Tales from the other side

When I was starting out as a journalist I took notes in longhand, then phoned in my stories by landline or wrote them on an office typewriter. These days the sound of a rotary telephone seems like ancient history. The other day our reporters received their Compaq palmtops with collapsible keyboard for their news coverage and filing of stories by e-mail or fax. Each reporter also has a cell phone.

I still keep my portable Underwood typewriter at home and use it occasionally. I tell myself it’s for when I need to rest my eyes from the glare of the computer screen, but I know I keep it for the memories of my youth evoked by the sound of the typewriter. There I was when I was eight, pounding unintelligible lines on my uncle’s huge black antique typewriter, in the days of the transistor radio, reel tape and black and white TV without a remote. Back then we had no Play Station, only jackstones and jumping rope.

In our backyard we kept a pink pig named Yvonne (named after a bold star), who ate rice bran and boiled swamp cabbage and loved to sun herself every morning in the back porch. At gatherings we sang to the accompaniment of the piano, guitar, blues harp and flute.

How did we survive without karaoke, CD, DVD, VCD? Do you still remember the pager? I remember only that my father died as the pager was being phased out.

* * *

You know you’re getting old when All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day trigger an attack of nostalgia and you start contemplating your own mortality. I look at the carved wooden case bearing my father’s ashes, beside the window where the haunting scents of dama de noche and kamuning waft in together with the aroma of rosemary, and I try to recall what new technology he has already missed in the few years since his departure.

In my younger years All Saints’ Day was fiesta time for us. Food for an entire day was brought to the tombs. The children wandered the North and Chinese cemeteries, collecting candle drippings and forming them into balls while the adults chatted and played cards or mah-jongg at the tombs of relatives the children hardly knew. Back then you could still find fireflies in Manila; they started appearing in the bushes in the cemeteries as we prepared to go home at sundown.

Yesterday I heard that cops were confiscating even portable stereos, LPG tanks, kitchen knives and scythes for cutting grass at the cemeteries as part of measures against a terrorist attack. No more picnics at cemeteries. I never imagined that one day, going to the cemetery would constitute an act of defiance against terrorism.

I have it easy – my father’s ashes are in my home. Even without a terror threat, however, I sense the specter of death as I offer flowers and light candles for my departed loved ones.

Too many of the journalists who covered the Manila police beat with me are dead. Louie Beltran, my favorite journalism professor, is gone. In our newspaper alone we miss Betty Go-Belmonte, Minnie Narciso and Art Borjal. I’m seeing more and more familiar names in the newspaper obituaries.

* * *

These days I count the passing of the years in the laugh lines and crow’s feet in my face. Where before I quickly got a glowing tan I now get brown spots from prolonged sun exposure. Each time I see my nieces and nephews they seem to be a couple of inches taller. Was I ever that young, that lean, that carefree?

Downtime has become a precious luxury. There never seems to be enough time for gardening, for playing with the dogs, for baking bread. Life has become so much faster; everything seems to move at cyber speed, at the click of a computer mouse. In my teenage years when my hormones were running amuck, I pondered, like most other people, the meaning of life. What was I living for? These days my most frequent question is when do I take the day off.

One day when I’m waiting impatiently to go to that other place that my father, delirious in his sickbed, described as wonderfully cool and bright, I will wonder how much I have failed to do, what I could have accomplished.

* * *

No terrorist can keep Filipinos from honoring their dead or enjoying their downtime. The fun started last night, with children trick or treating in several gated villages. Halloween is still a new phenomenon here; in my father’s time there was no trick or treat. For that matter, there was no Father’s Day, Mother’s Day or Grandparents’ Day either.

Now homes are festooned with faux pumpkins and bats, witches’ hats, monster masks and the hooded symbol of death. I remember getting goose bumps when my father, in his sickbed, told us cheerfully that someone we couldn’t see was standing at the foot of his bed, waiting to fetch him on a Wednesday. Unlike his other unseen visitors, whom he identified as his relatives, all of them dead, he couldn’t describe the creature fetching him, or even say if the creature was male or female.

On the third Wednesday after that visit my father was dead. When my eldest brother called and roused me from sleep that Wednesday in November at 6 a.m. – the witching hour for most editors – I knew it was bad news. Bad for the ones who were left behind, at least. Throughout my father’s month-long delirium I had never seen him look so happy as when he talked with visitors we could not see. His face looked almost ecstatic.

My aunt, who was my father’s favorite cousin, was sick at the time and was never informed about my father’s death. She told relatives that my father had visited her in her room and had even playfully whistled and teased her. Months later she was also dead.

On the days of souls and saints I think of such moments, and wonder what’s in store for us when twilight gives way to night.