Travels with my brother
I had long planned my trip to the US West Coast to attend to family matters when my brother Jim decided he would come, too. I was grateful for the company. The flight would be long and boring. I figured he could make it at least a bit interesting.
He has always been good company with a never ending repertoire of stories and jokes. When we were kids on a roadtrip with most of us 10 siblings and our mother in our trusty Taunus, he and Raffy, who is a year younger, would keep us entertained with their observations about the landscape, the people in the car, reciting poems and declamation pieces they learned in school, and life in general. Although they had to sit at the back of our station wagon with the baggage, they didn’t complain much. In fact, they kept us in stitches as they perorated on everything —from the philosophical to the absurd. Mostly the absurd.
When we were bit older — I was 18 , Lory was 14 and Jim was 13 — Jim had learned to play the guitar pretty well; and we three had learned to sing folk songs from a Peter, Paul and Mary album that our older sister Tictac brought home from the US.
We were invited by the late Sonny Joaquin to sing at a “hootenany,” a folk song concert in Baguio. At 13, Jim didn’t savor the prospect of spending part of his summer with his older sisters, but we were a trio and he had to accompany Lory and me on the guitar. However, when we got to Baguio, we found that our sponsors had mistakenly billed us as the Paredes Sisters.
That made our gig even less palatable to Jim who threatened to take the next bus back to Manila. He was such a curmudgeon who did only what he had to do. He played the guitar, while Lory and I emoted and relished the company of new friends. Jim, meanwhile, fretted over a remark made by Sonny who told him jokingly that his problem was he didn’t have a sense of humor. Of course, that wasn’t true. Jim was one of the funniest kids around. But he was insecure.
He tolerated Lory and me for a couple of years, singing at campus concerts in Manila. Almost each time, his tummy would go sour just before our turn on stage. But we did fine. Pretty soon, Jim created his own group of 12 high school classmates who called themselves the Apolinario Mabini Hiking Society, and our siblings’ trio became history. You know the rest. Now he is a solo artist who continues to compose, record and perform. Lory also never stopped singing in high school, college and beyond. And although I sing with my family and friends, it is not what defines me. I became a journalist.
I never again traveled with Jim until last week when we flew to California together. He is actually a great travel companion. There is never a dull moment with him. The little boy who perorated funnily about everything continues to thrive. Jim in his 60s is totally entertaining. He is also very caring and helpful to an older sister. Except that I love the anonymity of being in a crowd of strangers where no one knows me, and traveling with Jim is like walking under a spotlight. He is easily recognized. People tend to stare, peer, smile, wave, shake his hand and ask to pose with him for a selfie. He chats with them, poses for pictures, asks his new friends to tag him when they post the picture, while I stand idly by until he finally introduces me, the invisible one: This is my sister.
With him at rallies or at the mall, I tend to veer away when the fans come and ask for selfies with him. While I have always been proud of his accomplishment as an artist, I tend to undervalue his celebrity. He is my kid brother, after all.
But traveling with him, at the airport, on an international flight, and here in California, I had no escape. I watched him up close as Filipinos, both women and men, greeted him warmly, bringing their CDs for him to autograph, posing for pictures with him, telling him about their favorite Apo songs. There are those who courted or were courted with his music as their theme songs. Some nurses recalled the choreography they learned in high school to Pumapatak na Naman ang Ulan. He brought a guitar to a health facility where we visited our sister and quickly became the pied piper who accomodated every request by the Filipino nurses and patients for a song, playing and singing for hours, going beyond the Apo repertoire — from pop to Broadway to rock and roll.
While within the family we can sing for hours going through a rich repertoire that goes back to our childhood, I had never seen Jim do the same for strangers. He played spontaneously, sharing his talent generously, tirelessly, like the energizer bunny, until his fingers hurt too much he had to stop playing.
On this trip, I observed my brother up close in his celebrity and humanity. He’s not bad, not bad at all.
