I wrote an item here recently about a gathering of our best young Filipino writers 40 years old and below that we’re organizing for early next year as part of the Philippine Writers’ Festival. It got me to thinking, later, about what being 40 actually means in a literary life. What was 40 like to me — that fast-receding image in my rearview mirror?
A celebrity website tells us that Will Smith, Rachel Ray, Celine Dion, Hugh Jackman, Gillian Anderson, Emily Proctor, and Halle Berry are all turning 40 this year. Not too surprisingly, no such list exists for writers, maybe because they’re not the sort of people whose aging threatens your most private fantasies (really, Emily Proctor’s 40?), and also because writers hit their prime after actors do, or so we’d like to think.
Going over my own shortlist of possible attendees for that writers’ festival, I was gratified to see just how many terrific new Filipino writing talents have emerged just over the past decade or so. The one I’ve asked to help me organize this “Kumustahan” conference, fictionist Sarge Lacuesta, is just on the verge of turning 40, but already has several books and majorprizes to his name, aside from a fruitful career in advertising. They’re just beginning to be anthologized — a step which, I suppose, guarantees that your work will be read and cursed by legions of hapless sophomores long after you’re gone — but I have no doubt that years from now, these writers born in the late ’60s and early ‘70s will be seen as a bumper crop, a generation that found its voice and its concerns past martial law and EDSA.
Some years are just better than others, I suppose; what, for example, was special in 1899 that it would produce Vladimir Nabokov (April 22), Ernest Hemingway (July 21), and Jorge Luis Borges (August 24) one after the other? It’s an honor and also a misfortune to share my birth year, 1954, with the illustrious likes of Kazuo Ishiguro, Louise Erdrich, and Louis de Berniere (and, while we’re at it, Oprah Winfrey, Matt Groening, Bob Geldof, Chris Evert-Lloyd, and Denzel Washington), ensuring that I will never be the most famous writer of my time. (When I met Ishiguro in Norwich some years ago, he grinned and said, “Yeah, that was a good year.”) Besting even Ishiguro at the cash register, no writer came out of 1954 with a rosier future in publishing than the purpose-driven Rick Warren, whose book has now sold over 25 million copies.
I was born on the 15th of January, so I had practically the full year of 1994 to feel 40. In 1994 I was beginning to settle down after a few wild and woolly years between finishing graduate school abroad and starting my first newspaper column, “Barfly,” in Today. I’d been a creature of Timog Avenue, cruising the bars and back to smoking four packs of Marlboros a day after an 11-year abstinence (together with Beng, I quit again cold turkey in 1995, and we both haven’t taken a puff since).
By 1994 I had published two collections of stories, a novel, and a collection of short plays; in July of that year I went to Scotland for a month’s hermitage at Hawthornden Castle, where I finished work on Penmanship and Other Stories, writing the title piece and three other stories in the castle itself on a 386-SX laptop. It was a welcome break from teaching freshman English and churning out as many as four speeches a day for President Ramos (a task I actually enjoyed, although we never met on the job; in a postmodern twist, I got assigned to write the speech he delivered for the TOYM Awards that April, of which I was one of the recipients).
Beng and I had found a small apartment on Sorsogon Street in West Triangle, which we shared with a couple of big rats in the ceiling, with college senior Demi preferring to stay with her grandparents in Project 4; my Beetle had begun to fall into decrepitude in its first incarnation but I was still driving that around; none of these minor annoyances mattered much, because my life and my work were coming together, and I could feel one door closing and another one opening. I knew that I wanted to be a writer for the rest of my life, and I knew whom I wanted to spend that rest of my life with.
The late American poet Donald Justice wrote a great poem titled “Men at Forty,” and as soon as I read it I cried “Yes!”, which is perhaps the best accolade a reader can give a poem. It begins with these lines:
Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
And it ends with:
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.
I couldn’t have said it better.
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Speaking of time passing, let me share a private joy. Most of you know me as a collector of old and new fountain pens — thus the title of this column — but I’ve also acquired a passion for vintage watches, especially classics from the 1950s.
I like old, gold, mechanical watches that will look good on a leather strap (you’ll never see me wearing a steel bracelet, or anything that looks like a wrist-bound tank), preferably simple round ones with a clear white face. There is, I think, a fundamental honesty to a round watch that does nothing but tell the time, and over the past few years I’ve accumulated a couple of dozen of these beauties — many of them, surprisingly enough, from local sources (check out ebay.ph for a fine selection; on the main ebay.com site, there are at least 100,000 new and vintage wristwatches on sale at any given moment). I especially love Hamiltons, Bulovas, and Orises (can’t afford the Patek Philippes and Blancpains, sorry), which I can still find in the range of $100-$200 and have them serviced by my suki repairmen at World Watch in Shang Mall.
But like any collector, I have a few Holy Grails when it comes to pens and watches, and one of the latter has been a gold watch from 1954 (yup, that year again) — a fellow time traveler, whose ticking would be almost like my own heartbeat. I’ve had a couple of close matches: a 1955 Hamilton Parker and a 1958 Bulova, both so pretty that I can barely bring myself to wear them, feeling like a monkey at the dinner-dance.
A couple of weeks ago I came across a gold Omega Seamaster bumper automatic on ebay.ph, and was instantly, dizzily enthralled. No year was given, but I knew it was from the ’50s from its design, whose stepped, rounded bezel reminded me of a brass porthole or some other suitably nautical motif. I had only one other Omega — a steel Constellation chronometer given as a corporate gift, never worn, which I plan to trade away for something closer to my tastes — but I’d always wanted a Seamaster for its robust, no-nonsense build and look. This one was going for higher than any other watch I’d acquired, but you’ll eat sawdust when you know you want something, and I left a bid and said a prayer before flying off to Kidapawan for a weekend sortie.
The short of it is that I got the watch, which has now become my daily wearer. In my unhappiest moments (i.e., losing at poker even while holding a pair of aces or kings — “pocket rockets and cowboys,” we call them), I glance at its gleaming roundness, and all my tribulations vanish. The extra lift comes from a serendipitous discovery I made after making the purchase. I looked up its serial number — 14318304 — on the Omega database, and established that it had been manufactured in, yes, 1954. As it ticks, so do I.
Now it’s back to the salt mines, where I need to hack away a few hundred tons of the white stuff to pay for these gewgaws.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.