Speeding Through Time, Heels Digging In

It is June. Woog's 7th birthday. Where did my baby go? Where did the summer go? The rain is pelting down on the roof, and the sun is making its requisite weak effort. Mano a mano, neither the one giving in.

We wake up early today, the darkness permeating our tiny room. Even Woog, for whom sleep is infinitely preferable to food. The boys are excited to be getting on a plane for the first time. We are heading for Manila today, with cheap promo tickets bought online the month before. Our birthday presents for Woog, who is 7 toady, and Eli, who will turn 3 in July. And for Yaya Rose, who turned 19 last month.

It is June. In a week, my gapped-tooth older boy will be in first grade. The years are speeding by (oh be still, my racing heart), and I haven't the foggiest idea of how to slow them down.

I console myself by thinking of the month that has passed, and the many highlights that seem like mere flashes in my consciousness. Events that have made me, in equal parts, laugh and fume:

My Tatay, after gurgling half a case of beer with his brother, Ninoy Toto and my Atch, then attempting to turn off the overhead lights with the tv remote control.

Samantha, the Indian neighbor kid, slamming in and out of our apartment with impunity , and raiding the refrigerator while complaining of hunger. The things people need to teach their kids. I ought to have a few words with her mother.

Yaya Rose, coming home tearfully after a vacation. Her father refuses to let us send her to school. He prefers to pay for her tuition himself in their small pastoral community school in the hinterlands. When he can't even manage to put enough food on his family's table. When he is possessed of such small-minded maliciousness that makes us want to chew him up and spit him out.

The kids, building a castle out of Debbie-Does-Dallas and other Playboy Playmate video tapes that my uncle has sent over from the States. My uncle emails my father: you can watch these now you're a retiree. Tatay doesn't mention that VHS machines have become obsolete.

It is June. Woog is 7. That magic age, the beginning of the end of his wonder years. I look forward to the future with mixed emotions.....

Speed

Faster and faster, my fingers pound on the keys. It is as if I never left. The old sensations cascade over me and I am kayaking through the rapids, riding roughshod over words, getting drenched with words, inadvertently swallowing words. Will this thrill of a ride never end?

January

All little boys explore the various orifices of their body at one time or another. Eli is no exception. He has a particular liking for his nose, and he roots around in it regularly, to our great dismay. Occasionally, he unearths a motherlode, which he then pops into his mouth, smacking his lips delicately.

We are horrified to the depths of our germophobe beings. We discourage him, scold him, screech at him, even slap his busy little hands away. We ply him with other more palatable alternatives, but he merely gifts us with his triangular smile and continues with his mining expeditions. Perhaps we should be grateful he cannot as yet reach his ass.

January

We rush my Tatay to the hospital. It is my mother-in-law's 71^st birthday, and he falls into a blank stupor at the party. Inday takes his blood pressure, and it falls at 60/40. His pulse disappears into the unknown. He blanks out twice, and each time he comes to, he assures us that he is only tired, that it is only the wind that has whacked its cold hand upon his back, that we only need to take him home so he can rest.

In the emergency room, he keeps up the protest, this man who has been smoking for the last 50 years. Deedee, Dada & I bustle about him, and the children who are away call us frantically on our cellphones: Nonoy the doctor, Dudu the medical student – they all get a chance to speak with their father. Who is still protesting.

I stand in a corner and my mind is a-whirl with the memorial plan I have set aside, just in case. And where on earth to find the money to buy a small plot of land in the cemetery. Tearless, I am steeling myself, mentally preparing for the inevitable. I am first-born, after all.

A week later, showing no visible sign of duress, my father sails with us across the strait to his hometown of Dumangas. We light candles at his parents' graves, we stuff ourselves with prawn, oysters and mud crab, we drink with him and two of his brothers. He laughs and he laughs and he laughs. It dawns on me then that I have never seen him so happy.

