my brother, father's son

How do you string words together and slip them into the hands of a person you barely know or a brother you only meet eight, nine or barely a dozen times in your entire lifetime?

He is your father’s son. And at an early age you have already acknowledged that he is. From what started as something of an overheard conversation in your grandmother’s wake—in the days that follow, with your fourth grade sensibility, you begin to shape and reshape the idea that you have a brother, older than you by two years. The kind of brother that you will never share house with because he is from your father’s bachelor’s past. Then that moment when truth falls so naturally, so gently, arrived. Though it escapes you already on whether or not it was your father or an uncle’s words that validates his existence, it doesn’t matter because all along, you wished for an older brother who will make you slingshots and toys from timber and who will carry you on his shoulder when you cross the pea green river beyond the rice paddies to bring lunch to your father who tills the land on Saturdays. But he came into your range rather too late when, at that age, you can already do things on your own.

Then you meet him for the first time. And there is no denying that he is your father’s son. He seems to be plucked straight from your father’s yellowed university graduation portrait. And you begin to get envious because he is handsomest than any of you in the family. But more distinctly, he has the typical silence, the timidity, the temperance—the trademark of your father’s clan.

Year after year, he sits in one corner on a Good Friday afternoon. Year after year, in the background while the priest prepares for the mass, over the mic, somebody always mouths with a voice that cracks for good theatrics, the Seven Last Words of Christ. You want  to approach him, your kuya and squeeze the space with the whole town which only go to church on a regular basis, three times a year—Christmas, New Year and Good Friday. But you, in the end, limit yourself to simple hand gestures and nod to acknowledge the presence of the unspoken, of a space between you, of a ken between brothers. Those were your last memories of him, ten or fifteen years ago. So, one day when your life, by far, takes one rewarding turn, you plan to invite him for a get-together. The date is indefinite. Anytime this year.

But just last week, at the onset of reunions and Christmas parties, he left. And the unsent dinner invitation will sit on top of your cabinet and gather dust. Until the paper turns yellow with age and the print fades with the distant past.

And you want to believe like most kids who console themselves when left with no definitive answer about their loved ones when they die; when you want to wax the glaring possibility of what-ifs; you want to believe—in the midst of grief, of a rainy Saturday afternoon in the middle of one of the twin lakes--that he is now one of the stars you see from the roof deck on a still, cloudless night.

for Kuya Obet who left just when September begins

 

of last trip and (the feel of) wind on your face

There is something about last trips that you particularly like. So you begin to recall the most recent one and dig the burrows of memory and found for yourself images that are hard to make out. It’s been a while since you’ve taken the ride and really, really found the joy of doing it.

 In an attempt to hit something hard and to start building images around it, you try to shape and reshape the shadows and nameless faces in a half-empty slow-moving ride home and probably put backstories into each of them. But in the end, it’s the wind on your face that grabs notice.  

  It’s a moonlit night and you are clinging by the rear entrance with your foot slightly above the running board; the position affords you the view of the mountain’s silhouette ahead as the jeep ascends toward the town at the foot of Mt. Cuernos de Negros. The wind is already balmy at this time of day. And the stillness of the landscape, like after the rain, heightened what you want. So you close your eyes and feel the wind on your face. And inside your head, one after the other, diverse images gradually fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

 The last trip home is at nine. Or sometimes, depending on sheer luck, it can be thirty minutes earlier. In some rare trips, if you’re lucky enough, the jeepney leaves even with just five or six or seven of you. It is through these trips that you can have the whole window to yourself and claim enough leg room and more than enough potential story sketches. The drive is not the kind that jolts you. Rather, it is, as always, slothful, lethargic and dangerously sappy.

 In front of you, near the rear entrance, is a woman, silver-haired and with tiny wrinkles at the corner of her eyes. Her hands are busy holding empty plastic containers. Many of them string together in a leash. She seems to have been abandoned by her family and left to fend for herself. What strikes you, more than the empty bottles and the grease on her skin and shirt, is a puppy, heads occasionally bobbing from the sack. The pup, in a state of malnourishment and therefore lacks the energy to bark, sits quietly on her lap.

