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Born and raised with little, I found pleasure in little things early in life.  It was a boon, of course, that my mother worked in a US base in the Pacific.  I was also fortunate I lived during better times, when the currency exchange rate was 2:1.  So, even if my mother’s income was not spectacular, I studied in a private school until high school. 

I met the likes of American brands Revlon and Max Factor, Hershey’s and Nestle’s, NABISCO, and Kraft in my elementary schooldays, then the French cosmetics and scent makers like Chanel, Chacharel, Rochas, Lanvin, Yves St. Laurent, Dior in the higher grades.  Their products were available at the base commissary or PX and Mom somehow found way to afford them and take them home to me.

It brought me great pride to own a Parker and a Sheaffer, imported scho0lbags and quality notebooks from the base store. I also enjoyed the imported comicbooks and storybooks.  It brought me great pride to own a National transistor radio and a Brownie box camera that my Dad managed to get me when he too was working at the base.

But it saddened me that my mom couldn’t afford to buy me the fancy local pencils, erasers and sharpeners my affluent schoolmates brought daily to class. Or the extra sets of school uniforms they had and the colorful lunchboxes they lugged to school.

Ah, a young person’s wants!

Today, I can say I had my fill of designer goods and foreign-made food  in my childhood.  But I feel bad because their current prices are soooo prohibitive my daughters cannot now afford to have them on ordinary income.

Still, while my personal material tastes remain pretty high (thanks to a sustained hunger for information from foreign magazines and the Internet), I do not have envy in my bones—envy that the rich can flaunt their designer handbags and shoes and material possessions—thinking only that I have had them in my youth.

Proof?  Even if I can save up for a coveted item, even if I can now have in my hands the cash to pay for a wished-for Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, Michael Kors or Kate Spade goodie, I think many times over if I can let go of my cash just to have it or if there is something more worthwhile I can spend it on.  Wisdom?  I’d like to call it common sense, especially when times are hard for most people.

We have a saying:  you may amass all the material wealth you can here on earth, but will you be able to take it with you to heaven, hell or purgatory when you die?

Thank your stars and circumstances for the small joys material goods can bring you, but never forget that as you grow older, it’s the more substantial things and lessons in life that are worth taking with you wherever you go.

I fear  Alzheimer’s disease and everything else I’ve read about it . I fear dying in an accident or being killed by a violent act.  Which is why I try so hard to stay  in what is called “the state of grace”.    This means exerting effort not to commit mortal sin.   Only a Catholic raised in the Philippines in a Catholic school from the fifties to the sixties would understand exactly what this entails.

This means being ready for any eventuality, not physically if this cannot be avoided, but spiritually.  To my simple mind, this is being able to meet my Creator and looking at Him straight in the eye.  No, no mortal can ever be blemish-free, spiritually, but it is best to face up to one’s earthly sins of omission or commission, so she/he can comfortably lie in the Lord’s arms in the afterlife.

Yesterday was my Tia Odeng’s 80th-plus birthday.  She’s been in the US for decades; I’ve never bothered to ask her why she hasn’t come home.  That’s how much I respect her, as I’ve always respected her, and she’s much too classy to be asked such a question.

Tia Odeng is Lourdes, a retired pediatric neurologist.  I remember her as “kulog”, or thunder, a monicker her own sibling gave her, because she was unpredictable,  she had a temper, she never spoke of anything trivial, but when she opened her mouth, it was usually “thunderous”.

An extremely intelligent person, she was so deep it was difficult for people to fathom her, or intrude into her innermost thoughts.  But she was also funloving.  I remember her urging me to skip my PE class just so we could spend a few hours together to have a hamburger, or hie off to our favorite shoestore, or watch a movie.  This was in the early ’60’s, the last time she spent in the Philippines. I had just graduated from high school and was getting ready for college.

When she returned to the US, I cried and I felt I lost someone.  But we kept in touch.

Fast forward to 1994, when Mommy passed away and I was left really all alone with two growing children.  I cannot detail what support Tia Odeng extended to me, and continues to extend.  When, after a few years, I had the guts to ask her why she continued to be behind my back, she wrote: “I felt that I never helped your Mom enough when she was alive.”

I want to hold my Tia Odeng’s hand, but she is so far away.  I am still in awe of this generous lady.  The few times we talked over the phone, I felt so overwhelmed hearing her voice that I could hardly speak.  (I cannot bring myself to call her just to say hi, but I write her regularly.  She is the only one I send snail mail to, as everyone else has e-mail, because she refuses to have a PC, arguing that there isn’t much she can do with a PC).

She and I share a few secrets, but she is a secret in itself, a poet, a woman who seems hard and cold, but is really so sensitive and caring.  I can only wish she will be around forever.

To you, Tia Odeng, thank you for being there.  Happy Birthday and God bless you forever.  You’ve always discouraged me from going to the US, saying life there isn’t as beautiful as most Filipinos think.  But time seems to be running out on both of us, and sooner than you think, or than I can imagine, I will be seeing you.

