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1

Your Thoughts Exactly / One final autumn

« on: September 01, 2010, 01:39:27 AM »

One Final Autumn: A Retrospective
By Fred Natividad

The sound of trees in the neighborhood rustling to the rhythm of cool breezes of dying summer became more pronounced. Red, brown, and yellow leaves fluttered in slow abandon as they fell to the ground.

It was time for college again.

The boys - with their mother and her credit card - had done their final shopping. They bought enough new jeans and shirts and music tapes and whatever else. They did not buy any school supplies because they said they would buy what they would need at campus stores.

And so it was time - the annual trip 130 miles south of Winfield into deep corn and soybean country in the middle of which is the sprawling campus the University of Illinois straddling the twin towns of Urbana and Champaign.

The sound of trees in the neighborhood rustling to the rhythm of cool breezes of dying summer became more pronounced. Red, brown, and yellow leaves fluttered in slow abandon as they fell to the ground. It was time for college again...And so it was time - the annual trip 130 miles south of Winfield into deep corn and soybean country in the middle of which is the sprawling campus the University of Illinois straddling the twin towns of Urbana and Champaign.

                                                    IMAGE CREDIT: VISIT THE USA.COM                FOR REPRESENTATION USE ONLY

Champaign, Illinois - Smart college town

I had to give it to the boys. They were able to cram the motor home that served as their hauling truck with incredible mountains of their stuff. Pots. Pans. A dorm fridge. A guitar. A boom box. Pair after pair of jeans. Sneakers. Jackets and sweaters with the orange logos of the University of Illinois. A typewriter. A computer...

And, yes, books. But not the kind of books of their academic disciplines.

I don’t remember which of the boys volunteered to drive first. He nosed the groaning motor home out of the subdivision towards the country road that will lead to the ramp of the highway that will touch the outskirts of Champaign 130 miles down. They took turns driving and they talked ceaselessly while munching potato chips and slurping pop. They didn’t seem sentimental about the fact that this was their last trip to Champaign. This was their senior year.

The first thing Kikay did when we arrived at the dorm was to come up to their prearranged room. A Catholic outfit runs the dorm. Their room was already clean but Kikay, the perennial mother and housewife, insisted on dusting things before we brought up the stuff from the motor home. She insisted on arranging things in the room even if I told her that the boys will rearrange things their way anyway after we leave.

Then off we went to some Chinese restaurant for lunch, after which we drove the boys back to their dorm. We tarried as long as we could. Then it was really time for us to go home. The boys didn’t seem to have any intention of hugging their mother goodbye. But Kikay did not feel any affront. She went to hug them with all kinds of trite advice that they have heard a thousand times.  I went and waited in the motorhome dreading the prospect of a three-hour drive back to Winfield without the boys taking turns at the wheel.

Dark came early, so it seemed, when we reached the house in Winfield. It was not a big house - it had only four bedrooms and its total square footage was only about 2,400. Yet it seemed so large when, as we entered, we switched the lights on. It was so empty. There were no college boys sprawled lazily in the living room watching some football game or some comedic sitcom.

Kikay quietly heated up some leftovers for our dinner. We ate in deafening silence. Our two boys were not around. For all we know at that very moment they were out at some college joint having some fun - or what to them was fun.

After dinner I opened my second can of beer and tried to watch TV in the living room. Kikay went upstairs. My mind, strangely, was not on the TV show that was on. I don’t remember if it was a game show, or a comedy sitcom or a newscast.

Then I realized that Kikay was unusually quiet. Normally I could hear her nagging me about how loud the TV is. Or I could hear her tinkering with her pots and pans in the kitchen or stacking plates after removing them from the dishwasher. Perhaps she was doing her rosary beads but she usually did that before going to bed.

I went upstairs to find her leaning by the doorway of one bedroom staring intently at an empty bed. She was sobbing quietly. When I came up behind her she turned to face me and she led me wordlessly to the other room. Both rooms, of course, were empty. The beds were still unmade from last night.

Two semesters went fast. The boys graduated and they came home. But they did not come home in the context of really coming home. They merely came to use their beds as a way station on their way to strike on their own.  They were always out. And then they left for good.