 At the other end is a couple with one texting while the other in a med school uniform is sleeping with head comfortably resting on the other’s shoulder. The boy has what appears to be the girl’s thick book. A few spaces beside you, just behind the driver’s seat, are clerks in their uniform with grocery bags by their feet and students in their uniforms with books peering from their bags. The driver, who seems to stare blankly at the road ahead, has the look of assurance that with the pace, his trip gives everyone, himself included, the time to leave yours and his disquietude, even for just a while, and intently listen to the hum of the universe.

 

The MOST Hilarious TVC I've found this week!!!

By golly!! ROFL.!!!

UP Visayas Writers' Workshop

University of the Philippines Visayas Creative Writing Workshop :: UP VisWrite
UP Tacloban College

30 years. 30 days.

The tide turns. Waves race toward your toes. Tonight, you wonder if somebody at the edge of this sea, on a similar breakwater or probably on a parallel universe, sits and skips stones just like you do. But you can only make out a blink arranged neatly in the island before you.

It’s been 30 days and 30 years. And you want to find yourself elsewhere. Some place better than this. Perhaps on a cliff. No. A bamboo platform on a cliff. A room with doors that open to the sea. The gauze curtains gathered to one side. With the surf, hazy white lines that falls and rises. Falls. Rises.

c[]ngratulatiOns! Sam Gael Gulfan Macabit and Mr. & Mrs Primo Arbon

Start:	Jun 13, '08 10:00p
Location:	Tacloban City and Cagayan de Oro City

It's a red letter day TODAY for:

1. Mr. & Mrs. Ganymede Macabit--Christening of Baby Sam Gael in Tacloban City. I am supposed to be one of the godfathers. Dang! I miss it.

2. Mr. & Mrs. Primo Arbon III church wedding and reception near Cagayan de Oro City. Primo was a colleague at PAREF Springdale Private School for Boys who eventually relocated to Kansas for a teaching post.

My tight schedule prevents me from going to 2 different cities at one time. And I'm here in front of the PC fixing Monday's cultural exchange programme. hahays :-)

time out; method to this madness

In a fit of anger, you say you form a fist and count ten pussy cats to maintain peace and balance. And you added that when everything burns like hell’s kitchen, you lock your room, roll the shutters and holler at the top of your lungs.

But you never said anything about the days when you leave the doors and windows open to just stay in bed, lay on your back and count the number of grains or squares or cobwebs on the white ceiling. They often wonder if you turn green with madness or red with fury because you’ve never shown your emotion in public.

You only burst once when a salesclerk--in her own mistake thinks she can mask her negligence--raises her voice at you.  You just lose it. You comfort yourself that you are not angry; just stressing a point. In truth, the rage consumed your pride and ego that very moment. Since then, you stop wondering what you are capable of doing in public.

But lately you take a second look at being non-confrontational and the rooftop. The seldom used rooftop. In your head, in between ordinary days, in a fit of madness, you grab the yoga mat and roll it on a space that can hold a party of ten. On that night, as you lay on your back with the ocean of stars before you, the few secrets of the universe hums, rolls and unrolls with your mat.

Then you left that zone and retrieve Van Gogh from memory to distract the moment.

On a night like this, on a St-Remy’s asylum, Van Gogh translated these stars, eleven of them, into a circular form, magnified than what you see. There is no swirling clouds tonight, only the stars, dot-to-dot.

It always brings back memories of childhood when the family switches off the house lights and gathers at the yard, telling stories which you have long forgotten now. But the night lingers, with you sitting on the grass, with your five-year-old head on your mother’s lap, listening intently to a story about elves and a fiefdom that now belongs to a distant memory.

Or on a night the house was renovated--when the second floor windows are left with no covers. And the moon’s honeyed light peers from those windows to the ground floor where you are seated.

Then you come full circle even for just a moment--like that game in childhood on moonlit nights when you only need water to paint the moon; the earth as your canvas.

 

 

 

--RV Escatron | 8 June 2008