January

It is the year of the Ox. My birth year. I look at myself in the mirror and wonder if the way I'm constructed violates all the sacred tenets of Feng Shui. Feng Shuit, more like. I feel the dark digits of despair and depression clawing hungrily at me, as they so often did when I was young, so long ago. I snap at the husband. I growl at the boys. I go through all the self-defeating motions, sabotaging any chances of well-being.

January

One evening, we bring the boys and their Uncle Eisen to Chopsticks Alley to watch the fireworks and hear the bands play. It is a hawk and a spit away from home, and the boys are in their 'jamies. We walk the street that's been converted into a showcase of Snake, and Rabbit, and Dragon, and Rat...and all the other life-size Chinese lunar animals, lit from within.

While Atch and Manong Eisen buy beer, I take the boys to their respective animals and explain that they represent the year they were born. Horse for Woog, Dog for Eli.

I glance behind me at their Uncle Eisen and see that he is even worse of than I am, this man born in the year of the Tiger. Hasn't been home to his wife in over than a decade, and recently laid off from work. He is quiet, guzzling his beer.

The boys are thrilled with the fireworks that light up the night sky. When we get home, it starts to rain, and the downpour washes the dust from my eyes.

January

Siesta time. Woog is on one side of me, sleepy, grumbling. Eli is on the other, wide awake. My younger son is yakking his head off about nothing in particular. He is one of those children who doesn't have to raise his voice for it to resonate across great distances. Woog is growling, I am growling, Eli still refuses slumber. Apparently, only his father can make him sleep on command. I have seen it happen, time and time again, and it irks me no end.

Woog puts a pillow over his head, and I try to ignore Eli's grasping fingers, which squeeze at my arms like masticating machines, while he murmurs into my face. Outside, it starts to rain. I am about descend into nothingness, when Eli's voice takes on a different cadence.

I force my protesting lids up a gradient or two, and I hear my son singing his first full-length song:

Yeyn, yeyn, go 'way

Comma-gen, yanada dey

Yittew Eyi wansa pyey

Yeyn, yeyn, go 'way

I must get the tape recorder, I say to myself. But Eli's toneless, tuneless chanting lulls me like the sound of the breeze on the sea. I fall asleep, and this great moment is lost forever.

Like Riding A Bike

Writing is like riding a bicycle. When you don't write for a time, the calluses at the tips of your fingers where the constant banging away on the keys have flattened them, start to soften, and they round out again, just as fingers should.

And when you start to write once more, you wobble quite a bit, just as you would on a bike. Striving for balance and control, like Woog when he was learning to ride.

Sometimes there are ruts on the road, and you ride over them, forgetting to swerve. You don't actually fall, but you do get a good jostling. Up and down, bump and bump. And you put a protective hand on your figurative crotch, hoping you haven't damaged any of your soft tissues beyond repair...

January

Changes come fast, blowing all over me like inclement weather. Unexpected expenditures eat up at the wide margin of my budget surplus. I am broke all over again. Still hung-over from the holidays, I cannot seem to stop eating, and I take to wearing my old maternity dresses as no pants will close over my girth.

At work, the old frustrations bury me in so much mud and silt, and I defiantly send in my resume somewhere else. After two phone interviews, I am told, very gently, very tactfully, in a very round-about way, that I have been relegated to the reject pile. It seems spending 10 years in one company, working with the same people, has eroded my market value. I am ready for the scrap heap. Or a change. Whichever comes first.

January

We have new neighbors. They are dark-skinned Indians of the five-six variety, and they settle next door where Inday and family used to live. The adults keep to themselves, just as they keep their car covered in its canvas jacket. They prefer to ride their three motorcycles, even to bring their daughter to school.

They have two kids. Samantha is nine and a first grader. She enjoys singing at the top of her voice, especially during siesta time, and has a habit of entering the apartment without knocking. She immediately starts mothering Woog and Eli, as well as the little boy who lives in Door 1. Very Wendy Darling.

