Never too often

It’s never too early or too often to reconnect with the past and express what could easily turn out to be your final goodbyes.

Emotional I think I am not and morbid fascination with death is not in my DNA. I can be very stoic and unsentimental; some friends tell me I can be indifferent, even insensitive to people who want nothing more than to say hello for old time’s sake.

Perhaps it’s the way I was brought up or, to be fair to my parents, how I chose to live my life. I am not huggy-feely just like my father and my mother, too, was not given to public displays of affection.

When I lived in America during the martial law years it took time for me to behave like my American friends who embraced total strangers and rubbed cheeks as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

I was told that although Americans as a people are by nature gracious and friendly, this extroverted behavior owed much to Latino influence in the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. It had nothing to do with being presumptuous or making any sexual pass. People from South of the Border had no inhibitions about enfolding you in their arms and treating you like family. I also observed that of Afro-Americans who, for all the racist stereotypes, exuded warmth and brotherly love from the time you are properly introduced.

Despite our Spanish past, we Filipinos interact more like dour Asians; there’s a certain detachment, if not an emotional wall even within families. I, for one, have always felt awkward saying “ I love you” to anybody at the drop of a hat. Such intimacies may be appropriate for the closest of relations, but, it need not be stressed, never before the whole world.

By the time I resettled in Manila in 1988, I was overjoyed to note that some kind of beso-beso culture had flourished during my long absence. The downside was that these overt displays of affection carried a thick overlay of class and discrimination. What passed for High Society flaunted it with an air of pseudo-Iberian sophistication that they sadistically knew the aspiring middle classes would ape to the point of being ridiculous. It eerily evoked Rizal’s poseurs and charlatans in his 19th century novels.

I always got a good laugh out of this transmogrification of social-climbing to farce  in those TV sitcoms and Regal films of trying-hard Donya Budings and Porontongs mimicking villainous Etang Dischers and Oscar Keeses of Sampaguita days.

But what I found positive on the side was a more open and tolerant attitude about the past. Perhaps it comes with age. Modern society has actually moved a few halting notches towards sensitivity and grace. We no longer view the past as dead and done over with nor our parents and ancestors as disposable relics of yesteryears. There is a sharper awareness that the people we grew up with, those we knew and who knew us before we became somebody hold vital clues about where we came from and why we are the way we are today.

We forget or disregard the past at our own risk. Seldom will old friends and relatives seek us out. It is us who have to take time and effort to reconnect with them. The value we put to half-remembered relationships and fading memories is a matter of choice.

And so it has been that I spend more time with my father, now pushing 91 and in relatively fine shape, than in previous years. I had been remiss with filial obligations for so long until we lost Mom in 1974 when I was far away. I have accepted that Dad would not live forever and there would be little time to make up for all the years of absence. We cannot have too many reunions knowing that each one could well be the last.

The brutal fact of life is that we all live by a thread and what’s here can be gone in the twinkling of an eye. If we wish to avoid bitter regrets and If-I-only-knew lamentations, we have to reach out and make peace before it is too late.

I am not talking of high drama and tear-soaked encounters but of seemingly mundane but cathartic revelations that come unexpectedly while you are just shooting the breeze or going done memory lane over slow dinners and picnics. You’ll never know when golden nuggets would pop out.

In my case, this willful surrender to duty meant crossing oceans and making two flying visits down to Mindanao over the last six months alone. There was no compulsion involved. Somehow I managed to juggle my schedule and find gaps where Dad could be fitted in without too much extra expense or stress.

Dad had gone to Seattle for free medical check-ups that we couldn’t afford in the Philippines where he has chosen to spend more and more of his late autumn years. He has a family and a new grandson there to feel giddy about and his stay seemed uneventful until the weather suddenly turned too cold for comfort.

“I’m going home,” he told me over the phone with an unusual tone of finality. His arthritis was acting up, it was eternally dark in Seattle, there was nothing to do and nothing to see. He’s been there and done everything. He missed sunshine and, most of all, his thinning but possessive band of buddies in the old homeland. It was his cri d’coeur, to put it in snooty French. 

I pleaded for him to hold his horses until two months later when I could go to New York and pick him up on the way home. Besides, changing flight dates would mean stiff penalties. I had no heart to tell him he cannot travel alone anymore. It reminded me of the painful day some years ago when I had to personally divest him of his car keys after he had a bad accident, one that he miraculously survived unscathed. Only his car was totaled.

“Don’t worry, I can travel by myself,” he said as I mentally recalculated my US schedule. My stepmom, of course, had been deputized to care for the adored baby until the Christmas break and couldn’t fly with Dad.

Well, you never argue with your father, more so with a nonagenarian who refuses wheelchairs in airports and won’t hear of any medical emergency or unexpected flap that could strike him down during a long trip across the vast Pacific Ocean. “I know what I am doing,” he would always end any discussion like the pope.

The long and short of it was that I once again conspired with my stepmom and siblings to keep him pre-occupied while I fast-forwarded my stopover in Seattle. They drove down to shop in duty-free Portland, scoured malls he had never been to, dined out at all the new chi-chi places in affluent Bellevue. He would growl constantly but happily make goo-goo eyes with the half-American grandson he decreed to be his exact lookalike.

