A day at the races
I’m part of a growing group of Filipino fountain-pen addicts who get together now and then ostensibly to socialize, but really to display and fondle trayfuls of colorful plastic and metal cylinders that hold bladders of runny ink. We don’t write novels with these pens — who does, these days? — but we might spend whole afternoons just writing the same word or line (“Caloy” or “This is a wonderful nib”) over and over again, trying to figure out the nuances of Pelikans, Watermans, Stipulas, and Sheaffers — as if we didn’t already know them.
There are stranger afflictions, of course. Some people will spend their weekends not with kith and kin, but with a different species altogether — horses, for example. Holding on to folded sheets of paper, these men — and occasionally the stray female — will ponder the performance and pedigree of this stallion and that filly, and wager their week’s paycheck on a succession of numbers coaxed out of a mixture of science, astrology, and plain dumb luck.
A couple of Sundays ago, these two worlds came together when our pen lovers’ group spent an afternoon at the Sta. Ana Hippodrome in Makati, thanks to special arrangements made by one of our members, Jenny Ortuoste-Alcasid — a horseracing journalist, broadcaster, and industry executive (and, incidentally, a former student of mine). Jenny also collects fountain pens and has initiated her two young daughters into the mysteries of nibs and inks, so she hatched this brilliant idea of setting us up for our next meeting in a reserved box at the Sta. Ana grandstand, complete with buckets of beer and platters of that perfect Sunday-afternoon merienda combination, Savory fried chicken and pancit canton.
We were also interested in seeing Sta. Ana because Jenny had told us that the place was about to be torn down in favor of a new hippodrome somewhere in Cavite. The hippodrome had been built by the Philippine Racing Club in 1930 on the go-ahead of Nicanor Garcia, Makati’s municipal president at that time (ah, so that’s whom Nicanor Garcia Street is named after!). The conservationists in Beng and me bristled at the idea of the building’s demolition and we thought instantly of sparking a campaign to save the structure, given how we’ve lost so much of our art-deco heritage to heavy-handed mayors and developers eager to make money off desultory parking lots. But it was only fair to see the place first before screaming our lungs out, so the date was set.
With Beng gamely coming along, our group of about seven or eight people found our way to Barangay Carmona in Makati and discovered — or rediscovered, in my case — the life and world of horseracing. I hadn’t been there in over 30 years — I would tell Jenny that the last racehorse I remember betting on was one named Ilocos King, back in the mid-1970s — and only because I had been dragged to the place by friends who could recite the dividendazo or tip sheet in their sleep. I don’t have any qualms about gambling; I wouldn’t be a poker victim otherwise. But horses and jockeys added more imponderables to the draw of numbers that, for me, bring on the rush of blood to the head, so I would move on to cards, darts, and whatever could fit in my pocket.
As it happened, the excitement among the punters over the entrance of the horses (and, we would soon learn, of the lovely ladies who had been harnessed to hand out the prizes) was well matched by the excitement in our box over the parade of Parkers, Wahls, Swans, and such other pensoterica as our leather cases contained. Addictions brook no distractions, and a mushroom cloud might as well have formed over Sta. Ana and we wouldn’t have known any better in our own race to establish whose nib was more flexible or broader, whose cursive italics the more graceful (certainly not mine).
But we also paid our due respects to the venue and to our host the best way anyone could — by betting on the horses, figuring that Dame Fortune was our only hope of acquiring one of the Holy Grails of modern pen collecting, the Montblanc Agatha Christie, last seen in the neighborhood of what you’d pay for a ticket from Manila to San Francisco — in business class. In the end, we made enough — around P36 each, after six races — to buy decent ballpens (or, as our member Chito Limson pointed out, an Agatha Ruiz de la Prada school pen). Here’s tip to the fellow novato in betting: don’t choose your horses based on the cuteness of their names.
A good time was had by all, many thanks again to Jenny and to her daughters Alex and Ik, and as for the hippodrome itself, I took a long look, and decided that it indeed had seen its prime, and that both the people and the horses deserved a better arena for their exertions. Let the funding go to the Metropolitan Theater, a true art-deco palace that may yet turn into the Augean stables if we don’t watch out.
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The UP Institute of Creative Writing is extending the deadline for applications to the 2009 National Summer Writers Workshop, which will be held next year in Camp John Hay, Baguio City, from April 12 to 18, to be chaired by National Artist for Literature Virgilio S. Almario. The original deadline was Nov. 30, but looking at number of entries we had so far received, we thought the workshop would be better served (and, more to the point, could serve its purpose better) by giving more people a little more time to join. So the new deadline will now be Tuesday, Dec. 16, at 5 p.m. Entries should be received at the UPICW office in Diliman by that date and time, or else postmarked no later than Dec. 16.
As I’ve mentioned before, we bring 12 creative writers in mid-career up to Baguio every summer for a week of intense discussions about their work. We earmark eight of these slots for obvious standouts nominated by the UPICW staff, but four fellowships are available for open competition, open only to writers who’ve already published a book or are close to doing so, or who have won a number of significant competitions.
More details and application forms are available at the UPICW office in UP Diliman and on the ICW website at http://www.up.edu.ph/~icw. For inquiries, call 922-1830 and ask for Eva Cadiz.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
