‘Alive & Kicking’ at ‘T’

The late Robert Kennedy, an example of vitality during his time, once defined youth in words which I believe are even more true today. He said, "Youth is not a time of life, but a state of mind, a temper of will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease."

It is difficult to be a young person today. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to be any kind of person in this complex, rivetingly fast world today. Especially for the youth who have to worry about where their next meal will be coming from, those of the privileged class who feel, however, that there is more to life than exercising well the professions they have chosen, leading good and decent lives, indulging in sports that keep them healthy and fit, eating the right foods, having friends that love and respect them, and performing their responsibilities as good Catholics to the best of their abilities...the world can get to be merely an existence of comfort.

Why? There is a craving, a wanting. Because there are new adventures and there is new knowledge. There is a fundamental need for self-expression. Not too long ago, I used to hear the phrase "the silent majority" rather often. There is no such thing as a silent majority in the Philippines today. Perhaps, the silent minority. What an obscene phrase in an open society like ours. To be silent is to be dead. To be silent is to be lying within an urn or under a headstone. To be alive is to be kicking..."alive and kicking" my mother used to say cheerfully every time we asked her how she was. Now, at 93 years of age, having spanned almost a century, she can’t seem to say that anymore. This is not just accidental. There is a biological relevance to this. When a mother has a child inside her belly and she feels it kicking inside, she knows something is alive and aborning. My mother is the mother of four daughters and a son. I myself gave birth to three sons and a daughter, and we both know the feeling — one of the greatest feelings in a mother’s life, by the way. Every kicking assures us that our baby within is "alive and kicking." I’ve never felt good about silence. When there is silence, there could be terror. When there is deafening silence between two mates, this could be the saddest state of all. Silence is what the Germans of the Thirties experienced and what followed was inevitable.

It doesn’t mean you’ve got to be young in order to be alive and kicking. After a punishing imprisonment of close to three decades of his life, Nelson Mandela strode across the great big stage at Geneva Telecom from his seat of honor as opening guest speaker, the biggest telecom event in the world, with a gait that revealed the story of his suffering, and instantaneously captured the admiration and applause of his global audience. This was just a couple of years ago. When he began his speech with the words: "Blindness to the humanity of other human beings is a corrupting disease," he was as magnificent as he was alive and kicking!

At that same event, I was privileged to be in the roster of five keynote speakers for the first plenary session. I had prepared a speech which I felt was rather well written, captioned "The Asian Spirit and Asian Thrusts," being the only Asian and the only female keynoter. I had also organized and prepared my mind for the open forum pretty well, I thought. But the words of Nelson Mandela that rang loud and clear shattered my worldly speech and those of the four other keynote speakers, on telecommunications and the impact of globalization. All five of us keynoters were indeed not as "alive and kicking" as the great Mandela.

Being alive and kicking, especially for the young, suggests being absolutely potent...to do good when you can, and to hold your wit and intelligence like a shield against other people’s envy and malice. But above all, to laugh and enjoy yourself in a life of your own choosing, and in a world of your own making. In order to be alive and kicking, you’ve got to be strong and aggressive and tough and resilient to survive the evil ways of political society, but full of feeling for the things you cherish and the values you hold close to your soul. You’ve got to be everything that’s you, deep at the center of your being. It is so sad when the complexity of one’s psyche sometimes compels that person to hide behind the mask of the unreal, brilliant though he may be. You’ve got to be brave enough to live life creatively. The "creative" is the place where no one else has ever been in the manner you are doing it. Many times, you have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself. This happened to me, but that’s a long story.

Last Sunday, July 22, after Sunday lunch at home when I myself cooked for the family "Spaghetti alle Vongole," crispy fried chicken wings and pineapple over ham, my kids told me to visit the Power Plant Mall at Rockwell. "After such a heavy meal, Mom, it’s good to just keep walking and window shopping over there...the bookstores are good and some stores with locally made products are nice." I have never been one for window shopping and strolling in a mall. Whenever I visit one, it is always with specific objectives in mind: a birthday gift or two, a wedding gift or two, etc.

