split the whole clan apart as there were relatives who also were rooting for Jake and his love and who saw how deeply devoted they were to each other

Then Jake and his bride-to-be settled the matter by eloping. They fled to Cebu, got married before a judge and then stayed for a time with a uncle in Mandaue City where the bride managed to find work in a business office while Jake helped out in his uncle's restaurant.

Tempers among the feuding families eventually cooled down and Jake with his wife finally came home after several months. The two lovebirds settled down in the house by the plant nursery and the orchid farm and eventually had a baby girl a year ago.

Before that and just a month or so after they returned, they had a small church wedding in my hometown which I attended. Jake looked uncomfortable in formal dress and was ill at ease with the ceremonies but the bride was radiant and glowing.

I got my chance to greet them both after the ceremony and managed to steal a dance with the bride during the reception. I looked at her and wondered. It was all there, the flowing black hair, the small but well formed nose, the mischievous eyes, the generous mouth with the dimple in the cheek. And the musical and infectious laughter that tickles and makes the listener laugh also.

Weeks after the wedding, Jake gave me a magnificent wood panel on which he carved, in high relief, a glorious Chinese dragon posed with five claws in the imperial Chinese manner. I was speechless with gratitude for such a treasure. But I would have exchanged it without hesitation for the cover on the wooden box that contained his carving tools.

I have not had the courage to ask my cousin about the image of the woman on the wooden cover. And chances are perhaps I never will.

Cedric: "All these carvings and not a single, full sculpture in the round of a person. Not even a bust of a person."

Jake: "I don't like doing sculpture portraits. I don't have the patience to deal with a live subject and carving from pictures can be difficult at best."

Cedric: "Would you carve a bust of me, if I ask you to?"

Jake (laughing): "I could but it would not do you justice. Besides I have never done a portrait of a person in wood."

Cedric (teasingly): "Never?"

Jake: "Never."

A Visitor From The Deep

2006-12-22T08:57:00.000-08:00

I was driving home from a visit to a relative across town when I saw groups of people excitedly talking among themselves in front of the town plaza. An atmosphere of excitement was in the air and I saw a large number of children and young adults running about and gesticulating in the direction of the sea whose blue-green waters could just be seen beyond the outline of some houses and coconut trees on the other side of the plaza.

I braked the car, parked on the side of the street, jumped out and ran to the seashore about a hundred meters away. There seconds later, I joined a group of agitated bystanders standing on a portion of a long stretch of reinforced concrete seawall that protected that part of the town from the often violent waves of the Pacific Ocean.

"It's a huge fish!", cried a youngster of about fourteen. "Nonsense," said a middle aged man carrying a child in his arms. "It's a small whale." I pushed my my way through the crowd and then I saw what was causing the commotion.

It looked like a fish indeed, some seven or eight feet long and seemingly circling on a shallow patch of the sea just some thirty feet away from where we all stood. I looked at the creature as it started swimming parallel to us and something about its distinctive silhouette meshed with a picture in my memory.

Tursiops truncatus. It was a Pacific bottlenose dolphin and it was in some sort of distress. The reason became clear as it swam closer to the seawall. From our vantage point, we immediately saw clearly that it had a wound on its left side near the belly which was bleeding and leaving a small trail of dark blood. Clearly, it was not a bite wound but probably made by a harpoon or some other stabbing weapon.

By this time, guys from the municipal government and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources were rushing to water's edge. The town's coastal waters were mostly shallow and the rocky bottom often exposed to the air during the low tide. That meant that dolphins and other exotic marine animals who favored deeper water were seldom seen near the shore. Any attempt, therefore, to rescue or treat the dolphin would have to done soon before the waters receded and carried the wounded animal to sea.

To the surprise of those who went into the water, the dolphin seemed to tolerate their presence well and even stopped swimming while allowing two guys to sling a piece of sturdy cloth underneath its belly to support its weight. It may have been too weak to protest anyway. Surrounded by a circle of onlookers, a government veterinarian examined the wound while helpers bore most of the animal's heavy weight and made sure that it was able to breath the air through its blowhole. Another guy tried to shield it from the harsh mid-morning sun with an umbrella while still another kept splashing water over the dolphin's exposed back in order to prevent it from drying up.

I rushed back home, changed clothes and jumped in to join the small group that was attempting to rescue the distressed animal but when I got there the I immediately realized that the dolphin's chances of surviving were very slim. There was simply no one there who knew anything about treating a wounded animal like this. The veterinarian was a big animal and cattle specialist and all he could determine was that the would was deep and that damage to the dolphin's interior organs was highly probable. They had medical kits and antibiotics in hand but did not know how to administer treatment. Suturing the wound would have been useless unless one knew and managed to treat also the internal injuries.