So it came to pass that we had to sell the house simply because it was too empty.   

Every now and then we think of that autumn evening when Kikay and I stared at their empty, unmade beds in Winfield. We can’t forget the last time the boys slept in their beds with any feeling of home.

It was our last autumn as a family.

@ Fred Natividad
Livonia, Michigan
Revised August 29, 2010

2

Your Thoughts Exactly / My two love stories

« on: July 25, 2010, 09:02:58 AM »

MY TWO LOVE STORIES
© Fred Natividad

When I learned that one woman I once fell in love with was diagnosed with breast cancer, the tragic news brought me sadness that at the same time triggered pleasant memories.

She was not my first love.

But I fell for her. For some years we dated - old style. Mind you, this was in the fifties. Sometimes – actually, most times - we were chaperoned by her sister whom we chaperoned in turn – double dating style. I am surprised to recall now that even if I was in love with her I – we both - maintained the illusion that our relationship was nothing but platonic.

I never had the nerve to steal a kiss even at our intimate moments alone. For one thing, such moments happened rarely. Kissing was normally forbidden conduct in courtships in those times. The most physical romance we ever had was harmless holding hands or a dreamy cheek-to-cheek dancing to slow music at dinner dances.

It was at one of those affairs - some sorority ball - that she said we should enjoy the night because this may be our last dinner dance date. She did not elaborate and I did not even ask her why. I was in love to pay attention. I was dizzily mesmerized by the slow music so popular in the 1950's. This was the age when entertainers like Frank Sinatra and Patti Page were then the rage with their sweet and slow love songs.

Our “romance” was the poor-boy-rich-girl variety. Not a very original scenario, I admit, but hey, it was my love story... Well, maybe, it was not totally that kind of a scenario because even if I emerged from very poor peasant roots I was already holding a job along the lines of my college major. I was not just like any fellow who remained a janitor for some years even after he passed the Philippine bar. So I was no longer exactly as poor as my peasant grandfather.

And she was not an heiress either. She was a high school home economics teacher and her family was not really that rich. That her family was certainly more affluent than mine was, however, true and in a small town, a family with, say, half a dozen hectares of rice land is “rich.” Its members are counted among people in what passes for "high society." I did not belong in that stratum. She did.

Anyway, eventually, I proposed. Twice.

The first was during our town fiesta. There was the usual carnival at the town plaza, with sideshows complete with a Ferris wheel. We rode the Ferris wheel and at the dramatic moment when our seat was at the highest point I asked her if she would consider marrying me sometime in the very near future. I did not even ask if she loved me. I arrogantly presumed she did.

"Whoa, we are not even engaged!" she said feebly. It was her feeble response that gave me hope.

"Then let's get engaged," I said, clutching one of her palms in mine.

"Give me time," she said, without attempting to withdraw her hand.

I enjoyed the illusion that we were an “item.” We were oblivious of small town gossip that we were such. Maybe she did enjoy the illusion, too. That was not impossible. After all we continued our platonic dates publicly even if, for now at least, she rebuffed my proposal for an engagement.

We were both working in Manila. One holiday weekend we agreed to take an early evening four-hour bus trip to our provincial hometown. For the second time I proposed. She passively allowed me again to hold one of her hands. I whispered, “Let’s get married.” I was more audacious. I asked her to marry me unlike at the Ferris wheel when I merely asked for an engagement first.

It was another disappointment for me, a deja vu. She clasped my hands with her free hand and with slow, deliberate, friendly but patronizing emphasis she said this was our last date. She cannot accept my proposal. She firmly said that we should not see each other again.

"I am not trying to be hard to get. I know you will find a better woman," she said. She knew, and I knew, that she merely mouthed a hackneyed line.

All the way to the end of our night trip, still holding hands, we sat in silence as our bus monotonously droned forward, its headlights slicing the darkness soundlessly,

For weeks I pouted, deliberately staying away from her. I thought we had a temporary falling out and that things will be all right after a while.

