"Samson" Gets A Haircut

What an itchy summer. The heat has been getting to us in a huge way. Waves and waves of it hit us first thing in the morning as we get up out of bed, shading our eyes from the treacherous sun that has gotten in through the blinds. And at night, we toss and turn despite the air-conditioning, our nightclothes sticking to our sweaty skin.

Woog has raised bumps and welts on the folds of his elbows and knees. Atch has had a major upsurge of flat warts on his neck, red and angry like adolescent acne. And Eli, poor Eli with his shock of Afro curls. Not even the mini-scrunchies give him relief from his sauna-inducing hair.

Krusty the Clown

At night, he dug his already short fingernails above his ears where his hair ticklishly fell, giving rise to red scratches on his delicate baby skin. So we decided to give "Samson" a haircut.

In the ordinary course of events, this is no big deal. It's hot. Give the kid a haircut. But this is third-world superstitious Philippines, and the kid is three months shy of his first birthday.

Way back when we gave an 8-month old Woog his first haircut, also for the same reasons (and he had even longer hair then), we never heard the end of it: "But he isn't even a year old!" "Think of what the evil spirits might do!" "Your son is going to be sick, mark my words."

For the same reason that in certain Moslem countries, a male child is left bareheaded except for a thick knot of hair on the top of his head (easy access for Allah to pull him up to heaven when the time was right), children in the Philippines are not given haircuts until they reach a year old. Well, at least in the most superstitious of communities they are not. A haircut before the child reaches that crucial first year is supposed to render said child vulnerable to a host of malicious spirits who will endow the child with all sorts of sickness and general ill-health. So no haircut.

Which is all well and good if you happen to be a bald sparse-haired baby. Unfortunately, Eli is not. He has inherited the thick curly hair from both sets of ancestors, which will continue to grow and thicken until he reaches his thirties, when said curly luxuriant mane shall start to copiously shed both front and center (also genetically predetermined, poor boy).

Before this post goes all off-tangent into the realm of premature balding (and totally bald) family members, suffice it to say that Eli did get his first haircut: kicking, screaming and frantically twisting, nearly giving his mother a heart-attack after several near misses of neck and ears.

The result was a fringey, choppy, uneven Friar Tuck do which we all laughed at, including "Friar Tuck" himself, who giggled in relief at finally being set free:

Samson does a "Friar Tuck"

So we showed him off and waited for the usual barrage of doomsday prophecies. But none came. Even my mother who led the naysayers during Woog's first haircut years ago was surprisingly silent. Well, ok, she did say "Wow Eli, you're so gwapo!" And for a woman who prominently displays Feng Shui bric-a-bracs along with statuettes of her favorite Catholic saints in her house, that's saying a lot.

The whole upside of the situation is, Eli is faring wonderfully better in this heat. He no longer scratches, he no longer whines. And he's so gwapo!

Suddenly This Summer (Part 3)

"Mommy, I want to go 'twimming in the 'twimming pool!" Lisped two-year-old Eishka, dragging her groggy mother by the hand. Said mother was blinking against the glare of a very early summer sunrise after having spent the wee hours yowling her lungs out at Paradiso's videoke bar.

Yaya Rose and Yaya Arcelle, themselves mote-encrusted and sleep-deprived, were rehashing their midnight performances in the same videoke shout-out, and laughing with hysterical horror about the hapless centipede that crawled over them the night before as they lay huddled in blankets against the arctic air-conditioning.

Atch was cranky and muttering darkly about people singing way off-key .."and at the top of their lungs, too..." cutting into his precious sleep. "...likely kept the whole resort awake," he grumbled. But the rest of the midnight revelers largely ignored his sour-graping. He was prevented from singing the night before due to a heat-induce sore throat, bully for him. He perked up after I handed him his morning coffee, but not by much.

We introduced Eli to the joys of the twin swimming pools. After a previous day spent digging his toes in the warm sand however, the cold chlorinated water made him scream bloody murder, runners of tears and snot streaming down his miserable face:

I want to go back to the beach!

Lucky for him, he was rescued by his Tatay, and together they contemplated the plumage and shrill warbles of the lovebirds in cages around the pool area.

Two beached whales

Breakfast was a subdued affair, most of us either nursing a hang-over, or sulking over having been ordered to return contraband shrimp and entire hermit crab communities back to the sea where they belonged.