We all stood there in mute frustration and anger at our inability to prevent such a senseless death of a beautiful and friendly animal. I ran my hand over the dolphin's side and as I marvelled at the slick softness of it, like the wet inner tire of a wheel, a wave of anger and revulsion swept over me as I thought of the human being who could be so callous to do this gentle creature harm. And to think that in its moment of pain and helplessness, it would seek the company and help of the very same beings who, in many cases, bore a collective responsibility for so many of the instances that members of its own species have been harmed or slaughtered for fun or profit.

The dolphin took almost two hours to die and all of us on that sandy and shallow water stood vigil. We talked occasionally but spent most of that time in silence while checking that the animal was as comfortable as possible. Speculation on who inflicted the injury was avoided as if each of us there felt a collective guilt.

When it finally died, we asked a fisherman in a motorized boat to bring the body to deep water and then let it go back to where it should have belonged. That, in our minds, seemed appropriate.

In the heat of the sun at just part high noon, we all watched the boat with its cargo covered with a piece of canvas leave the dock and set out to sea. In minutes, it was just a small speck in the distance, another seemingly black dot in the brightness of the horizon. Then it was gone.

As I walked home, wet and tired, a friend came rushing to me. He just came in after hearing all the news. "What happened?", he asked, out of breath and chest heaving. 'Where's the dolphin?"

I merely shrugged my shoulders and walked past him. "Dead and gone," I said. "Dead and gone." The I went home without another word.

In the midst of the attempted dolphin rescue.....

Bystander Man: "They say that dolphin meat tastes like beef."

Bystander Woman: "Really? Who said so?"

Bystander Man: "I had relatives who have eaten some."

Bystander Woman: "If this one dies, will they slaughter it, you think?"

Bystander Man: "They always do."

Bystander Woman (musing): "I wonder how much they would sell it for? I could be tempted to buy some."

The Amulet Man

2006-12-13T17:22:00.000-08:00

Manong Pilo is already in his late sixties but he remains, without a doubt, the most popular barber in my small hometown. There were two other barbershops in the poblacion but he managed to hold on to a large and loyal clientele simply because he was a likable man and was skilled in what he did for a living.

My hair grows very fast and twice a month I am usually propped comfortably in his old fashioned, wooden barber chair and for a half hour or so we would chat about the local news and the weather while he deftly snipped around my head with his gleaming scissors. When he was finished with the barbering, he would meticulously brush off all the stray hairs from my head and clothes with a vintage barber's brush.

The came the part for which customers always come back for, a brisk yet exquisitely pleasurable massage of the head, neck, arms and upper body. For those who have blissfully undergone the approximately 5 minute procedure, it can be something to look forward to.

But my fascination with the character that was Mang Pilo extends beyond his skill as an artist with hair. For this elderly man was also the last surviving member of the dreaded Montero gang, a bandit band composed of just five members, all related by blood, which used to terrorize the small villages surrounding my hometown in the 1960's and the 1970's.

The gang was well armed, audacious and eminently successful in making a lucrative living from illegal logging and from bandit raids on the logging companies which operated in the dense virgin forests of that time. They also extorted money from rich businessmen who owned big stores and other businesses in the area.

Like the Robin Hood of myth, the gang members gave generously to the poor and the dispossessed. They also dispensed rough and swift justice to those who dared to oppress and harass the rural folk in their mountain hamlets and coastal villages. That made them popular heroes and impossible for the government to stop much less capture inspite of the loud complaints from their well-heeled and affluent victims.

The Montero gang were great believers in the protective powers of amulets and it is said that each of them wore an amulet around the neck that protected them from injury caused by all metal weapons and bullets. The amulets were said to be made of gold and each supposedly contained a tiny piece of one of the actual nails that were used to nail Jesus Christ to the cross. How the relics were obtained, how the amulets were made and who made them was not known.

The end for the bandit band came in the late 1970's when the Marcos government launched a nationwide campaign to get rid of all armed groups and private armies in the countryside. Battalions of army soldiers and Constabulary troopers ruthlessly hunted down the gang members in their mountain lairs and hideouts. It took the government more than a year and plenty of casualties to accomplish its mission. The gang members had many followers and allies and they all fought in a terrain that favored their guerilla style tactics. But the soldiers and troopers had superior numbers, firepower and resources.

