How to celebrate your 50th

Think of it as the equivalent of eloping instead of the cathedral wedding and grand ballroom reception you had for your first marriage. Otherwise, you’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes — trying to live up to someone else’s expectations of how everything should play out, having various personages in attendance just so it can be reported that such personages attended, paying through the nose for food, decorations, and entertainment that are forgotten the following day by every single one of your guests, despite all the pictures, videos, and society columns gushing how memorable the occasion was.

  Think of Gigi Reyes. Celebrating her 50th in typical fashion and having the milestone event live on only as photographic evidence of a profligate lifestyle and an unfortunate predilection for off-shoulder bouffant gowns.  Then, she must live with the added insult of disavowals from bigwigs that their presence was anything more than a social obligation.

Here’s the foolproof way to observe that important rite of passage; enjoying yourself thoroughly, yet avoiding any chance of a future plunder charge.                 

1. Pick the right location. Choose somewhere remote but not too so distant that you actually read the airline’s inflight magazine. A secluded place (accommodating 18 pax max) whose exclusivity owes nothing to signs, tasselled cordons, bouncers or dress codes.  Let hundreds of miles of ocean separate you from the nearest first class municipality, where oglers recognize only one of your companions — despite majority of you being, at least, distinguished in certain circles, if not, somewhat famous. Like Sting, or Beyonce, he is called by a single sobriquet: Davidsalon.

 When you jokingly challenge the chatty driver, “Ako?  ’di mo ’ko kilala? he politely says, “Mukha nga kayong familiar, Mam,” but ventures no guesses.  

Pick a location where Internet is spotty. This way, you can get nothing but the most crucial business done. Workaholics can but try to chill. Facebook addicts have to make do without their daily dose of 300 affirmations. Maria may as well delight in having finished two books, including The Hard Thing About Hard Things.   

2. Pick the right venue. One that isn’t in Boracay. One that offers an entire island with beach and mountain, sand and corals, gardens and forest, bath tubs and outdoor showers, and a swimming pool that seems like it’s filled with bath water you drew yourself.

One that keeps out anyone ornery or rambunctious unless that person is your dear friend, or your son (or unless that person happens to be you).  

One that provides numerous nooks for privacy — strategically-located hammocks, lounge chairs or bean bags, and pocket garden retreats for the hot-flashing or the hung-over.

 But if you want serious solitude, you can have a solo massage that elevates you to a nirvana-like state. You can steer a Hobie Cat so far out that the quiet roars in your ears.  Or you can walk to the end of the dock, don pre-rinsed and laid-out snorkelling gear, and descend into the house reef where an unending procession of sealife sends you into a trance.  Doing some soul-searching? You can take a jet ski clear around the neighbouring islands and the only soul you will encounter is your own.

At the same time, the staff prepares settings encouraging conviviality. Making them so appealing that the workaholics, the hot-flashing and hung-over cannot but partake. A massive round table sure to prompt reveries of the King Arthur legends you read as a tween, if not the horrible movie musical your parents forced you to watch as a child (but oh, that Franco Nero was so pogi, wasn’t he?). A long picnic table shaded by coconut trees for traditional Sunday lunch.  A poolside cocktail bar.  A torch-lit dinner on the beach.

 Then there’s the metamorphosing living room.  At 6:30 a.m., it’s an airy yoga studio —after the staff, like pixies, has removed the coffee table and moved the sofas back, rolled out and down, respectively,  the mats and  the projector screen. The early birds converge to salute the sun, even as it mildly chides, “What took you, you slackers?!”  At night, it transforms into a movie theatre for Oli to show off his solo-produced AVP on Antarctica. It also becomes a karaoke lounge, where those who can’t get with Kool and the Gang are free to French leave. The few who remain shrug off their un-kool behavior (It’s up to you. What’s yoh pleazhah?).

The place must feel like your own. That you — if you’d done well in your chosen profession,  won a couple of lotteries, yet still wanted to retain your self-respect — would build such a place. Luxurious but not lavish. Tasteful but not hashtag trending.  Highlighting native artistry and natural tropical features versus carving out a square-shaped lake or erecting faux Grecian columns. You would design such a place if you meant for it to be an elegant vacation home to share with loved ones, rather than a commercial enterprise targeted at a socio-demographic of dubious values and worse judgment.

The operative word is home: that is, if you could bear the price of a British mayordomo, a Swedish all-around and a cook of Italian/Lebanese blood pumped by a Pinoy heart.   A home doesn’t apportion shampoo, conditioner and bath salts in cunning little containers.  It doesn’t give you a toothbrush meant to disintegrate after a week or soap made for tiny hands.  A home doesn’t put a swirly logo on everything, provide pitifully few bottles of water, or make you sign for every godam consumable.  A home is about making you feel at home. Of course, your laundry gets done for free.  Of course, the Body Shop toiletries are too large for travel kits.  Guests in your home don’t need a menu of different selections for each meal; everyone trusts in the specialties of the house. Everyone wants chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven and coconuts plucked off the nearby tree whether you asked for them or not. Some half-wit with a job title that didn’t exist eight years ago better not say otherwise. 