When I materialized at their door, he was the soul of graciousness and good behavior. The nonstop grumbling and thundering declarations to take him to the airport so he could fly out by himself had evaporated into thin air.

It was time to negotiate and extract at least a week more out of his prematurely truncated US visit that was supposed to last into early January.

This time I was in command and he sheepishly followed. “We are driving down to Carmel and Monterrey,” I decreed. “You have been to San Francisco, LA, Las Vegas, Napa Valley, the Oregon Coast, Grand Canyon, and everywhere else but never to one of the most beautiful places on earth.”

Dad was well-read, he knew about John Steinbeck, Carlos Bulosan, the Filipino farm workers and how close inland and farming Salinas was to Carmel. He was a dedicated golfer for many years and he knew Pebble Beach was the best in the world. Like a kid, you grabbed his attention and kept him pacified by foisting new toys or taking him to a theme park he has never been to.

There was no question that this long road trip was tailor-made just for Dad. He was the boss and we were his minions. The pace of driving, where we stayed, what we ate, how long we slept and stayed in our rooms depended on his whims and preferences. There would be no acrimonious debates because his over-riding interest was never in doubt.

We were in no great rush. Dad could only take so much sightseeing although he loved posing for pictures and would invariably ask for more shots to be taken.

In Pebble Beach, he marveled at the centuries-old gnarled trees and couldn’t have enough of  the Lone Cypress, which literally stood in solitary splendor on top of a rocky promontory eternally buffeted by the thundering waves of the Pacific. Of the famous golf course at the water’s edge, he could only wish he had been young and rich to play there in the wake of Bing Crosby and all those Republican zillionaires. The million-dollar homes with drop-dead views of sea and mountains he simply drooled over. Old Carmel Mission brought back memories of how Christianity was laboriously brought to our own unpromising islands. Clint Eastwood’s Carmel-By-the-Sea evoked a quaint and artsy village we once visited in the South of France.

But Dad had no sense of envy or regrets. He was grateful enough to behold so much beauty, natural and man-made, co-mingling so harmoniously to the point that money seemed too vulgar to even think about.

In proletarian Salinas, heart of Steinbeck country, the farmer in Dad was agog over the limitless abundance of the land—grapes, lettuce, pears, melons, vegetables and grain as far as the eyes can see and beyond. We bought fresh fruits at Chicano bodegas and feasted on greasy chow mein in Chinese slophouses that must have catered to the Bulosan generation. We stayed in a cookie-cutter Marriott inn ran by a Korean lady with incomprehensible English who couldn’t stop grinning. We had breakfast at IHOP and felt sad about how franchises and chains have obliterated good cuisine from the lives of common folks who cannot afford fine-dining.

Unlike the Batangueño macho that he was in his prime, Dad was no longer imperious and demanding. He quietly appreciated being catered to and babied  to the gills. Still, he was not to be patronized. We knew better than to make him feel eternally grateful or to seem like we were doing his biding under duress.

Guided by some benign spirit, we and him somehow arrived at this honorable pact of give-and-take, and our time together could not but turn into sheer joy. Reversing roles, I became the doting parent he never was and he turned into the pampered but well-behaved kid I wish I had been a long time ago.

This is the spiel I give my friends who are now in similar situations with one or both parents or who just vicariously relish the thought of  how much happiness they could have shared with oldies who’ve moved on to a kinder and gentler world.

After that magical week in California, flying home to the Philippines with Dad in tow was a no-brainer. He did as he was told, clambering up to wheelchairs that I explained would speed us through the short stopover in Narita and get us out of NAIA in no time at all. I shuddered at how he could have coped with this trans-Pacific gauntlet that he last faced solo ten years ago. For all his bravado, I knew he was relieved that I came along over and above his proud  but  now hollow declarations of independence.

Although Dad masked his disappointment when I told him I was off to India and Nepal for Christmas, he realized it was too late for me to cancel that long-planned trip; it was his insistence on coming home early that had condemned him to spend the holidays by himself in Bukidnon.

He flashed a wide smile when I added, by way of consolation, that I planned to make up by spending New Year’s Day with him in our hometown and take him down to Davao and Gensan to see old friends. I kept that promise. I was back in Manila midnight of Dec. 31  and on a plane headed south at the crack of dawn a few hours later.

Dad was waiting at the airport. I knew he had counted the hours and days before my arrival. We were off to another father-and-son adventure and it was hard to tell who was more excited and who would savor every moment of it. Two month later, he called and told me that he and my stepmom, who had just rejoined him, were lonely. I picked up the hint and, to his utter surprise, said, “I’m coming down this week-end to be with you. We’ll go anywhere you wish.”

I could almost imagine him grinning like a Cheshire cat who just swallowed a canary. One dear friend roared with laughter and said I was simply making sip-sip to the old man. Whatever it was, I made at least one person on earth very happy indeed. I would find that score difficult to top on any day.  

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E-mail the author at noslen7491@gmail.com