In one epic battle in the mountains of which stories are still told, the gang members and their followers were savagely cut down after a prolonged battle. Apparently the amulets were not very effective in shielding them from the hail of automatic gunfire and modern artillery. Not one of the band survived except for Mang Pilo whose jaw was shattered by a government bullet which also knocked him unconscious. He was saved from certain death because the soldiers wanted to find out from him where the gang's loot was hidden.

He must have given them the right information because he was later sent to a government hospital where his jaw was repaired and healed. Then in the early seventies, while serving a prison term in the national penitentiary, he was given a presidential pardon. He went home and took up an occupation he had learned in prison. He became a skilled barber and masseur.

Mang Pilo, in the decades that followed, became devoutly religious. He became a regular churchgoer and even became a member of the church choir where his deep baritone was put to good use. He never married though and he lived with the family of a devoted niece who married a local policeman.

Years ago while he was cutting my hair, I once asked him what happened to his amulet and if it really worked. He shook his head and told me that the amulet, contrary to popular belief, was a thing of evil. It did not actually protect you from harm or from a flying bullet, he said, but it gave you a false sense of power and invincibility. And in his view, it pushed the wearer to to do the most evil and depraved acts .

"One of the soldiers took it from my neck," he added, a hint of melancholy in his eyes and the scissors hovering above my head. "He did me a favor I could never repay. I never knew who he was but may the Lord have mercy on his soul."

Then the scissors dropped down and started snipping hair again.

Cedric (in the barber chair): "How does it feel to kill a man?"

Manong Pilo (bemused): "Why do you ask?"

Cedric (persistent): "Was it easy or hard for you?"

Manong Pilo (putting down the scissors): "If it was easy for me then I would not have nightmares until now. Don't believe everything you hear about me. It should never be easy."

Buried Treasure

2006-12-02T01:52:00.000-08:00

My paternal grandfather was almost 84 when he passed away in the 1980's but until his death his sight, hearing and mind remained keen and sharp although he suffered greatly from asthma and gouty arthritis.

I was his only grandson so he doted on me and as a small boy I also worshiped him. We would spend hours chatting in the backyard of my parents' house in my hometown. The old wooden bench we both would sit on is still in use to this day although the huge fire tree that used to tower over it and whose foliage sheltered us from the heat of the afternoon sun had been cut down almost a decade ago.

It was during one of these early afternoon talks when Lolo Andong revealed to me the secret of his buried treasure. His eyes twinkling mischievously, he looked around to check for any unwanted eavesdroppers and with a lowered voice began to tell his treasure story.

My grandfather was already a thriving gentleman farmer when World War II broke out and in 1942 when news of the fall of Bataan and Corregidor to the Japanese imperial forces spread all over Mindanao, he started making preparations to move his small family from his small village to a hiding place in the mountains. News of Japanese atrocities in Luzon made him fear for the safety of his wife and young child.

They brought only what essentials they could carry on their shoulders. But before they left to join the massive exodus of panicking village people, he saw a neighbor burying valuables like precious chinaware and jewelry in the adjacent backyard. He immediately followed the example and secretly buried money, my grandmother's jewelry and many other precious family heirlooms and items in several places around his house. Then he wrote down the exact locations on paper, hid the document and left the house to join his family and the stream of refugees fleeing the village.

He did not see his house again for almost two years but when the Pacific war drew to a close and the Japanese forces withdrew, he brought his family back home and their lives gradually returned to normal. He dug up all the items he had buried except for one small item. He told me that he wanted to get it out of the ground but a fortuneteller in the mountains told him not to. The woman told him that for his luck in business to continue, he must not touch that treasure trove. Only a descendant of his can do that safely and without harmful effect.

My grandfather told me that he followed the fortuneteller's words to the letter. In the decades that followed he never made any attempt to dig up his treasure but was passing the secret to me. It was now my decision whether I would free it from the ground or not.

I told my father excitedly about the secret later that evening and he laughed about it good naturedly. "In a few years maybe," he said. "You could dig it up yourself." Then he winked at my lolo. We never talked about the matter again after that although I never forgot about it. When Lolo Andong died almost two years later, I resolved that time would come when I would try to find out what my grandfather allowed to remain buried in the earth.

It was only in the middle of the 1990's when I finally had the time to visit my grandfather's village and his house. I immediately got a distant cousin to help me out and from the instructions my lolo gave years me before, we paced out the exact location and started digging.

