Two Weddings and A Monkey (Part 1)

The city was in a fever. It was the month of the MassKara and traffic swelled to horrendous proportions everywhere. Not helping matters any, the sun beat down on every available surface, melting asphalt and frying stagnant dura matter. Erupting tempers were rife, as were drunken knife fights in the plaza at sundown. It was a wonder to certain irate locals why tourists kept flocking to this city every October, despite the traffic and itinerant vendors, despite the heat and violence at happy hour, year after year after year.

At the home front, the flurry of activity was building up, as well. It was the 18^th, the very height of the MassKara festival. It was also Nat's wedding day.

She arrived from Manila a couple of weeks before that, taking a leave from her sub-specialty stint as an OB-Gyne-Ultrasound internist to join with her one true love. Atch and family breathed collective sighs of relief, the youngest was finally settling down.

Like a mini-reunion of sorts, my husband's teeming cauldron of kinfolk came pouring in from all four corners of Christendom. We managed to stuff some of them into the already tourist-laden hotel where the wedding was to take place that afternoon, and the rest we crammed into our two cramped apartments like so many flopping sardines.

Apart from the mad scramble to get suitcase-rumpled suits, barongs and dresses pressed, there was an equally hushed moment when we all held our breaths as Atch carefully inserted Eli into his elegant satin coin-bearer outfit. He had previously threwn passionate tantrums at all his fittings, pawing at the shiny material. He rolled on the floor at the wedding rehearsal, as well.

Atch turned the hotel room's air conditioning full blast on our diaper-clad son, and when he was sufficiently covered in goosebumps, eased him into his costume. Eli was surprisingly compliant. Until he left the frigid zone.

Meanwhle, Woog's fingers and feet were literally everywhere he could get them into. He prowled the hotel lobby, shaking the silver-cast condiment containers, cruising the floor on the bellboy's baggage trolley, picking pebbles from the landscaped garden and dropping them surreptitiously into the blossom-bedecked pool.

It was when he almost tipped over one of the tall crystal centerpieces brimming with calla lilies that I gave in to my itchy finger compulsion to give his femoral artery a hearty tweak. He subsided momentarily, eyeing me with wounded sheep eyes, but only until he took fraternity with a spoon and fork not five minutes later and discovered the lovely tinkling sounds that wine glasses make.

Atch took over at this point, herding the boys away from livid temperaments and melting make-up. By the time the wedding march was set to start, three of them looked like drunken survivors from a stag party.

The wedding planner and her minions separated the whole messy gaggle of entourage and relatives, and cordoned everyone off in the sweltering garden where we awaited curtain call.

In the end, Nat's wedding was a breathtaking vision of bubbles and butterflies and smoke. Strains of violin music pierced through the mist of our tears as my ethereal sister-in-law floated down the aisle to meet her destiny...

Nat and her Eric


The bible bearer marched.


The coin bearer didn't.


Atchbund and Aifee


Smiling for the requisite shot, tummies rumbling for dinner.

Finally

Siesta Hour

October.

He wouldn't sleep. Not even to close his eyes and be still. He had began to yawn, but still he preferred to sit up and talk in single-word mono-syllables, ride giddy-up on piled-up pillows, and burrow under the blankets like a green-and-orange flowered ghost.

I pleaded and cajoled, scolded and screeched. I fabricated stories of red-eyed furry creatures with long sharp teeth that would burst from the windows and swallow noisy sleepless children whole. But siesta hour was fast approaching its zenith, and not a single grain from the sandman's potent arsenal had found its way into this little boy's eyes.

I was sleepy and irritable. Manong Woog, also sleepy and irritable, had scrunched into a tight ball at one corner of the bed by the wall, protecting his tenders from energetic kicks and overly enthusiastic toddler tackles. In spite of the air-conditioning, in spite of the sweetly drugging sleepy-weepy music on the cd player, in spite of my rhythmic patting of his plump thigh, Eli remained wired on the adrenalin of his very youth.

Frustrated beyond all reason, I seized about for something substantial to throw at his shrieking, bouncing self and I chanced upon Goofy, one of the stuffed animals that had taken permanent residence on his bed. Goofy stared back at me with such insufferable dumbness, sure of his place in the face of my son's sleeplessness that a red un-motherly rage shut down all sense of reason.