I was not prepared for the excitement generated by a store called "T," and I was not prepared for the discovery that the store’s owners were two young women, two lovely sisters whose parents I know very well...Tisha Espiritu-Garcia (T is for Tisha), 31 years of age, wife and mother, and Michelline Espiritu-Suarez, 34 years old, wife and mother. I also was not prepared to see how excellently done the bags and shoes were...truly world class, in fact, outstandingly world class; simple designs with colors and hues that didn’t shout but were muted in elegance and in utility; bags not difficult to handle, made in the Philippines, designed and crafted by the Filipino. The little black bag, the little beige bag, the little chartreuse bag, the baby pink bag, the big brown shopping bag...all so slickly made; if there were visible stitches all of them were straight and perfect. Aware of the Filipino woman’s craze for shoes and sandals, these were displayed so attractively I felt like buying all of them without exception, all of them, in the easiest of colors to handle. The craftsmanship was superlative and the price ranges unbelievably easy on the purse. These T shoes and bags sold at the T store, on the second level of Rockwell’s Power Plant Mall were definitely on a par, if not better than the Kate Spade products selling seven to 10 times more. I don’t think I will ever purchase a Kate Spade bag anymore, for the T bags made here in the Philippines sold at the "T" store have outclassed the Kate Spade variety. By doing so I will certainly be buying Filipino.

Tisha and her sister Mitch have succeeded in zeroing in on an extremely enticing product to the Filipino woman... T store was "alive and kicking’ that afternoon. So was Tisha, with the answers she gave to my questions. There is an excellent synergistic relationship between the two sisters — they are definitely in sync, which is the basic reason why the enterprise is running so smoothly. Where Tisha is the creative designer, Mitch is the systems expert who takes care of the finances and the administrative management of the business, their respective backgrounds providing them with sufficient experience and knowledge to carry on with their responsibilities. Both are excellent homemakers, are wives and mothers to the core first and foremost. Tisha just happens to be married to Glenn Garcia, one of my favorite young men and son of good friends from way back. That Sunday afternoon, Glenn, dashing as ever, arrived with daughter Yanna, and "T" indeed became alive and kicking with the number of customers the store attracted that lazy afternoon.

Let me tell you one other ingenious dimension of "T"...there is a bag named after daughter Yanna; another named after mother Marilen, and an extremely impressive bag, the design inspired by and conceived during EDSA II — the bag’s name is Gloria! I am certain President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo will be impressed by this bag excellently designed and superlatively crafted by the Filipino and ingeniously marketed by two Filipino women, young, creative and enthusiastic, both enjoying the excitement of having started and established a thriving enterprise they can be proud of — two young girls with wonderful families of their own, and an inherent love for their country, the Philippines.

It feels good to listen to Tisha talk about their expansion plans — possibly an office line of briefcases, portfolios and passport holders; a young "T-Girl" line; a glamour line, but these are all going to be dedicated, I am sure, to the Filipino woman’s good taste.

The enthusiasm sparkling in Tisha’s eyes that Sunday afternoon reminded me of some lines I had read from one of the books of Flora Lewis, all of them on women in general. She said that the world seems to be losing the essential quality of enthusiasm, the interest which fires people and makes it unnecessary for them to ask, "What is the point of my life?" Lewis said some have it in abundance... artists, scientists, educators, bankers, business tycoons — people whose driving concern is doing, not having. Flora Lewis stressed (this particular aspect of her treatise is hard to forget), that: "The greatest possible luxury is not to know for sure when you are working and when you are doing something else — to enjoy the pursuit of your concern so much that you’d probably be doing it even if you didn’t think of it as your job, your business, or your work."

This, I think, is what is happening to two talented and enterprising sisters. You don’t have to tell me that both are indeed "alive and kicking," proud to be Filipino, happy at home, happy at work.