Replacing the 4th string
Even what we thought were landmarks change and scarcely remain the same, given through the years a kind of ritual bloodletting. Raon Street in Quiapo is one such example, whose present name constantly escapes me. The shuttered Cherry Foodarama along Shaw Boulevard is another. So too is the Sunken Garden in UP Diliman a shape-shifting emblem from the past.
They’re digging up Raon again, a sure sign that elections are just around the corner, as all those pork barrel funds must be put to good if goofy use, sorry for the temporary, temporal inconvenience. The long planned trip to the audiophile’s haven had to do with a broken fourth string on the trusty acoustic guitar, gathering dust in a chair before the old unused computer, the one with Windows 95 and still functioning last we clicked the power button.
Like any boiling, roiling pot of the metropolis, Raon seethes with an urban edge teeming with hawkers of pastry and isaw, confidence men, bored female attendants in stores selling bass guitars, amplifiers, harmonicas and drum sets, sidestreets that reveal hidden staircases leading to upper floors that offer obscure electronic parts for nearly obsolete sound systems, the experts hiding in backrooms having forgotten what the needle and the damage done sound like.
The sound is that of commerce and music, and you’ll be lucky if there’s still the round phonograph cleaner to be found, the one with the reproduced blurred photo of the Fab Four or Vi & Bot, which might have gone the way of vinyl and the Parlophone label. The fourth string had been broken for some time, and have you ever tried to play a guitar without it?
The best you can do is maybe make up a few chords on the bass section, the fifth and sixth strings, or else fantasize on lead with strings one two three. I’m sure though it’s not the first time it’s happened, many a musician must have improvised on stage or even in practice with a broken string or two in the heat of the moment, raging against the good bleak night like an Orionids shower.
The fourth string of course corresponds to the D key on piano, the keyboard badly in need of a retuning, as strings 6 to 1 in descending order can stand for some acronym even for not too fanciful composers, E – A – D – G – B – E, as in “Every Asshole Deserves a Good Beating, Ey wot?” Or “Erin Always Does a Good Bronkovich Emitation.” Or a kind of campaign jingle for would-be second-generation senators, “Enrile Angara Dugyut Gyud Basta Estrada!”
Remember they’re digging up the street, and with it whatever secrets contained behind the swinging wild west doors of the dirty graying buildings, themselves harboring a campaign jingle or two like a fugitive out of tune, out of the “my way” loop of pirated porn DVDs showing 101 positions even the Kama Sutra or dalmatians could not imagine.
Meanwhile down Shaw, no one knows what really happened to the lamented Cherry Foodarama grocery now in a perpetual state of renovation. The landmark seems to have disappeared altogether, along with the Tik-Tilaok Manok, the Mr. Quickie on the leveled premises, the sarsa-less Cebuano lechon timplado na, and always you should park on the shady side of the now-vanished building.
Yet who could say that we did not see it coming? In the last trips to Cherry they were no longer replenishing the shelves, as if the owners were just waiting to exhaust their stock before the usual periodic inventory. The admirable Tsingtao beer and soju, cheap wine and affordable value- for-price whisky rode off into the distance without so much as a by your leave, the longtime customers left high and dry at the side of the sloping Laurel road.
Still who could deny that even if leveled the grocery retained its landmark quality, though the signage may no longer be there. You look for a place along Shaw and the reference point is usually “Does it come before or after Cherry coming from EDSA or Kalentong?” In its last unwarned days though, the odor of ferment and sleeping rodents was all around, as if the demolition team were just around the corner of Wack Wack, which it turned out they were. Just hope that the Gato Negros found a safe place somewhere, in another friendly neighborhood grocery, if not down the gullets of the thirsty disappeared.
The Sunken Garden in UP Diliman is a different species, subject of a hyperactive high school e-group with time on its hands. Many remember it as a lovers’ lane, particularly that leafy section near the back of the main library. Or a venue for pickup soccer games, a site for ROTC drills, as well for the annual February fair and accompanying rock concert featuring indie bands. Those were days when Ferris wheels were still Ferris wheels, when you could marvel at the possibilities upon reaching the apex of the ride, and not succumb to the octopus of memory or nostalgia.
In Albert Camus’ The Plague, the movie version, the Robert Duvall character is hauled off dying, muttering the French term for nostalgia, and he keeps repeating it, nostalgie, nostalgie. As if he were speaking with duckweed in his mouth or on his tongue. But the colors of Oran are there behind the library, an open book like a fourth string that must be constantly replaced. It is however advised that the entire set be replaced even if only one string has snapped.