But, not long afterward, I heard she was engaged to someone else! Just like a corny movie plot! I didn't know I had a rival, not a serious one anyway. She never mentioned any serious suitor nor had I heard of one from our mutual friends. Then I remembered that at our last dinner dance date she did whisper that we should enjoy our last moments while we danced cheek to cheek to some slow music.

She did not have a long engagement. In a few weeks she got married in a presumably posh setting. I say presumably because I was not there. That I was not invited did not surprise me. She explained to a mutual friend that the reason for the absence of her “best friend” at her wedding was that it was too late to send out a new invitation to me after she discovered that the original one was accidentally crumpled and discarded along with some other paper trash.

It was quite a shallow excuse that hit me hard.

But I did not get drunk like some jilted character in a movie. I put out a brave front even if memories of our dates haunted me. I flirted with so many other girls that it did not bother me that most of them rebuffed me. In other words, my attempts at being a gigolo did not help me in my misery. However, as another trite saying goes, it was not the end of the world after all.

Two things happened.

First – sour grapes if you will - I realized that I was not in love with a girl with a next door homeliness. I was unconsciously in love with what she represented: a trophy from "high society.” I self-inflated my ego with the thought that I was able to get to first base where no other suitors had even come close. That was an illusion. It was shattered when I was out after first base.

So I began to see other girls again with more realistic eyes. This time I appreciated them as human beings, neither as trophies nor as attractively packaged mannequins.

Along with this fresh perspective something else happened.

I had a cousin, a nurse, who dragged her brother and me to an excursion and a picnic to historic Corregidor Island. She promised that I would be meeting lots of her fellow nurses she worked with, quite a few of whom were single, attractive and unattached. No red-blooded, single man nearing thirty like me can ignore that kind of a carrot.

She admitted, however, that she had another reason for inviting me. She needed me to help her brother carry boxes of food for the picnic!

My cousin made good on her promise. It was the best thing that happened in my life. She introduced me to a lovely creature, a pediatric nurse who became my wife. As a nurse she was able to tag me along to immigrate to America where there was an acute shortage of nurses.

But that’s love another story.

Suffice it to say that it is a love story that has endured for 45 years now - and still counting... So in my mind I keep the violins playing not just for this ongoing love affair but also for a past unsuccessful love affair with a woman that I learned had breast cancer.

©Fred Natividad
Livonia, Michigan
July 15, 2010

3

Lounge / Pandayan Lost

« on: April 19, 2010, 09:50:18 AM »

Pandayan Lost

The story of Rodrigo Rovete, Pangasinan's panday (blacksmith, as in Panday Pira), originally from Pozzorubio, Pangasinan,  has been going around for sometime in the Internet. When I first came across his story I told many friends from Pozzorubio. Were they surprised! They have not heard of their celebrated panday townmate because they had been expatriates in Chicago for a long time. They were unaware the he exported knives and swords to the United States, that even Hollywood used his products in movies.

For one thing Rodrigo Rovete has moved to Nueva Ecija, his wife's home province. Also, the people I talked to apparently did not, at the time anyway, have Internet access. Some had new home computers but they bought them merely for show in their living rooms along with other affluent trappings - VCR's, oversized TV's, digital pianos... etc. They said they bought the home PC's for their children although the children were still too young then to tinker with the expensive toys.

Anyway, the story of Rovete brought back some nostalgia - an old man like me love to think of old times, especially in the home province when the ambiance was still bucolic, where the ubiquitous mode of transportation was not the tricycle but the regularly scheduled big red buses of Pantranco, the erstwhile premier bus company in Pangasinan, now defunct.

I remember a little village, where my mother was born, in a town next to my hometown. The people of this once sparsely populated neighborhood subsisted primarily on agriculture. But in between farming the other industry in the village was blacksmithing. Which is why the place was nicknamed "Pandayan," from the word "panday." In Pangasinan, "pandayan" means a place where blacksmiths work.

From the provincial highway of my mother’s hometown, near the poblacion (town proper), a dirt road branches into the hinterland to follow a river upstream towards the rice fields, into the coconut and mango trees. Clumps of bamboo huddled along the river banks. The road ends at the curving bank of the river. That road today has extended to the next town, my hometown, still following the contours of the river.