I am back and, I hope,  for a long time to come.  Can’t say I was genuinely busy.  Probably just a case of time mismanagement.  The trouble is,  I have never internalized what my creative writing workshop director taught us:  everytime something worth writing about pops up in your head, get up and write it down, no matter what time of day or night.  I’ve missed expounding on sooo many subjects that now, I have forgotten them.  Can’t say I should blame age for this, although age does have something to do with forgetting.  Tamad is what I have always been, and laziness is the enemy of productivity!

Glad to be back though, and on a new server.  My daughter saw to it I got back to posting on my own website.  She pays for this, after all.  I cannot retrieve my writings from a previous server, but I did manage to copy/paste/save some, and these I will re-post here.

Today’s youth are able to harness digital technology to show how they will look like when they’re fifty and up.  I do not know how knowing their physical appearance then will help them age gracefully, which involves more than just handling changing looks.

My contemporaries did not have this opportunity for imagination.  We went on with life as we thought it should, or often, as our old folk thought it would.

In my mind, my female friends are forever alternately innocent and capricious, and sympathetic and critical, and my male pals, alternately generous and unforgiving, and affectionate and distant.

To this day, at sixty, I see myself at age five, wearing an unusual cap and standing before a birthday cake Mommy took pains to highlight a simple party for me.

I see myself at a much younger age, flanked by Mommy and her officemates and a wee bit overdressed in my favourite red dress, overlooking the famed Balara Filters, then a popular week-end local tourist destination in Quezon City.

I see myself at age ten, awfully fat and dwarfed by the tall pine trees in Baguio, where I had the fortune of spending a vacation along with my wealthier cousins.

I’ve kept the many pictures of my earlier years and I get pretty nostalgic looking at the girl with the dimples, the thick hair, and the plump physique. My mirror now tells me my eyelids are dangerously close to covering my eyes and my hair is more swiftly graying than my hair dye can keep up with.  My skin is not that bad, but the “laugh lines” have proliferated.

I seriously realized I was growing old when, alone in a luxurious hotel room in Melbourne in 1997, I saw that no amount of moisturizer could make the dryness of my skin go away.  Since then I haven’t used bar soap to wash make-up off.

In 2000, I gamely scaled a rare prime forest mountain in Antique for a writing assignment.  It took me most of a whole day to reach the top.  Going down was another story that merits another post.  The thought that I had a fighting heart that did not give up despite the beating it got from ascent to descent to the pain of an infected wound was the only good reminder of that experience. A bad dark scar on my leg is the terrible remembrance of that episode in my life’s roller-coaster ride.

From then on, I went downhill, physically.  I was diagnosed with gout, and then presented with a list of prohibited foods.  I was depressed.  I had spent a lifetime of good food (read: often forbidden), and yet my good cholesterol level was better than my bad, and I had no diabetes.  Gout was not going to ruin my appetite, if I could cope with the pain of uric acid building up in my joints.

Then I left a high-paying job and was immediately plunged into deeper depression.  I did not want to even move at all.

My ambition of aging gracefully has flown out of the window.  I admire you, Jim Paredes.  It is increasingly becoming difficult to think of aging the way you do.  It’s a case of “the flesh is willing, but the spirit is weak”, instead of the other way around.

But then, tomorrow is another day.  While I am more fully aware of my mortality now, thinking of tomorrow might just be an indication that I have not truly aged.  Is that good or bad?

Hadley is the name of a star.  Its origin escapes me now.

Hadley was also the name of a young photographer I met in Surigao City almost 20 years ago.  We were in the area for a shoot and Hadley, as a tourism photographer at the City Tourism Office, was officially assigned to us, a group of tri-media people that included Alya Honasan and Ceres Doyo.

Hadley was tall and good looking, very casual.  He had an innocent look about him, not just because of his age but also because, well, he was born in and spent much of his life in the province.

Hadley chose to join the only television crew in the group:  ours.  We had no choice but to split from the rest of the journalists group we were part of:  they belonged to radio and print.

Television work often forces people to wait.  Set-up takes time and a documentary cameraman spends time to get the right video.  A segment producer like I used to be conducts interviews when the main host is not available for location work and interviews take time.

Radio and print journalists can easily take down notes or keep the information they gather in their heads for use for a later broadcast or magazine issue.

Hadley was with us during our entire stay in Surigao, acting as tourist guide sometimes or arranging our motorized banca rides to islands nearby.  He was with us for our coverage of the Ecleo cult.

I remember having brought along two The Inside Story t-shirts and Hadley had  seen me wearing them, two similar tops within one week. On our final day in Surigao City, Hadley spent the night with us in one room.  He unashamedly asked if I could leave behind my t-shirt, not knowing I had a couple of them with me and could easily spare one.  I gave him the piece of clothing he asked for.

In exchange, he gave me a thick portfolio of his works: a collection of photographs of places and people, that displayed a high degree of professionalism.

Years later, in the throes of grief and confusion after my Mom passed on, I was forced to take stock of my situation for the sake of my children and for the sake of my job.  I felt that taking a leave of absence would help and so I did, even if it meant loss of income.

