Happy ever or even after

Amost heartwarming social I attended the past year celebrated the golden wedding anniversary of dear old friends Bnn and Malu Bautista. The loving couple had resurfaced at my Lush Life book launch at Manila Hotel’s Champagne Room last October. And they acknowledged that they weren’t just there to affirm long-time friendship, haha, but to case the joint as well.

It turned out that they had already made a reservation for the same venue for their golden anniversary party some weeks later. And of course it was their turn to invite me to share in the milestone.

A milestone it was indeed, since they obviously both escaped the millstone fate of some former wedding partners. To stay 50 years together and remain happy and comfortable with one another may have been eased off the bucket list of many other people I know. So it’s great to empathize, conversely, with the exceptions to the splitsville syndrome.

 No, now’s not the time for me to launch into a spirited brief for the passage of the RH bill, and eventually one that grants divorce and takes away that sole and quaint distinction our country has for being otherwise so outmoded, thanks to busybody bishops and hypocritical legislators. What I’ll do here is champion the ecstasy of fidelity and undying TL as evidently enjoyed by these dear friends of mine.

Fifty years. That I’ve known them both longer than that — half a century — speaks too of enduring friendships, something that most FB youngster-addicts would probably be hard put to imagine.

I met Bnn Bautista, the second son of the now iconic Fernando Bautista who founded the University of Baguio, even before I graduated from high school and entered UP Diliman, where he was still taking up Architecture. On weekends I joined him and two other buddies — Frank “Prime” Libatique, also an Archi student, and Eric Villegas of UP Engineering — in Bnn’s “bachelor’s pad” in Gagalangin, Tondo for long sessions of coffee, beer, and dialogue on existentialism. We contemplated on whether it was proper for us to identify and relate with the Left Bank ideologues in Paris, or just wear berets, sport goatees, and be happy to be branded as bohemians or “beatniks.”

Haha! Of course I went on to become a hippie, too, long before the term “jeprox” came into play. But before that, Eric and I frequented Baguio on Bnn’s invitation, stayed at their family “digs” where “Tatay,” “Nanay,” and the Bautista brothers taught us about the genuine art of laughter and camaraderie. One such visit led to a yet pristine Sagada, way back in 1962, when Eric and I stayed in a grass hut in the middle of rice terraces.

Bnn and I also became Jai Alai buddies, that is, as frequent bettors in regular “church worship.” Eventually he hitched up with Malu, which led to courtship rites for the sequential hand of Malu’s younger sis Dada. Yes, Bnn and Frank asserted, Dadaism meant the appreciation of a sugar cube in a birdcage.

Flash forward to Nov. 19, 2011, when I joined Frank and Bing Libatique’s table at the Champagne Room rather promptly, turned aghast that a Mass would actually start the anniversary celebration, took five, that is, long smokes and swigs of single malt in a plastic bottle at poolside, and went back just in time for dinner of marinated salmon and lapu-lapu in Vegetables Terrine (with tomato basil vinaigrette), quail consommé flavored with aged sherry (with sautéed oyster mushroom and crispy cheese twist), thousand leaves pastry (with shrimp ragout in creamy dill pernod sauce), peach lemon sherbet, Australian beef tenderloin baked in mushroom crust (on Merlot garlic sauce), and frozen orange chocolate parfait.

Meanwhile, I also burped at seeing other vintage friends among the Bautistas’ guests that included four generations of their clan, Bnn’s high-school friends from Baguio (where he had his first big date with Malu, at a Grand Ball at Baguio Military Institute where “Tatay” Bautista served as academic dean), and the Diliman gang that included Bim Bacaltos and Tina and Tony Turalba, plus tennis buddies and the “golf Mafia.”   

Among Bnn’s bros, present were Des with Auring, Herr with Leonie, and Gil with Lilie. Great to high-five with everyone after all these years. And beside the celebrating couple at the presidential table was Manila Hotel’s own president, Atty. Joey Lina, former senator and now a full-fledged divo, who regaled the party with scintillating, full-throated arias.

The party highlight was the series of song-and-dance numbers performed by Malu’s and Ben’s kids and grandkids, in Can-can regalia. And that was when a tear dropped from our jaded eye, in acknowledgment of the strength of tradition. Indeed, Nick Joaquin chose the perfect aphorism for his great play on the Filipino as artist — from W. B. Yeats: “How but in custom and ceremony are innocence and beauty born?”

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Somehow peripherally related to that nostalgia shebang is a recent title authored and published by our friend Ana Santos, who serves as editor for the glossy monthly Illustrado heroically published by Lalaine Chu-Benitez in Dubai.

Happy Even After: A Solo Mom’s Journal is the first of its kind in our country, that is, in openly discussing solo parenting — per author Ana Santos, “not to promote or glamorize it but more to just talk about how to raise balanced and well-adjusted children in spite of it.”  

The Bautista kids and grandkids fete the couple with custom and ceremony.

The journal answers the following questions: “What do you do when the pumpkin carriage has turned into a baby carriage, the glass slippers have been replaced by sensible flats and there is little or no participation from Prince Charming? You write a true-to-YOUR-life-fairytale.”

What started out as a workshop series in 2010 saw expansion into the publication of a 96-page book of inspirational stories and spunky quotes from several Pinay solo moms — who are defined as those who were never married, were once married, widows, or those raising other people’s children as their own. The objective is to help single moms get back on their feet again, or just cope with the dynamics of solo parenting in the Philippines.

Santos writes: “We hope for this journal to be her ally, her cheerleader when she can’t take it anymore, her trusted friend who will give her a dose of tough love when she needs it and even her stand-in co-parent — anything and everything she needs and wants it to be.

Among the contributors are Risa Hontiveros, supermodel Marina Benipayo, beauty queen Patty Betita, TV host Angel Jacob, journalist and author Miriam Grace Go, children’s book author Jean Patindol, Anna Ysabel Driz, Looie Lobregat-Ocampo, Mary Ann Marchadesch, and Ching Jorge.

Clinical psychologist and sexuality expert Dr. Margie Holmes weighs in with practical tips and inspiring quotes from kids from solo parent homes. There’s also a short section on pertinent laws such as the Solo Parent Act. Then there are blank writing pages for the reader to write down her own thoughts, paste pictures of her and her children or just scribble random ideas.

Copies are available at Fully Booked branches in MM, Cebu and Davao, or online at www.happyevenafter.com, with free delivery within Metro Manila.