We had to widen the hole several times but after more than a meter deep in the earth, we struck metal. We dug out what appeared to be an round, old style biscuit tin some six inches deep and more than a foot wide. It was still in remarkably good condition although it was slightly rusted in some places and was wrapped in a tattered, canvas like material.

Inside the house later, I excitedly pried open the container and saw what it contained. Wrapped in small cloth pouches was a small quantity of silver, pre-World War II coins and something wrapped in cloth. I got it out gingerly and slowly unwrapped it.

It was an exquisite porcelain plate with a flower motif design and in the middle was something that made me finally realize what made this thing a priceless treasure for my lolo. It was a handmade painting of my lolo and lola in their wedding finery, still clear and vivid as the day it was painted on in the 1920's. The clear protective glaze and the cloth wrapping had preserved the plate from damage.

Subdued with awe and nostalgia, I went home with the treaure.

I still keep all the coins today. They are valuable as collector's items although the actual monetary value is not that much really. But the plate is priceless and it is never displayed or even shown to people. It remains hidden and protected from harm.

And who knows? One of these days I may bury it again in a safe place for the future generations to uncover and marvel at. That would be, in a sense, poetic justice and my Lolo Andong would probably like that gesture very much.

Many years ago...............

Cedric: "Lolo, when you married Lola did you love her?"

Lolo Andong: "Yes I did but she did not like me then. I was just another farmer and she had other better and wealthier suitors."

Cedric: "But you did get her in the end, didn't you?"

Lolo Andong: "Yes I did but I used a tactic that the other suitors did not know."

Cedric: "How did you do it?"

Lolo Andong (smiling): "I courted her mother. When I got her mother's approval, she arranged for your Lola and I to meet more often. Then she fell in love with me."

Blood Thirst

2006-11-27T05:32:00.000-08:00

When I was 18, my father bought me an expensive air rifle with a telescopic sight. It was a thing of beauty and became one of my most treasured possessions.

Two weeks after getting it, I went on a hunting trip with my mother's brother who was an avid hunter and who had taught me the rudiments of shooting and hunting. We decided to go try our luck in a forested area about three kilometers south of my hometown where a troop of wild monkeys have been seen.

It was midafternoon when we got to the area. We swiftly charged our rifles with compressed CO2 gas, loaded them up with lead pellets then started stalking the illusive band of primates. My uncle went ahead and I followed him some three meters behind.

It was my uncle who saw the monkeys first high on a thickly foliated branch of a tall tree. He quickly signaled me with the hand to crouch low and out of sight. Then he started looking for the leader of the monkey troop, an old, grizzled and bad tempered male he had named Solomon after the famed Jewish king. This Solomon too had many mates, some six of them, and like his Biblical namesake, was also crafty and shrewd. My uncle had tried to shoot the monkey leader twice before but each time he had missed the cunning bastard.

After a couple of minutes, we both saw Solomon who was frolicking with a female on another nearby tree branch. Both were unaware of our approach. My uncle excitedly signaled me that we would shoot together. He would aim for the monkey leader and I would try to get the female.

I knelt behind the trunk of a small sapling, wiped the perspiration from my eyes with the back of my hand and aimed through my rifle's telescope sight as I propped the side of the rifle on the sapling's trunk to steady it. Both targets were in the clear and I shifted the crosshairs to one side and centered it on the female monkey's exposed back. I threw my uncle a quick glance and saw that he was already in his pre-firing position. Then I thumbed the rifle's safety lever to off, slowed down my breathing and then waited for my uncle to pull his trigger.

When he fired I immediately followed and the two shots were less than a second apart. But despite his experience and skill, my uncle had eagerly fired too soon. Solomon, warned by some sixth sense or instinct, had jumped away as my partner fired and the bullet merely grazed the his shoulder and cheek. I, on the other hand, was luckier for my pellet had landed dead center on my target.

The female monkey desperately tried to hold on to the foliage but amidst the monkey leader's screams of rage, she finally tottered then fell more than forty feet to the ground and landed with a dull thud.

I was up and jumping with glee while my uncle desperately tried to line up another shot at Solomon but the old monkey was gone. All that was left of him and his troop's presence were the swaying branches where they used to be and the fading sound of their enraged cries.

My uncle and I quickly located the spot where the female monkey had fallen but he warned me to let him approach first. Wounded animals often bite and he wanted to make sure first that the target was truly dead. After a while he called me to join him.

The monkey had landed on her back and was dead but clutched in her arms and still alive and mewing like a cat was a small baby monkey. Its enormous eyes were wide with terror as it tried to snuggle into its mother's arms.

