Time flies

18 September 2010

My dearest daughter,

Time flies when you are having fun. In the last two days, I just connected with two first cousins of mine. My father’s sister’s children. All I remember about them is their house in a certain region in the Philippines. Thirty years is a long time to be away from home.

They have memories of us going to Tagaytay. I have very nice photos of it.

I have memories of eating oyster at their house party. Very good memories of it. I did not realize that someday, I will also be an oyster fanatic. I remember the old people handling the oysters gingerly, opening them carefully so that their hands don’t get cut.

I remember their father coming home with a Hasselblad camera 6x4. He was the first of the overseas workers, we did not know then. A continuation of the brain drain. The Philippines builds the world while the Philippines languishes.

They had many children in their family. I can count six in my memory. But the memories are far away from memory simply because we grew up far from them.

There are many mysteries about your grandfather that I am trying to piece together. It is not easy. His siblings either did not want to write about him, or could not write about him. Their life in the Philippines was hard.

So, we settle into wondering about his life, trying to piece together some genealogical map to bring order to chaos, to unknown.

What I do know are as follows. We left the Philippines. He left in 1981 with your grandmother. We joined them in 1982 in Los Angeles. They borrowed the money form a friend of theirs in New York.

In Los Angeles, your grandpa would sit outside even in the rain barbequing. He loved to BBQ. He loved cigarettes; he loved beer too.

College financial aid bought us our first American car. Not just any car, mind you, it was an Oldsmobile Omega 1984. The smell of that car was intoxicating. The cloth was dark brown, not chocolate, but chocolate hills dark brown. Philippine dark brown.

Grandfather worked as a cleark at Bank of America. He used to be the chief accountant for the Bureau of Trade in the Philippines. Or so my memory tells me.

(Aside to you daughter: There is always a desire in humans to be above everyone else. I understand this. I used to have this desire. You must understand that our family began at the bottom. If we are to rise, we stand on each generation’s successes and failures. No one else will give it to us.)

Your grandfather was at the top of the game in the 1970’s. An Ilokano accountant CPA defending the budget of a whole government ministry to Malacanang. Not bad for a boy born in Ilokos. This might have been our Ilokano heights. The time of martial law.

But he leaves office with a hint of despair. Charged with corruption, or some crime that he should have known about if he was really in command of his group. Forced to retire and to seek a new life in America.

How do you go from the heights of command to become a clerk in B of A, when B of A meant opportunity and not infidelity? By smoking nearly two packs a day. By drinking four cans of beer at the end.

Like the ancestors of old, pain is just your body telling you that you need more alcohol, more nicotine to drown out that body pain.

In the end, it was just one day in which all things changed. A near crash at an intersection that led me to wear his seatbelt. Feet swelling which led to a leukemia diagnosis.

And all those hours in the hospital for my mother. How do you define love? I saw it there. Nary leaving the hospital from the day the ordeal began till the day he died. Your grandmother must have lost 20 years in that time. The rock, the foundation in life against all odds.

If you ever come to a precipice of life, remember your grandmother. A rock. A foundation. There is nothing that can shake us from this earth with her mooring you to the core of humanity. Nothing!

Such emotions are so raw. So painful to process. Yet so essential to understand so that you don’t get lost in your life. Do not worry about the past. The past is taken care of by your ancestors. Worry for your future. Prepare for interesting times.