Father of the bride

As you read this with your Monday morning coffee, I’ll be across the Pacific, giving our unica hija Demi’s hand away in marriage to a fine young man by the name of Jerry Ricario. They met online — she had a blog, which he responded to, and they were soon e-mailing and calling each other up; thus are romances born these days, with blips crossing the digital ether and recomposing themselves into something as close as you can get to a human emotion like wonder, like love.

It’s a day I’d been trying to imagine for a good many years now. Was I going to cry? (I’ve been weeping buckets, for the silliest reasons.) What was I going to wear? (Methinks a black suit and a silver tie.) What was I going to give the couple? (I’ll tell you soon enough.) Who was she going to marry? (Oddly enough, I’ve never worried about it — Demi’s a smart girl, and will choose wisely.)

Demi’s taken her sweet time to get here; she turned 32 last October — a sensible age, by current standards, to settle down. Kids these days, they put all kinds of carts before their horses—the job, the career, the car, the apartment, the MBA. I suppose you can’t blame them, either, because that’s what most parents look for: "Can he feed you? Where will you live?" Me, all I ever wanted for Demi was happiness, in whatever shape or form it took — and I’m glad she finally found it in Jerry, an avionics engineer with a passion for museums, books, and music.

Beng and I actually met Jerry even before Demi did, on a trip we made to San Diego sometime last year when I was a visiting professor in a Midwestern college. Within 10 minutes he and I were talking about Chuck Yeager, the legendary test pilot for the X-15 (Jerry tests the guidance systems he designs in the Mojave Desert — a major score, in my boy’s book), and I knew we were going to get along.

Today I can’t help remembering that Demi’s mom and I got married when Beng was 23, and I was 20 (it was, in fact, my 20th birthday, and my mother had to sign a consent form before the judge could do what he was supposed to). It was all over in five minutes; one of my brothers ran to the restroom to take a leak and when he came back we were signing the papers. Then we repaired to a nearby restaurant for merienda cena; there was no honeymoon, except the one in our newly rented apartment, which we gave up after several months of playing house, realizing how much cheaper the parental dominion was.

Back then, you didn’t plan for these things too much; thanks to martial law, our comrades were dying all around us with numbing regularity, so we figured that we would be lucky to reach 25, and that if there was anything else we felt like doing in life before being shredded by an Armalite, we had best do it soon.

Three months after getting together — and after I’d just been released from martial-law prison — Beng and I figured out our budget on a paper napkin and decided to get hitched as soon as I turned 20. After nine months, right on schedule, Demi arrived — and for a moment back there I nourished the thought that I’d become a grandfather at 40, if children did what their parents did, but of course they never do.

All I can think of right now, hours before enplaning for San Diego, is shining my shoes. In the mad rush to get everything together — my semester’s grades, everyone’s presents, a slideshow I’m going to surprise the couple with, and cans of sweet banana that Demi specifically requested — I’d forgotten to have my black pair resoled, so I’m going to have to make do with my dark brown loafers, which need a good waxing. Whatever else I do—fathers of brides always seem to manage to make fools of themselves in the movies — I won’t be charged with going to the wedding in scruffy shoes. Maybe that’s the Pinoy in me: look smart, from your toes up; always wear a watch; always change your underwear; don’t let them think you’re clueless, even if you are.

I shouldn’t be so nervous, because our new in-laws the Ricarios are Fil-Ams from Bicol, vagabond provincianos just like the Dalisays from Romblon and the Poticars from Iloilo. Just a week ago, our balae Gudy sent us a letter — by snail mail, in longhand — whose simple but heartfelt words spoke volumes about her family’s down-home values.