Harkirat is three and cries at the drop of a hat. He and Eli eye each other warily. Soon, Eli is crying at the drop of a hat, too. My son, the mimic.

Not in any way racist or disparaging, Atch takes to calling them “the Boomies”, short for Bombay. We don't realize how much Eli is picking up on adult conversation until one morning he points at the father and yells: “Tatay Boomie!” It is a good thing we are in the car and the windows are rolled up. Atch drops the moniker pretty quickly.

January

It is raining outside again, and the cold is seeping into our bones. My head is buried in work that I barely glance up at my whining younger son. He is clinging to the doorknob, all set to cry at the drop of a hat again.

Belatedly, I realize that he is whining the longest sentence I have ever heard out of him, “I waaaaaant to go ouuuuuuuuut!”

Bemused, I unlatch the door and send him out into the rain.

January

We meet our new landlord and landlady. They are in their mid-twenties, very up-and-coming. They hail from the capital and do not speak the local dialect, but they are keen on keeping things the way they are. Very wise. I am hoping it includes the rent.

He is soft spoken in an upper class college-boy sort of way, with long fingers and a penchant for designer labels. She is short and feisty, with a voice that would rival a fish seller's at the market. They are pregnant with their honeymoon baby. Sweet.

Procrastination

It has been quite a while, hasn't it? You poor motley collection of words, you. I am languishing under the cool and sleepy palms of Procrastination, while the busy water throws itself at me on the sand, reminding me there is work to be done. It wants to pull me over to where it roils, dark and deep and vaguely threatening, urging me to stroke and stroke and stroke until I reach the other side.

And so… “I must go down to the sea again…for the call of the running tide, is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied…”

I lower my head and taste the sea. Time, it seems, has not banished the salty sensation of words on my tongue. Those same words flow down to my fingertips as I graze them over the flow of nouns and adjectives and punctuations I remember swimming in so long ago. And so I submerge myself once more into the wet warmth of words to take up where I left off before the lethargy of Procrastination took hold.....

December

We are sad. My sister-in-law Inday and her husband Sam, finish building their dream house. They are moving away from the apartment next door, bringing Tatay, Nanay, Ia, Elen, and the dogs.

With them, they take away a lot of laughter, the extra watchful eyes we count on when we are away, their cable TV subscription we illegally connect to, and the eggs/sugar/coffee/bell pepper that we borrow from them on occasion.

The dogs' fleas go with them, as well, but this minor detail doesn't detract from our melancholy. Even our kids are quiet. There is no Ia to play with, to fight with, or to tease until she cries. There is no more haven to run to when Mommy and Tatay are mad.

There are a lot of changes, it seems. The apartment compound we live in is being sold to a young couple who run a school for special children not far away. It is being sold by our landlady so her son would stop badgering her for more money to finance his drug habit. We are leery of our new landlords. They are so young!

December

Atch makes good on his promise. It takes me a couple of weeks to remind him, though, throwing my sister and her hugely brilliant engagement rock his way to tickle his mind.

Finally, he drives me to an exclusive jeweller who crafts me a ring on which rests a brilliantly clear stone. I make a pretense of looking at it through the loupe. Cut...color...clarity...cocka-poo... Is a girl supposed to know all these things? Apparently I should, and the wonderful world wide web provides me with the answers.

Still, I get my (post) engagement ring, and all is well with the world.

December

I am within budget by a generous margin. Most of my Christmas shopping is completed by October. Perhaps the coming year will be one where I am finally free of debt.

December

For Christmas, Woog gets the much-coveted Nintendo Game Boy he has been whining about for the last two years. Atch's wallet has a hefty dent in it. But no matter, Woog is happy. He leaves his other new toys and books lying around like so much discarded fluff.

His four-cornered, damp-towel parents immediately establish the rules: no playing on school days, only on weekends. He is so happy, he doesn't care. In fact, he prefers his new electronic contraption over our nightly story time.