In front of my happy frolicking son, I started to violently slap Goofy's face. Left and right. Left and right. All the while shouting: “You horrid little dog! I'm mad at you! Mad! Go to sleep, now!”

Not content, I grabbed hold of Alligator, an ancient 3-foot relic dating back from my own childhood. I stretched poor Alligator's mouth wide by two of his remaining chicklet teeth and yelled at his soft green non-ear: “Set a good example, you %^&*@ ! Close your eyes and go to sleep! You're keeping Manong Woog awake!”

Pooh with his yellow belly fat was not spared the force of my wrath, neither was Mr. Monkey or Barney or Blue Bear. I was on a roll, vaguely aware that Eli had gone very still in the middle of the chaos of pillows and piles of blankets.

I seized Goofy on my return trip, ready for another lambasting rerun, but Eli snatched him back from my grasp with a whimper. His eyes were swimming in unshed tears and his lower lip a 5-kilo piece of blubber whose ends were quivering downwards to his collarbone. Sniffling, he crushed Goofy to his chest and gathered the rest of his stuffed menagerie closer about him. He was asleep in two point four seconds.

Behind me, Woog gave a hearty sigh of relief as he settled in for some deep slumber of his own.

Gazing at my sleeping sons, I debated whether I did the right thing. I may have solved the problem at hand, but the long-term consequences might very well translate to an adult Eli spending long hours on his therapist's couch trying to rid himself of the replaying images of his mother's stuffed animal abuse.

But then again, didn't I just teach him the value of empathy?

Feeling better about myself – after a fashion – my own sweet siesta hour began.

Zzzz-zzzz.

Over Beers

There we were, hunched over our sisig and chicharon bulaklak, and nursing our beers like a couple of co-conspirators plotting the downfall of an absent drinking buddy. Or maybe two people in the midst of an illicit affair having a clandestine date. We certainly didn't look like parents discussing the household budget or child discipline issues. Not your a typical mom-and-pop operation, it looked like.

I was picking up the tab this time, having received some modest remuneration from one of my freelance writing gigs. When he called me earlier that afternoon, he sounded tired and throaty, and I thought I'd liven up our Friday night with a visit to one of our usual haunts. He didn't sound like he cared: head straight home and drop off to sleep, or down a couple of beers and exchange a few rare words with his Aifee.


But it was one of the unusual times I was offering to pay, and not wanting to miss this goldmine of an opportunity, my skinflint of a husband readily acquiesced.


So there we were, on our second bucket of San Mig Lites. We had wound our way through spirited discussions about the boys and work, wistful forays into the possibilities of our dream-home-to-be, and the inevitable summing up of income and expenditures.


We had finally come to the point where I was silent, chin propped on one palm, listening to him talk and talk and talk. His eyes, already silty to begin with, were at half-mast. With a lopsided smile on his face, he was yakking his face off and falling halfway towards drunk.


Funny how time has tweaked a good number of things. When I met him, he had a full head of hair, a golden tan, and an ego that rivalled some of the worst monsoon winds I have ever come across. These days he goes around saying I am partly responsible for his obscenely widening forehead. Years of slaving away at the bank have leached away most of the colour of his skin. And the ego? It's about the only thing that remains constant, it seems, except it has died down to a moderate gale.


Standing up in the middle of a watery belch, he wended his way towards the men's room, changing course midway and tromping off into the parking lot greenery where he bent over and regurgitated the contents of his stomach in between the company car and a blue Toyota SUV. My elegant and dignified banker, Atch.


As he walked back to the table with a vapid grin on his face, I was struck by how very fragile he looked in his rumpled uniform barong and his glasses slightly askew on his oily nose. Wasn't it only yesterday when he strode so confidently and energetically toward me with his arm stretched out imperiously for me to latch on? Didn't he half carry, half drag me on board a ferry at the ungodly hour of 4am for the trip back across the strait after we partied at a bacchanalian wedding feast and consumed Lord knows how many bottles of beer/whisky/wine? He steered, he directed, he commanded, and I practically kowtowed to this diminutive alpha male. A man now pale and bemused, looking old and tired. My husband.

Mrs. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

I paid the bill and we drove home in silence, his gear-shift hand resting on mine. The years may have been kind, but never before now did our mortality – his mortality, loom so close before my eyes. The realization gave me pause for thought and I shivered. And in the car's frigid air, his hand tightened over mine.