3. Pick the right company. Have a good mix of nerds and jocks, cowboys and indolents, challenge-seekers and challenge-challenged. The more individuals embodying two seemingly contradicting archetypes, the better. Actually, the more Laperals you have, the better. “Ang kyut nila!” Beth exclaims; the hardnosed news desk veteran is beside herself with gigil. The family is so freakishly charismatic, Maria dubs them, The Incredibles, and the name sticks. There’s always at least one of them around to make a situation work. Whether it’s paddleboarding from one end of the horizon to the other to supply the lithe foreground for the perfect photo, performing water-skiing stunts or cannonball dives for your awed 11-year-old, engaging anyone so-inclined on a gamut of subjects from the perils of the Double Dragon, where HD technology is going, the perfect Jewish pickle,  to lizard turds.  Offering companionable silence as you do your Surya Namaskara A, or energetic cheers to spur you to that next impossible step toward the summit, incredibly, a Laperal is always there.

Have at least one oenophile who will deliberate for weeks over which grape varietal to pair with lobster, since the different sauces make it tricky.  Clifford will plan the perfect white to go with lechon, a rose to drink with either a rustic Bolognese or delicate Alfredo pasta.  By golly, he will find something that works with sinigang, as long as it’s served in precisely shaped stemware. For his punctiliousness, his wife Melissa might roll her eyes and say, “See what I have to live with every day?” But the rest of you should only be too happy to imbibe Cliff’s wisdom and his wine. 

In other words, all of you must like wine.

Have a good mix of old friends, older friends, and new friends. This way, there’s always someone who hasn’t heard the one about how Oli kicked down a door to rescue Dindo, trapped in the bathroom of our one-star resort (but only after Oli asked, “Are you decent, partner?”), the one where David, though he neither sings nor plays a musical instrument, once performed before a rapt crowd, a straight-faced self-accompanied rendition of Roxanne.  Or the one where Penny, seeing nothing but a blank screen for the first few moments of your stepson’s indie film, rummages frantically for her eyeglasses, only to see that there really is nothing to see but a blank screen. For a good five minutes. (And it’s because she’s an old friend that she sits through the rest of it).  

Have only people who like to laugh. This way, the unavoidable mishaps (aka Cebu Palpac, Melissa locking herself out of her villa) are merely fodder for your widening travel group’s repertoire of funny anecdotes.  Dindo’s jokes are just as hilarious in their 10th retelling. Tales involving failed ventures in China, family squabbles, terminal illness or a movie star cousin-in-law’s death somehow conclude in a punchline or a wry bon mot. Even newbie Jurina lets out a titter when you twit her about wearing a spangly mini skirt and false eyelashes on a caving expedition.

 If by some chance someone who doesn’t like to laugh finds his way among you, then refer to the rule about wine. If that fails, turn to Clifford’s failsafe advice: champagne works with everything.

4. Spend at least five days. You see sunsets in five kinds of fabulous. If you spent anything less you would miss five different weather changes: Humid. Breezy. Bright. Rainy. Downright schizo.

Your son gains genuine fishing experience; none of this playfishing in pens or ponds. The real deal.  Out on a boat for extended periods with beer-guzzling men.  By the fourth day, they will have caught enough fish to serve as a ceviche and he will have picked up Steve’s salty vocabulary and Kiwi accent.

The tuko’s insistent tuk-uhh becomes this soothing thing. It dawns on you that you’ve never seen so many butterflies not in a butterfly farm before. You come to accept that the trilling you hear from the outdoor tub is not produced by gadgetry but actual feathered creatures.  

You need five days within which to catch sight, at least once, of each of the following species: sea turtles, octopi, barracudas, blue-spotted stingrays, as well as that flash of tulingan as they leap and plunge in unison.

For the middle-aged, five days in swimsuits reveal more than pot bellies and cellulite. Everything hangs out, as it were.  Small group discussions are organically created.  Among the subjects:  Why some are childless. Why some cut off their child. Why the prospect of impending grandparenthood is unbearable.

Amid such discussions, scars from mastectomies and heart bypasses converge into a single stripe you wear on your chests like decorated Marines from the same PMA class.

You leave with a deeper understanding of what past choices brought each of you to where you are today and which of them brought you together these last five days.

Whereas you and Ailene started careers in broadcast news together, only for you to be you, and for her to be SVP of a multinational bank with two children in Oxford;

Whereas, you and she used to dive in 5-knot currents, where today, you but not she, balk at donning scuba gear again;

 In five days, you reaffirm that there are no regrets or conceits between you, only great mutual  affection,  as the both of you float, mesmerized, while a blackfin shark circles. 

In five days, David, in all his heft, Joy, in hers, will talk about doing triathlons and being Miss Bikini Body again, respectively. We all laugh and sincerely wish it to be so.

After five days, the wine and bubbly are all gone.

After five days, some of you will have built up the nerve to tell their no-longer-so-new-friend that her business partner is a mandurugas.   She greets this revelation merrily, just like she did Dindo’s jokes in all their iterations.

After five days you leave sated, happy, only your son, with reluctance.

You leave marvelling at the range of choices that lie ahead of you still, limited, perhaps by the state of your knees, but, if anything, expanded by your hard-won maturity.    

Five days will have to do because the world is calling you back. Windmills, other than the one on the hilltop you just conquered, await.

 Some of you need to keep jobs. Some of you need to keep providing jobs. Some of you have to hop a plane to Amsterdam.  Some of you have that bad China venture to make up for. Some of you have to face up to grandparent responsibilities. Even The Incredibles.

On the fifth day, the driver you had before, now taking you from the Coron pier to the Busuanga Airport, finally realizes who you are.

“Alam ko na kung sino kayo, Mam!” he jubilantly volunteers. “Kayo si Chanda Romero, hindi po ba?”

You have no riposte. You leave it as is: the perfect punchline to cap the perfect 50th birthday celebration.  

* * *

For inquiries, email bliss@ariaraisland.com.