The bare essentials

This happens every time I find myself living abroad for at least a month: the first thing I try to do is recreate a space called "home," which is as close an approximation as I can conjure of the objects, flavors, sights and smells I need to function without any excuse other than "Where’s Chippy?"

Chippy, of course, is my seven-year-old Persian tomcat, who always gets left behind, and whom I honestly miss more than I miss most people. (To be fair to most people, they don’t nuzzle my leg, or get their necks and bellies scratched.) I often wish that I could stuff the furry fellow in a bag or pocket and pull him out when everyone else has gone, but he’s just too freaking huge, and flashing feline malice toward all but his doting master.

But let’s not dwell on the impossible. I may not have Chippy with me here in De Pere, Wisconsin (pop. 22,850), but I can have a picture of him – a ball of orange surliness – on my desk. Except that I didn’t bring a framable picture – who does, these days? But wait! I have tons of Chippy pictures on my computer… and no printer. There’s a communal printer in the office, but I don’t think it handles color, and I don’t suppose my new colleagues would be too thrilled to catch me printing out portraits of an overfed cat instead of my syllabus for English 221, The American Short Story.

So I march over the Allouez Bridges panning the Fox River to the city’s only department store, a single-storey, warehouse-type affair called ShopKo (making me want to say "Shop ko rin"), and look for, among others, a cheap inkjet printer, 4x6 photo paper, and suitable frames (plural, because I want a picture of Chippy in the office as well – and, okay, let’s throw in some family faces).

A fraction as it may be of our Megamall, ShopKo has nearly everything I need. And what, exactly, are the bare essentials as far as I’m concerned (excepting food, another list altogether)?

As far as I’m concerned, a house is not a home unless it’s also an office, and an office isn’t an office unless it has a stapler. That’s right. A stapler – that toothy castanet without which papers would be flying all over the planet in mad disarray, with final chapters preceding prefaces, gasoline receipts and hardware invoices insinuating themselves between hastily and fervently scribbled pages of romantic verse, endnotes vanishing into bibliographic oblivion – just imagine the chaos. So, I choose a stapler in bright green – remember, you want one you can spot on your cluttered desktop as easily as a red suitcase in baggage claim; and it can’t be just any bright green stapler, but one with a metal tongue – yep, a staple remover, giving me the awesome power to undo whatever I do. Immediately I feel enlarged and more secure, envisioning a day of intense activity at my work desk, with papers coming and going like a swirl of autumn leaves, and I beaming with confidence in the midst of it all, blithely clicking away with my bright green stapler, with staple remover.

And what’s a stapler without – well, that other staple of office desks – a pair of scissors? I need scissors to open packages and envelopes, trim nose hair, and cut noodles (not necessarily in that order). There’s something about the sound of "snip, snip, snip!" that I find oddly reassuring – although I’m not quite sure what I’m being reassured of; I’d guess it’s the same vestigial warrior in me that revels in brandishing modern weaponry – albeit a stapler in one hand and scissors in the other. (And while we’re in the neighborhood, let me add that one accessory I’m hardly ever without is a sewing kit, against the inevitable day when I’ll be struck by some catastrophic wardrobe failure – such as when my zipper came undone on a long flight to South Africa; sewing kits are tiny armories of pins, needles, and threads that can hold suits, pants, and pride together in the thickest and nastiest of social skirmishes.)

Today’s office is useless unless it’s connected to half a million other offices around the world. That should mean broadband Internet, but I’m dismayed and distressed to find that all I have in my apartment is a phone, and a clunky ’80s model with a handset large enough to mash potatoes and hunt small mammals with. So I do the next best thing and find a splitter that will give me a phone and a dial-up Internet connection at the same time. Like most guys, I’m a lazy bum – or, rather, I won’t expend valuable labor where a simple technological kludge will do, like a 99-cent splitter that will save me the trouble and the exercise of plugging and unplugging the line from the jack every time I want to dial up the Internet, which is every five minutes or so. Of course this requires another phone line ($1.99) and – what the heck, might as well, I can take this home with me – a sleek new cordless phone, on clearance at $14.99 (I’m beginning to pile up those pennies).

These store managers are smart. They know that 50-something guys – unlike 15-year-olds whose eyes can remain catatonically glued to the same jerky figures in the same computer games for hours – have great peripheral vision. So where they put irresistibly cheap cordless phones, they also put irresistibly cheap TV remotes. I swear, these guys can read my mind. I almost forgot, but come to think of it, the TV remote in my new apartment isn’t working as it should – I’m squeezing the keys hard enough to draw blood, but all I keep getting is CNN and C-Span. OK, so I’m a current-affairs and political junkie – but I came to America to watch Project Runway, Antiques Roadshow, college football, and all the serial killers they can round up for the A&E channel. The mere thought of missing out on all that fashionista cattiness makes up my mind, and an $8.49 remote – one more thing to click-click – goes into my shopping cart.

And what’s an office without coffee – hot, black, strong enough to bring tears to your eyes and a satisfied smile to your lips? There’s a coffee maker in the apartment, and a bag of Batangas barako, a pabaon from our Ninang Leonor. What’s missing is a crucial implement – a proper coffee mug. I used to travel for years with the same coffee mug, a souvenir from my first American sojourn in 1980. Like every serious coffee drinker, I take my coffee mug just as seriously; it should sit flat and solidly on my tabletop; it should be thin-lipped, so I can sip the hot brew without feeling like I’m gnawing on a flower pot; and it should be a manly mug, without any decals of petunias or cutesy animals. (I’ll take a cat, but it has to be a fierce-looking marmalade Persian.) I hop over to the kitchenware section, and find my mug – a squarish, large-mouthed, creamy-white bucket large enough to keep me bug-eyed all night; $2.99. I think I can get it for 25 cents at the Salvation Army – but it’ll cost me $3 in bus fares to get to the nearest thrift shop and back, so I figure I’m getting a bargain.

And now, I think, I’m all set to get some real office-type work done – like a syllabus, or a newspaper column, or an interview transcript – but the coffee’s too good, and the TV too tempting, and there’s really nothing yet to staple or to snip. The cordless phone sits smartly in its cradle, quiet as a cenotaph; no one knows my number yet, and I’ve never been one to call. I open my laptop and print out and frame a picture of Chippy, exchange silent meows, turn the TV on to some new program about forensics, and then I realize how, except for the maples outside my window, I’ve recreated home, which turns out to be an unsettling fullness, a sense of having no further excuse not to work. My fingers glide over the keyboard, peck out a word, then two, and suddenly 2 a.m. in De Pere, Wisconsin feels just like 2 a.m. in Diliman, Quezon City.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html.