My uncle bent down, pried the baby monkey from the mother's dead clutches then examined it closely. "It's too small," he said. "It will not survive without its mother." He handed it to me then added, "Better leave it. Either the others will return to get it or it will die."

I held the baby in one had as it clutched its hands around my fingers, its body trembling in panic. The decision was apparently mine to make and I had to make it fast. My uncle had already packed the dead monkey's body into a cloth bag and was waiting for me follow him home.

When we arrived home hours later, I had a passenger in my vest pocket.

But my uncle was right. It was too young to survive without its mother. I tried to feed it some milk formula but all my well intentioned efforts were in vain. It died three days later.

I have hunted many times since then but never monkeys and anything larger than small birds. And my uncle did go after Solomon and his monkey troop again and again over the years. He did get a couple of monkeys into his game bag but not Solomon. The old monkey was too crafty and cunning even for the likes of him.

Cedric: "Hey uncle, what do you feel when you shoot at a man?"

Uncle: "In my case nothing, just the adrenaline rush. It's just pure action."

Cedric: "So you just pull the gun out........"

Uncle (leaning forward and interrupting): "When you pull out the gun you use it. No hesitation at all or the other guy will kill you first."

Cedric: "But when do you decide that you must pull it out and use it?"

Uncle (smiling): "That's the thing that separates the cold blooded killer from the good guy acting in self-defense. That is what you must learn."

A Matter Of Duty

2006-11-24T05:15:00.000-08:00

My father was among the first doctors from my hometown and because he became well known as a physician and surgeon in our locality everybody assumed that becoming a healer had always been his ambition in life. The truth was it was not. He had dreamed of another life but fate ordained him to become what he was. And by force of will and a well developed sense of duty he excelled in the field of endeavor he would not have chosen for himself.

While he was growing up in the 1930's, he was brought by his own father to Cebu City and got the thrill of his life when he got his first airplane ride on an eight seater Fokker plane operating from a crude airstrip some 30 kilometers from his town. That trip made a lasting impression upon him and he became fascinated with the glamour and excitement of flying. From that time on, he wanted to become a commercial pilot and dreamt of a carefree life making a living from piloting flying machines all over the country and perhaps all over the world.

But my grandparents had other plans for him. They wanted a doctor for their only son and in a generation where children were expected to obey their parents, he could do nothing else except follow his parent's wishes. He was sent to Manila and there he would spend half a decade learning to treat and heal diseases when all he ever wanted to do was to be on the planes that regularly crisscrossed the skies above him as he went on with his studies.

When he graduated and passed the board examinations in the late 1950's he returned home and for a year or so did absolutely nothing. He became despondent and refused to practice his profession. For the first time, his parents were helpless against his seeming indifference to a medical career in a place where there were virtually no doctors and where his skills would not have not only given him a more than comfortable living but would have made a real difference in the lives of the people.

Then a missionary doctor from a far away land struggling to fight an uphill battle against disease in the rural countryside in my father's part of the country sought his help. The reluctant physician initially refused to help but his conscience and a growing admiration for the white man's dedication to helping others finally moved him to get involved.

In a crude three room hut on the outskirts of town which was the foreign doctor's clinic and mini-hospital, my father gradually found his true calling. In the years that followed that hut would grow bigger and eventually become a government hospital. My father became the moving force behind its expansion and emergence as the primary health facility for the local communities in the area.

It was said that he had a healing touch and could do magic with a scalpel. But my father would merely smile, shake his head and deny the stories of amazing healing feats attributed to him. But many of his former patients held in in high esteem and until now many of them would shed a tear when telling me stories of how he had saved them from certain death. His fellow doctors and the other employees at the hospital loved him but they loved him more for his affable nature and mischievous sense of humor. At work he was businesslike and brusque yet when the work was finished he was good natured and a man easy to talk to.

That he had grown to love his work was clear. Even when he was hospital director already, he would always consider himself on duty and ready to cover for any absent physician. Waking up in the middle of the night or even in the wee hours of the morning in order to answer emergency calls did not bother him even when he was already in his sixties. And even when he retired, it was not unusual for him to help out often in the hospital. He still operated on patients, delivered babies and consulted with sick people.

I once asked him what made him love his work so much. He took his time before answering my question. "With me it was not a question of loving or not loving your work," he said, as he put a hand on my shoulder." "I did what was needed to be done because it was the right thing to do. The love for the work I was doing came later when I started seeing the results of my efforts."

Then he was off to work, walking briskly and with no hesitation at all.

