Family time
About a week ago at this same time, I was ironing a shirt in the basement of a townhouse in Centreville, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. It was a short-sleeved linen shirt, black with faint gray checks, and I’d bought it earlier at the local resale shop for a few dollars, then laundered and dried it for pressing. It was nothing special my paunch is beyond any kind of cosmetic salvation but it reminded me of a similar shirt my late father had worn as a young man, the same shirt in the picture I keep of him in my home office in Quezon City.
I’m older now than my father was when that picture was taken. He’s seated at his clerk’s desk, holding a pen they all did in those office shots poised to leave his mark on the world. I remember when he’d take me along to his office and I’d rock in his swivel chair, playing with a double-headed pencil that was red on one end and blue on the other. I thought that to grow up like my father would be the coolest thing, and when, these days, I look up from my work at that picture of him in that shirt, I feel doubly glad to have become a writer.
My father published no books, wrote no novels or poems, but he was good with words, and wrote speeches and letters for politicians who didn’t know half of what he did. But then of course they knew or had something he didn’t, so he ended up writing for and about them instead of being written for and written about.
That’s just the way it goes, I tell myself today. My brother Jess and I have gone a few steps past our Tatay to write our own books, but we’re not too proud that we won’t do what he did, so we both work as professional wordsmiths, lending our skills to those blessed with either less time or less articulation. Our father wanted to be a lawyer and would have become a sharp one; in his middle age, Jess is completing Tatay’s dream for him, and should take and pass the bar exam next year.
When I saw that shirt at the resale shop in Centreville, I felt as if the planet had taken an extra spin to remind me of how much things had changed and yet also, as the cliché goes, how they had remained the same.
Centreville is where my sister Elaine lives with her husband Eddie and my mother Emy who, like many widows and retirees, shuttles back and forth between Elaine and me and my siblings in the Philippines. Since our married daughter Demi also lives in the US, in California, Beng and I have been spending our Octobers my semestral break with our Stateside family, and we all try to get together on one coast or the other.
It’s an arrangement that my father, who’s been gone for 14 years now and who never stepped out of the Philippines in all his 73, would have found bewildering. It’s an expensive annual pilgrimage that uses up all my leave credits and nearly all my savings, but I’m literally buying time. The older I get, the less utility money seems to have beyond meeting basic needs, and family time has become one of the most basic of such needs, and yet, paradoxically, also a luxury in this global age. Of course there’s the Internet and Skype and now even FaceTime video calling on the iPhone 4 which is a far cry from when I had to save up for the three-minute Sunday phonebooth calls to my family back in Manila when I was a graduate student in the Midwest, twenty years ago.
But there’s nothing like time spent together, never mind that you blew more than a month’s pay on the plane fare (and thank God for seat sales on Delta) to share a cheap Chinese $6.29-a-pound dinner with the family, or to haul three bags of good used clothes and knickknacks home from the resale shop with your mother and sister, laughing in the autumn chill. This is what we work and live for; this is what I wouldn’t trade for all the writing prizes in the world the mundaneity of moments that will mean little or nothing to anyone else, but which bring sense to sacrifice, in their emotional clarity.
For all the meanness that consumed this year’s American elections and I’ve seen quite a few of them Centreville remains my refuge and safe room, where I can feel sequestered, albeit temporarily, from the claims of all my jobs and all my responsibilities, and become just a son and a brother again. And I never take for granted what a privilege these vacations are, for all that I have to do to make them happen, at a time when hundreds of thousands of other Filipino families remain sundered by work without options, without savings, without hope of a reunion for the time it takes to complete a contract or to pay for the two-bedroom subdivision house.
This week, Centreville will be another memory of another year. Classes resume at the university, and I will be back in the classroom in Diliman, sweltering in the unseasonable heat, talking about how English both enslaved us and set us free. Back in Virginia, my mother will be playing Scrabble by herself, waiting for bluejays to descend on the offerings she leaves out for them on the porch; Demi will be attending to another stream of guests at her hotel in San Diego; my sister Elaine will be minding the collections of her Jewish law firm in DC; my sister-in-law Mimi will be looking for more ways to fight global poverty from her cubicle in the United Nations; Beng will be spending another week in New York helping her sister and her nieces settle into their new apartment, before flying home to attend to a growing stack of paintings awaiting her restorer’s touch.
And for the next 12 months, I will be pecking away at my keyboard in my study, beneath my father’s picture, saving up for that next ticket to IAD, or SAN, or JFK, wherever the family decides to become family again.
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My recent columns on editing as a profession drew a lot of responses, and some of them brought up that dreaded question: “How much should you charge for your editing services?” I knew someone was going to ask this, and my unfortunate and frustrating answer had to be, “It depends on the job, on who’s contracting you for the job, on your own credentials, on the schedule, etc.” Within that range I’ve asked everything from a couple of bottles of good wine for something almost token a review of a document taking no more than a few minutes to the low six figures for editing a full-sized book.
Again, there’s no fixed set of rates for these things, not even for me, although established publishers like Anvil or the UP Press will have some system to go by when they contract editors for specific jobs. What I often do is to keep a personal goal in mind I’d say, for example, that this particular job will cover all my credit card bills for the month or get me a new MacBook Air, or take care of my next ticket to the US to visit my mother; that way I’m happy and motivated.
I try not to undersell myself, but I also try to understand the client’s needs and capabilities. I have no compunction charging affluent clients and institutions top rates; but sometimes I might also do jobs pro bono or at a deep discount for something or some people I like.
After everything I wrote, that might sound awfully unprofessional let me just add here that I do have a bookkeeper and that I issue official receipts but what was it that I just said about money? Next to buying food, it should buy you and others some happiness on which, if you’re lucky, there just might be a sale.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
