Grievous issues

Let me share a funny story about my relatives – warm and lovely people among whom I was born in the Visayan island village of Alcantara, Romblon. My aunt Adoring is a retired schoolteacher who is about as nice and proper as ladies come; her husband Pat is a retired engineer who can appreciate a good Scotch. They have a daughter in the States, and two grandchildren – a six-year-old girl and a three-year-old boy, who, apparently, don’t see eye to eye on such grievous issues as afflict brother-sister relationships.

One day, my cousin Dennah called her parents from the US and put the young girl on the line; Manong Pat took the call and listened for a while before handing the phone over to Manang Adoring. "Here, you take this," he said, flustered, unable to catch what the six-year-old was telling him in her American child’s voice and accent.

My aunt calmly took the phone and proceeded to her grandmotherly duty, nodding her head and saying "Good, very good!" every now and then with a benign smile. All seemed well, going by my aunt’s composure, until it suddenly became clear that something was terribly wrong. Dennah came on the line to complain that her daughter was crying. "But why?" my aunt asked, alarmed. "Because," said my cousin, "she was trying to tell you how bad her little brother was, doing this and doing that, and all she could hear you saying was ‘Good, very good!’"

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Another story I like to tell is that of another wonderful couple I met in the course of my duties as a university official. It’s my job to meet with donors – generous individuals and corporations who endow us with grants for professorial chairs, which in turn help us reward and encourage our best academic performers.

Let’s call them the De la Cruz couple (I forgot to ask for permission to share their story, is why). They donated a professorial chair to the UP College of Dentistry to honor the memory of their daughter "Betty," who died 10 years ago after a brave battle with cancer. Betty’s Mom, "Doris," is a spunky lady to whom her daughter’s loss is obviously a source of enduring pain, but who chooses to remember the best of their times together.

Betty was still very much alive and well, and studying to be a dentist at UP, when a crisis suddenly arose. Betty had been practicing her denture-making skills on a toothless indigent patient she knew only by the name "Mang Donato." The problem was, her dentures needed to be evaluated by her professor so she could pass the course, and Mang Donato had vanished inexplicably and without warning into the warrens of Pasay’s slums.

Betty was in a panic, but her plucky Mom would not surrender so easily. Off she drove in her Volkswagen Beetle to Pasay, not particularly knowing where to go or whom to ask. When a neighborhood looked promising, she ventured forth into the catwalks and alleyways, asking whomsoever she met if they knew a Mang Donato who was bungi. She solicited the help of the barangay officials, but got nowhere. The closest she came to giving up was when she popped the question to a group of men, who smiled back – all of them toothless, but none of them Donato.

But miracles do happen, and one day she just chanced upon this man in this corner of Pasay. "From the moment he opened his mouth, I knew he was Mang Donato," Doris says. Sheepishly, Donato explained that he had run away and taken off his dentures because (as all denture wearers like yours truly know) they were torture to get used to. But now, confronted by the kind señora’s pleadings on behalf of her daughter, Mang Donato bravely put them on and consented to be brought to the college for the requisite examination. Betty passed the course, got her degree, and launched her dental career, which she enjoyed for a few years until mindless death claimed her.

Doris de la Cruz tells this story with a wistful cheer, an admirable composure that belies what had to be years of what someone else called "astonished protest," describing the anguish of an English queen who had attended the funeral of all her four sons. While I marvel at Doris’ tenacity – the same tenacity with which she and her husband helped Betty through her ordeal and its aftermath – I can’t help thinking how terrible it must be to survive your offspring. Doris dealt with what must have been the indescribable pain of her loss by realizing one of Betty’s last wishes, and opened a shop at the mall devoted to all things silver. The shop has done reasonably well, and has kept Doris busy.

We at the university feel immensely honored and challenged by this family’s generosity, which will help many more bright young people fix the teeth of such as Mang Donato, and lend substance to their smiles.

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I found myself in Bangkok a couple of weekends ago, tagging along with a group of Filipino art restorers and conservators who were led to an international conference by their diminutive but energetic president, Beng. Usually it’s the other way around, but this time I had the leisure of lying in bed and figuring out the nuances and intricacies of Thai TV (same silliness, different language) while Beng and co. talked paint layers and solubility tests with their Thai and European counterparts.

I’d been to Bangkok twice before but never had much of chance to check out the places I really wanted to reconnoiter (certainly not Pat Pong – whatever for?). Bangkok, of course, is always interesting on its own, even if you’re not looking for anything in particular. This time around, the city was in the throes of its own election fever, and posters everywhere displayed the range of one’s choices for governor. All the candidates seemed to be pensive and respectable men in sober neckties, and each of them had a number to be known by, in lieu of a Pinoy politico’s nickname like "Mr. Palengke." A livelier time was promised by a newspaper article announcing the performance of Thai Elvis wannabes Jeerasak Pinsuwan, Vasu "Jibb" Saengsingkaew, Lek Presley and Sattawat Tungkarat at the Ambassador Hotel.

One place-name on the city map I picked up at the airport seemed familiar and reassuring: "Thewet market." Oh, good, I thought – the wet market! (It was obvious to me that, typically, some forgetful Thai had merely conjoined the two words.) What a good thing that Bangkok had one, too, and that it seemed not too far away from the hotel – I always like the sights and smells of fish and other marine exotica, even and especially out of town.

As it turned out, there is a corner of Bangkok named Thewet, and it was nowhere near where we were, since the map I was holding had liberally compacted distances to suggest that one place was within hailing distance of the next. I realized this to my great dismay when, on our last night and with the aches and cares of the day just dying to be released in a shopping spree along Sukhumvit Rd., we were informed by the front desk clerk that we were exactly one-and-a-half hours away by bus from our intended destination.

Earlier that day, we had taken a bus to Chatuchak Market. If you’re a flea market junkie, you haven’t lived until you’ve been to Chatuchak, a cross between Divisoria and Portobello Rd. Beng and her friend Robert quickly vanished into the blocks of stalls selling all kinds of tropical gewgaws and souvenirs; I chose to remain at the periphery, where dozens of vendors hawked trayfuls of Buddhist medallions, relics, and artifacts – and old watches, my newest folly. I saw a great-looking stainless-steel ’60s Jaeger Le Coultre going for the equivalent of US$100 and would’ve picked it up without further ado, had not the seller – perhaps assailed by a pang of Buddhist guilt – announced before I could even ask that its movement was "Not original! Not original!"

Disheartened and in need of instant indulgence, I ventured into the stalls. At one of them, I was smitten by a T-shirt – a whole set of shirts, actually – featuring vintage Volkswagen Beetles printed in glorious color, with a resolution normally found in coffee-table books. I had found my consolation.

When I asked the storeowner for her largest size, she took a look at my girth, shook her head, pulled out an XL, held it up against me, then shook her head again. I implored her through sign language to find an XXL, but she kept shaking her head, ruing the loss of the day’s biggest sale. I shared her grief, and went home empty-handed.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.