I would drop by the office every so often.  Once, when I did, I was told someone was looking for me, a Jean Sering.  Her brother Hadley had been murdered and that their family thought I might be able to help because I was in media. Of course I was devastated.  Having known someone and later being told he had been killed seemed so surreal.

Jean and I arranged to meet at Robinson’s.  She handed me an envelope with photographs of the murdered Hadley.  He had been shot, and having been found hours later, his body was already bloated and his face had been disfigured.  But he was unmistakably wearing my Inside Story t-shirt and there was little I could do to avoid gasping.  It had been years since I gave that shirt to him, and yet, here he was, in his final hours, garbed in a cheap shirt that someone had gifted him with.

I took home the photographs and, except on two occasions, I never looked at them again.  Jean wanted to know how I could help them find the killer/s. The police had closed the case but the family was not happy with this. Hadley held so much promise in his short life.  He was scheduled to be married and he had put up his own photo studio.

I tried in my heart to see what I could do to but there was nothing I really could in my capacity as a television writer.  Besides, in those days, I was completely lost.

I deeply regret having failed to help.  I do not know if the killer/s were ever identified and brought to justice.  I treasure Hadley’s portfolio, as I reverently keep the photos of my murdered friend.  I never heard from Jean again and I am sorry to have lost not only Hadley, but her as well.

If Jean happens by this Website, I want her to know I continue to cherish Hadley, who, most certainly, is up there in the heavens with his namesake.

Every person dreams. Some dreams eventually become reality for certain people. Some dreams remain just dreams, or wishes unfulfilled, as it were.

I dreamed of going to ballet school. My chronic obesity and poverty threw this dream into the dustbin.

I dreamed of travel abroad for the longest time and got it when I was past twenty when my big boss sent me to Kuala Lumpur for a week-long seminar on Women in Media.  In subsequent years, I would fly off to various Philippine destinations, to Indonesia, a stop-over in Singapore, and a week-long “ocular” inspection prior to a shoot in Australia.

Australia was memorable:  three cities in exactly seven days.  A stay in a luxurious hotel in wonderful Melbourne, visits to a city “zoo” and a quick look at the famed Gold Coast in Brisbane, wine-tasting in Hunter Valley and a walk through the Rocks, a view of the awesome Sydney Harbour Bridge and its environs in New South Wales!  And, the weather was what I had always dreamed of:  the tail-end of the Australian winter saw us walking in the cold and loving it.  This is the closest I could get to the imagined clean and cool weather of the US that I have always dreamed of visiting all my life.

Locally, Batanes used to be a far-away dream.  But I got there too and the memories I’m afraid can no longer be duplicated in the immediate future.  Stuck in my mind are the friendly Ivatans who would greet anyone they meet along Batan island’s cobbled streets a gentle “good morning”…the traditional thick-walled Ivatan houses constructed to withstand typhoons…the unspoiled beaches…the Ireland clones that came in the form of gently sloping cliffs that smacked of “The Sound of Music”…the meals of beef, beef, beef, morning, noon and night…the honesty of the natives that saw a companion’s stolen camera being discreetly returned right before we were to return to Manila…the unpredictable behaviour of the waves as we negotiated the sea in a round-bottomed boat to Sabtang island…the picturesque fisherfolk with their catch hoisted on their sunburnt shoulders.  Now all I can do is dream about going back to Batanes and hoping it has remained the way it used to be.

I have been to Palawan at least four times.  Been to El Nido and Calauit Island, but not to the subterranean river because the route here is supposed to be “manned”  by monkeys that I am not specially fond of.  I’ve made friends in Palawan too.  I dream of going back and I might just, barring budgetary constraints.

I dreamed of reaching Davao, that beautiful city down south where the fabled durian abounds.  I found the chance just two weeks ago, but had to forego the trip because of certain priorities.

I dream of Pagudpud in the deep north, but it can only be reached via land after a ten-hour ride.  I shun land travel now for health reasons…or maybe I just cannot contain my excitement and therefore would rather that all my trips be by air.  My last Superferry ride was not too pleasant because I had a crippling attack of nausea.

All these travels were work-related, unfortunately, and did not give me much time and space to truly appreciate the places I have been to.

Hongkong was for pleasure, but when we got there a storm was brewing.  It struck the following day and found us having to scout around for the rare open department store.  (Unlike Filipinos used to typhoons, the Hongkong-ites shy away from strong winds and driving rain.  It is not unusual for them to close their stores when storm level 12 is declared.  It amused us to see Pinoys strolling along Hongkong sidewalks in bad weather but still having fun, the obligatory umbrellas over their heads.

I dream of going to the US, where many cousins and aunts reside.  But this will probably end up in the dustbin too:  the coveted US visa is simply too difficult to get and I am not wont to faking my way around.  Besides, a three-week trip there could be costly, despite the relatives.  I am also not wont to impose on their kindness and oblige them to put up with me and provide me board and lodging.

My remaining dream is escaping to an island or a cool mountain hideaway and finally writing ”the” book that I have always wanted to write.  Will this become a reality in the near future?  Who knows?