The rest of our stay was spent in the swimming pools, and even my mother with her sprained ankle jumped in, creating mini-tsunamis in her wake, much to the delight of the kids.

Finally, it was time to leave, and amid the flurry of packing, the yelling at dawdling children, and the last minute snagging of swimsuits left to dry, an air of exhausted melancholy settled into the adults. Even the little ones seemed a touch subdued. Vacation time has come and gone. Back we plod to the real world.

We waved our tired goodbyes to the Hawaiian-shirt clad staff and sent ourselves on our way. Except for one hair-raising incident when an embarrassed Kylot muttered, "Auntie, I'm going to throw up," and Atch pulled over to let the poor car-sick boy heave his half-digested lunch over the side of the road, the drive home was groggily floatingly uneventful.

We got home to our beloved furnace of an apartment. Dust had gathered in thick flurries over surfaces and in corners in a conspiracy of powdery coup d' etas during our one day absence. We dragged our limp lethargic selves inside and deposited our lumpy waterlogged belongings on the dining table for sorting.

And as I eyed the growing mound of laundry-ables piling up, I sighed, thank you Papa God for the wonderful vacation. A Happy Easter to You, too.

Suddenly This Summer (Part 2)

Breakfast was a memory five hours gone, and the stirrings of hunger in our gut now raged like the ocean throwing pieces of itself at the breakwater. By 2pm, we began to drool at each sizzling drizzle of pork fat at the grill, and the tantalizing aroma of cooking meat was answered by a chorus of rumbling responses from tummies beneath the tablecloth.

"I'm hurrying, I'm hurrying!" cried Dudu, the medical student, narrowly missing her trembling fingers as she sliced into tender hunks of char-grilled chops. At the table, Atch and Tatay were making short work of the oysters, dipping them into chili vinegar and downing them with beer.

My Mom hobbled out from the corridor, supporting her sprained ankle with a makeshift bamboo cane. By virtue of her being semi-ambulatory, the duty of manually inflating the kids' life preservers fell to her able lungs. Because vacation time in this extended family has always been spur-of-the-moment, we had, as expected, forgotten to bring the air pump. And If this meant life preservers filled with my mother's exhaled Winston's smoke, then so be it.

The kids were herded, grumbling, into designated places at our al fresco lunch, but the moment food was dumped into their plates, they fell to, burying their faces in cold mangoes and watermelon.

"It's Holy Week, aren't we supposed to fast and abstain from meat?" Someone absently commented, and was roundly ignored.

For a while there was silence as each one forgot the others' existence. Except for some mad scrambling with forks as the grilled milkfish was served, all went juicily, scrumptiously well.

* * * * *

With no surprise, the kids forgot siesta-time entirely. They waddled back into the surf, in the wake of a surfeit of warnings from nervous adults, and chased by their mothers belatedly wagging bottles of sunscreen. The invasion of paradise had just began:

Unbreachable boundaries

Castle Diablo & architect

Eli (straining to evacuate his lunch) with his Mom, on the sand

As sunset approached and the tide receded, the rest of the sun-phobic adults pussy-footed their way across the sand, led by my father with his bottles of beer, plate of left-over milkfish and long-convoluted tales of his (misspent) youth.

Tatay & Atch amid beer, cigarette smoke and stories of the past

Between a rock and a hard place:

With two kids and little privacy, any likely place will do

My Mom was apparently snoring her lunch off in one the air-conditioned rooms, having been the only one to remember her siesta hour(s), but the kids continued their hunt for shrimp and hermit crabs while the rest of us communed with the sunset.

Guard doing tour of duty at man-made shrimp and crab trench

The arid "Martian" landscape

Deedee & Dudu salute the dying sun

In the rush of our hectic lives, the simpler beautiful things often come in last, but that Black Saturday, surrounded by the tang of salty sea air and the red-gold of a setting sun, a sense of calm filled our dark souls and stilled our pounding overworked brains.

Come join me

The traditional Catholic upbringing of our youth demanded penance in time of Lent, and we realized that our penance was in not having appreciated the glory of His Creation, thrown our way each day, often sadly ignored. And in this far-flung bossom of the world, where The Shepherd called out to His sheep, we repented.

Hinigaran sunset

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