What I remember is that Tillie and I were making arrangements to have lunch with Kay or Tita Cake, as my youngest daughter used to call her. Kay is a former cousin-in-law who now lives in the States. But we became good friends and I hadn’t seen her in around 20 years and was eager to see her again. Then suddenly I received a text that said Mike, Kay’s brother-in-law, had died and his memorial service would be on Wednesday. Mike and I were also old friends. When I was selling at the Legaspi market he would drop by and converse a while.
“Was that recent?” someone asked.
Around six months ago, I replied. Much later I realized I had stopped selling at the market two years ago. I am getting old, losing my sense of time, getting forgetful. It’s hard, this business of getting older.
Anyway I decided to go to Mike’s memorial service. There was a time we were all very close. We — a big bunch of first cousins and their wives — would get together on Sunday nights for drinks, dinner, talk and laughter. That was around 48 years ago. Now some of us have died. Others are turning 80 or are wheelchair-bound. Time has really marched on. That sort of stuns me — the way time just keeps marching on and changing lives as it passes.
That’s how I ran into Mila, a first-cousin-in-law again and did not recognize her. The last time I saw her she was single, rounder, and her hair was all black. Now she is white-haired, widowed and thin with grownup children, one of them a chef. She invited me to the Lourdes fiesta in Kanlaon and brought me back to visit one of my childhood sites.
When I was a little girl, we lived in Santa Mesa, an easy drive to Quezon City. We would occasionally come to church here, especially on Holy Thursday. Lourdes Church was part of our visita iglesia itinerary but it looked different then. It had a big garden. There was no school. The Santos-Viola home is directly across Lourdes Church. On the way there I thought, this must be a multi-generational friendship playing. Jose Rizal, my great-grand-uncle, was a friend of the Santos-Violas and now here I am going to their house to renew a friendship.
Actually once they were my in-laws. Carlos Santos-Viola, Mila’s father, was married to Caridad Nakpil, my former mother-in-law’s sister. Since my marriage was annulled we are now no longer in-laws. We are out-laws, related by a strong bond of friendship and genuinely fond of each other.
Bing, my former brother-in-law, was there. We sat together and caught up. I admired the decorations. He told me it was Mila’s son who had done everything — cooked, decorated, everything. Talented, I thought, like the rest of the family.
We went inside the house. There on top of the desk was a yellow book with the title in bold black letters, Teacher Teacher. It is a book I am reading now, a tribute to engineer Demetrio A. Quirino Jr., a teacher, founder of the Technological Institute of the Philippines, father of Elizabeth Quirino-Lahoz, whom I taught to write. I wonder where they got the book? Was it given to them or did they buy it? Were they at the launch? But there were so many guests I couldn’t ask.
Actually I have a piece in that book. I remember Beth Lahoz calling me and asking me to write about my favorite teacher. It’s the sort of book you like to keep beside your bed and read randomly before you read the book that will actually put you to sleep. It’s a good book. Always before I put it down I turn to page 269, where there is an illustration of engineer Demetrio Quirino Jr. and whisper to it, Were you really that good-looking? In my mind I see him smile.
I mean, what is this? I find myself since Christmas drawn into the fold of my former in-laws and it feels that I never left, that time hasn’t flown. I am in awe of that — the comfort we feel with each other. We are even reading the same books!
But one thing I have learned as I live is that life is strangely beautiful. It teaches you over time about friendships and how they last. You see a sister-out-law you have not seen in 15 years and it’s like you were together only yesterday. A week has passed and we sit at the dining room this time of their ancestral home in Barbosa, Quiapo, sharing lunch of siopao and siomai and giggling over the way I push a cat off the table and its inability to fall gracefully after having a serious but lighthearted talk about the possible future of the house.
Sisters-in-law once. Sisters-out-law now. Nevertheless still united. And most important of all, bound together by very strong love.
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