Maybe that’s what scares me — never having been a balae, could I live up to expectations, as a sometimes stubborn non-conformist? No, it isn’t like I’ll turn up at the wedding half-drunk in week-old jeans and swearing at the preacher like a bad Jack Nicholson; when it comes to fashion, my idea of nonconformity is to press my jeans, not rip them. It’s more like I, uhm, don’t care much for church weddings, especially big ones, and am immensely relieved that Demi and Jerry decided to get married on a moored boat, with just a few people aboard. I’ve been told that there will be a proper ceremony in church next year in Manila (for which I suppose I’ll have to make a special confession, and a long one that will be) — but I’ll be a good sport, and be the Catholic schoolboy I once was, just for the kids.

I’d probably be breathing easier if Beng were coming with me, but she’s not; she’s packing my bags, but we couldn’t get her a tourist visa in time for the wedding. She’s being customarily quiet about folding my shirts and tucking the balled-up socks into little corners of my bag, but I know — even as she tells me it’s all right that I’ll be going to San Diego alone — that she’s writing her own piece in her heart and head, although it’ll never get published, unlike mine. Her baby’s getting married across the ocean, and she’ll be watering the plants and changing the curtains at home, as if she had nothing better to do.

If I cry today as I know I will, my excuse will be that I’m shedding them on behalf of the mother of the bride. We did something good and right together, Beng — and there she goes.

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And what of our gifts? Surely someone else will provide the inevitable pots and pans, the immutable cutlery, the deathless fondue set. (Just for the record, we never minded receiving those; three decades later, we’re still in need of them.) I wish I could write the newlyweds a ticket to Europe, but I’ve never been to Europe except on someone else’s tab. For a lot less, I could give them a new Mac, but I can sense that this is already a marriage of two geeks, with Demi bringing her own iBook into the bargain to complement Jerry’s PC and his awesome networking skills.

Ours, at any rate, is a family of modest means; in this country, writers and artists make only so much. Unless you count my old pens and watches and Beng’s old bottles, there are no family jewels to speak of, no heirloom silverware.

Beng, however, has always had her present at hand: a 1973 drawing by her former mentor and later National Artist Jose Joya — the first of what we hope will be the couple’s own little trove of artworks by Filipino masters.

As for me, a month ago and purely by chance, I came across an unusual message in my inbox, advertising the sale of one of my Holy Grails: a first edition of Carlos Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical novel, America Is in the Heart, a moving, often gut-wrenching, account of a Filipino immigrant’s life in America in the 1930s. (I turned green with envy when I saw a near-mint copy of it, dust jacket and all, on the shelf of one of UC San Diego’s leading Fil-Am scholars, Dr. Jody Blanco, during my visit last year; someone had gifted him with the very book and edition I’d been chasing after for ages.)

I’m not a compulsive book collector in the same way I collect fountain pens, but I simply couldn’t pass this one up, and I made a bid for it; after a couple of weeks of polite negotiation by text and e-mail between myself and the seller, my bid prevailed, and he turned over the book to me at Jollibee Philcoa. My hands trembled as I accepted the book; I had written my undergraduate thesis on Bulosan, and as a Filipino writer in English myself and an occasional visitor to America, I felt that I understood Bulosan’s complex character.

I don’t have to report how much I paid for the book — you know how it is with these things, the price is always a little too much for the buyer and a little too little for the seller, although we were both pleased with the outcome.

The book itself was in only fair-to-good condition, as collectibles go; it had long lost its dust jacket, and some pages had been taped together. But it had something that even Jody’s copy didn’t — a personal inscription by Carlos Bulosan himself, to an equally famous Filipino, a former (then future) Chief Justice: "For Fred Castro: This story of my life will, I hope, bring me closer to you and our native land through our good friend, J. C. Dionisio, with my best wishes. Carlos Bulosan Los Angeles 3-6-46." Fred Ruiz Castro received the book in Manila and signed it on the 4th of April.

I thought for a minute whether I would be defacing and devaluing the book by adding my own inscription to it, but given to whom and where it will now be going, I should think that its return to California, 61 years later, merits a few squiggles in my own pen-wielding hand. If Bulosan’s America was in the heart, for our dear daughter, the heart is in America.

Live long, live right, and every now and then look homeward.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://www.penmanila.net.