In a plane over Bohol and flying through some turbulence many years ago when I was just a 12 year old boy.....

Cedric (nervous): "Hey Papa! The wings are moving up and down. Are we in trouble?"

Papa (chuckling): "Relax. It's just a little turbulence and nothing to worry about."

Cedric (really nervous): "Are you sure?"

Papa: (reassuringly): "Let me tell you something. Airplane wings are designed to flap up and down a bit. They are not really rigid but constructed to be a little flexible, so I am not worried. And you should not be."

Cedric (calmer): "Really? I did not know that. How come you know this things, Pa?"

Papa (leaning back and closing his eyes): "Something I must have read somewhere. Relax now and get some rest."

Angie

2006-11-22T19:04:00.000-08:00

Angie is fifty-eight years old. She is overweight for her exactly five foot height and tips the scales at about 160 pounds. She suffers from moderate hypertension, diabetes and osteoarthritis. Her teeth are all gone except for two molars on the lower jaw and she wears a full set of dentures which are almost often misplaced and she spends an inordinate amount of time looking for them every morning.

Her shoulder length hair is streaked with the grey of middle age and she gamely dyes it black at least once every two weeks. But it happens to be also naturally and temperamentally wavy and difficult to control. When she wakes up in the morning , it would stick out in the most bizarre ways and it would look as if she had just been electrocuted.

I had urged her many times to trim it short and thin it out a bit but she obstinately refused to do so. "A woman," she declared, "must have long and beautiful hair."

She likes to eat fatty meat and would swoons over anything sweet. Her doctor has placed her on a very strict diet with virtually no meat and sugar but she inevitably and with great ingenuity finds ways to cheat. Like the time when I caught her hiding a box of chocolates underneath her pillow and there she was crying and telling me that it was from the kitchen helper's ardent admirer and that she mas merely hiding it and keeping it safe for the poor girl.

That she studied only up to the second grade was true. Her family was so poor that she was practically sold into virtual slavery to a more prosperous relative where she lived a miserable and abused life until my father rescued her and made her my nanny when I was only barely a month old. She never saw again the inside of a school and refused all offers by my parents to give her even a rudimentary education. She also never married even though she had suitors and admirers. I became instead the focus and purpose of her life.

That she did not have much of book learning is true but she had sound common sense and a quick intelligence. She had also the memory of an elephant that enabled her to recall shopping lists, recipe ingredients and cooking procedures with ease, a useful skill if you are essentially illiterate. And years of practice and my mother's patient tutelage had made her an excellent cook, something she put great pride in. Her native fish stew with lemon grass is so tasty that my late father once said that it "could literally raise the dead", an accolade I think is no exaggeration.

But it was her often childlike innocence and implicit belief in the goodness of human nature that is the most endearing of her qualities. She is totally without malice and even her foibles and occasional tantrums were never meant to be mean or wicked. And hugs and kind words plus plenty of reassurance were often enough to set her right and her smiles would once again light up our world.

Now who could be the fool not to love a treasure like that?

Cedric (concerned): "Mama Angie, your blood pressure is up again. It's 160/100. Have you been taking your medicines? What have you been eating?"

Angie (indignant): "Excuse me, I have been taking my medicines! And my diet has always been the same this week. I don't know why my blood pressure is up. Maybe the doctor is wrong. They cannot be trusted you know and they are always after our money."

Cedric (exasperated): "I hope you have been eating the oatmeal and eating a lot of fruits and veggies. What did you have yesterday for supper?"

Angie (unconcerned): "Just pork adobo and lechon kawali. Want me to cook you some for lunch?"

Looking Back

2006-11-21T01:04:00.000-08:00

When circumstances compelled me years ago to live and work in my home town far from the hustle and bustle of the city where I had grown up, I was far from happy.

I missed my friends and the city life. My dreams were to make it big there and not spend the most productive years of my life in the small and rural town that seemed like a prison, a seeming gulag of lost hopes and missed opportunities.

The years that passed have made me change that view.

There is hope and opportunity in plenty in this place in the middle of nowhere. There is happiness too as well as sadness and tragedy in infinite variety. There is love and romance as well as rejection and disappointment. There is hope of the inexhaustible kind as well as the bleakest despair.

Life in its infinite diversity.

Of course, I do still miss the city and I go there often to visit my old friends and the hunting grounds of my youth. But the place I once despised is now my refuge and where I feel most at home. It suits me now and I may not be entirely happy but I am content.

This blog is a testament to that fact and is a record of my new life in this paradise on the edge of hell.