Suddenly This Summer (Part I)

Woog stares sullenly at the battery-operated fan that is blowing wistful flurries of air into his sweaty face. "So I'm going to die," he announces in a grating whine to his hot sweaty irritated family over the breakfast table.

It is Black Saturday in the Lenten weekend and the electric company has magnanimously decided to let the populace repent of its sins through an unscheduled power outage in the middle of summer. It is eight o'clock in the morning and the house is a furnace. Outside, the cement jungle is worse.

"Call Bata and see if they have electricity, "Atch says through gritted teeth. Bata, where my parents live, is our "brown-out" refuge. Whenever there is a power outage, we hightail it to where they have air-conditioning at full blast.

Alas, the Bata contingent is sweltering as well. "Come over anyway," my sister says, "and pack for an overnight, just in case."

Aha, so they're planning to go away for the weekend. Spirits revived, Atch preps the car and Woog rummages for his plastic beach shovel. I am tasked with the packing of everything else.

We arrive at Bata in an hour. There are excited hyperactive kids everywhere, and Woog and Eli join in the fray. One of my sisters, the medical student, is listlessly walking around questing for a bathing suit. Her twin, the student nurse, is outside entertaining some boy. Another sister, newly arrived from the capital where she is a corporate lawyer, is making frantic phone calls to beach resorts, north and south. Apparently, everywhere else is booked with holiday-makers for the summer Lenten season.

My father is leisurely sipping his third cup of coffee, and my mother is at the dinner table doing paperwork, left foot propped up where she sprained her ankle gardening the day before. No one seems to be in a hurry. In this household where I grew up, schedules vary from moment to moment. Here, "the last minute" finds it's truest sense of the word.

Atch sighs and settles himself in the sofa with a glass of iced Coke and the morning paper, while the ebb and flow of noisy kids seethes around him. Finally, Deedee the lawyer finds one last likely place to the south. In two hours, we are packed in two cars and on the road.

* * * * *

We arrive at Paradiso Beach Resort, Hinigaran after more than an hour on the blacktop. Adults in the lead car shake their heads to clear the ringing in their ears. Unfortunately, the lead car has been tasked with carrying all of the yammering squealing excited children, ranging from ages 8 years to 9 months, said children having streaked off to the seashore as soon as the car doors have opened. We crane our necks in panic but they are oblivious to such mundane matters as adult concern:

Cooling hot footsies
(Clockwise from left: Yaya Rose & Eli, Eishka & Yaya Arcelle, Woog, Kylot)

9-month old Eli: "So this is sand?"

Burrowing for crabs

They are gone for more than an hour until the kill-joy adults forcibly reel them in for a late lunch at 2 pm. So enamored is he with sand and sea, Woog contrives to give the shore a passionate parting embrace before allowing himself to be dragged in to eat:

Sand lover