Many people in my mother’s old village are her relatives - second, third, fourth, ad infinitum distant cousins, uncles, aunts, granduncles, grandaunts... My mother used to take me there. Walking on the dirt road towards her ancestral neighborhood we met people and every third or fourth elder we met was a distant aunt, uncle, grandaunt, granduncle... By tradition I had to kiss their hand. They were so many I don't even remember their names and the hand kissing routine became my reluctant duty every time we came to visit Pandayan.

As we entered the then dirt road on foot (tricycles did not exist then) the distant cacophony of heavy sledge hammers pounding on red hot pieces of iron over anvils began to assail our eardrums. Pandays were at work fashioning knives of various kinds, shapes and sizes. The pounding noise of so many shops beside or under the houses grew more deafening as we neared the end of the road where we usually ended up at the home of a panday family, the closest among the huge number of relatives of my mother.

The childhood bamboo house where my mother was born has been long gone. But the lot where it once stood has been planted with coconut trees and two or three mango trees heavy with fruit every season. The small income from that property and from a tiny rice land is what kept her coming occasionally to Pandayan.

We would briefly stop at one house after another whenever someone was at the yard or at the panday shop. My mother would say “masantos ya agew” which literally translates to “blessed day” but actually meant to say “hello.” My duty was to kiss the hand of those she greeted who are distant relatives.

My last visit was about half a century ago. I came to Pandayan to notify our hundred plus relatives that my mother has passed away. Of course the elders, those still alive, did not recognize me immediately as the hand-kissing child of yesteryears. The latest generation did not know at all this gray haired relative who came from America.

But the big change in Pandayan, aside from the very obvious population explosion, was the missing neighborhood sounds of pandays at work. The new generation found other ways to make a living in big cities like Manila and foreign countries as OFW's (Overseas Filipino Workers). I found a distant Pandayan cousin in Canada who confessed that he was never able to learn the panday trade of his father.

Coconut and mango trees still filled backyard lots but the panday workshops are gone in Pandayan. I did not see any old anvil or a hand pumped blower that forced air into an open furnace where pieces of iron were heated red-hot to be pounded into gleaming knives including the familiar "barang," a long, heavy, all-purpose utility blade used to cut firewood or bamboo or to butcher animals for sale or for home consumption.

There were old stories that in some rare deadly cases in the past, feuding farmers used their barangs offensively against each other... Scary!

People are still relatively poor by OFW standards but many houses are no longer made of bamboo nor roofed with nipa palm leaves. TV’s and cell phones are no longer novel. The dirt road that my mother and I used to walk on has been paved with asphalt. The asphalt made the road a convenient playground over which polluting tricycles deftly avoid playing children who are three to four times more than our numbers when we were children.

 Pandayan, as I remember it, is lost.

Fred Natividad
Livonia, Michigan
© 2010

4

Use and Misuse / Re: Will Taglish stay forever in the Philippines?

« on: March 04, 2010, 02:24:21 AM »

Maudionisio:

I agree that foreign words are needed into Tagalog when there are no Tagalog equivalents. That is fine for Tagalog - this may even lead to the desired evolution of a national language based on Tagalog. Examples of foreign words we need are bacteria, golf, algebra, etc...

But mastudyhan, naginkres, naginkwire, are examples of inexcusable substitutions of mapagaralan, dumami, nagtanong...

And what about the future of English in the Philippines? I feel - and this, of course, is subject to open discussion - that English should be VOLUNTARY so that anyone who desires it will have a high motivation to study proper English.

The status quo is a shameful scenario of characters with high visibility talking Taglish and very poor English. This is because they were FORCED to study English "pram gred wan to koleds." This may be the reason why Filipinos generally speak and write poorly in English since their minds constantly grope for words that come to mind from both Tagalog and English.

"Naginkres ang inkwayries tungkol sa ertkwik sa Chile..." That expression is funny. If the speaker was not poorly exposed to forced English he would have easily said "dumami and tanong tungkol sa lindol sa Chile..."

The point? To improve the use of a native language we must eliminate the FORCED use of English.

Also, voluntary study of English may lead to a better expression of that language because of higher voluntary motivation.