The merriest season

I came back from the Philippines last September and reveled at the sounds of Christmas songs already being played in radio stations, the sight of Christmas trees of all sizes being sold in the malls – and those giant, multi-colored parol blinking by the roadside reminding you of many Christmases past. Or in my case, of the gifts I have received, the simplest being the most my life I’ve received, the simplest being the most memorable.

When I was 10 years old, my seatmate in school gave me a Christmas card that she herself had made. Nothing fancy, that one: a piece of coupon bond folded in the middle, and on the cover she drew a simple parol, the long red tail of crepe paper flowing in the wind.

When I was in high school, I had a crush on a girl (believe me). She was tall and pretty and she walked like Melanie Marquez. But it was not meant to be. I gave her a box of perfumed stationery I had stolen from my mother’s collection, but she returned it to me with the note that we would be better off as friends. Bright girl.

When I was in college, I received a book of modern short stories during our Kris Kringle. I was 18 years old. It was a confusing time. I was enrolled in business management at Ateneo, trying to balance the books in that assignment given by Miss Flora “Bebe” Lim in our Financial Accounting class. I could not balance the darned books for all the world to see, because all I wanted to do was to write short stories and poems.

Years later, when my father went to work abroad, he sent home a balikbayan box bursting with gifts. But I still remember the cassette tape that came with the box, which contained my father’s taped messages for all of us.

It contained words that I’m sure many sons and daughters have heard: study well and work hard, respect old people and don’t forget to pray. And whatever you do during weekdays, don’t forget to go to mass on a Sunday. That last request I followed all the years I was studying abroad. My classmates and I would dance in the clubs of Edinburgh on a Saturday night, but on a Sunday morning, I would be there, at Robbins Hall, bug-eyed from lack of sleep, attending my Catholic mass with a priest from Kenya who gave the most moving homilies.

It’s such an irony that the farther one goes away, the nearer he becomes. Those years when my father was so far away were the years he wrote to us – or told us through those tapes – what he felt. In his letters and in those tapes, thousands of miles away, my father’s deep and sad voice sounded so urgent and so near.

This year, the early birds included a former student of mine who now teaches at the Ateneo’s Department of English. She gave me The Faber Book of Seductions edited by Jenny Newman. In her note, she called me “my teacher in literature and seduction.” Hmmm. May she keep her boyfriend long and well.

Suddenly I recall a sculpted piece of chocolate I got years ago from an artist-friend. It’s thick and dark chocolate in the shape of a penis. The moment I got it I rang it up and asked her, “Who was the model for this?”

She did not laugh; no, she cackled on the other end of the line. And then her revelation: “Frankly, my dear, I patterned it after a consul’s dick.”

“Which embassy?” I asked.

She told me later, but I’m not saying from which embassy, not until hell freezes over.

Later in the many years I taught at Ateneo, I received a gaggle of gifts. They fell neatly into two categories: sex and religion.

Under the first category, I got a pair of truly hairy creatures from this famous gift shop. You lift this guy’s long bangs and voila! You have the guy’s pink appendage hanging pendulously between his legs. Well, this must be Gen Y’s version of the wooden man in a barrel from Baguio.

From two giggly girls at the back of the classroom I got a white T-shirt with “Boners” silk-screened on it. But do these girls know what a boner means? In the middle of the shirt are eight sets of skeletons. They could look like coconut trees swaying in the wind. But no, these two skeletons are making out in all imaginable positions!

Salvation was the other category. One of the girls in class gave me a big rosary that glows in the dark. Two other girls in the next section gave me not one, but two, images of the Blessed Virgin Mary. One of the boys – the most eloquent in class – also gave me a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary with this note: “No more half-naked men, please.”

In my mind, I riffled through the films I’ve shown in class. The only one with a half-naked man was the film Innocent Erendira, a cinematic version of the late Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novella. But the young man supposedly plays the role of a young angel called Gabriel. He wants to save the young sex worker Erendira from her heartless grandmother, but instead, he falls in love with her. And then the angel and the sex worker make love.

In hindsight, I really do not know what I said in class that made some of my students give me images from the Catholic iconography. It’s as if they want to save me, or to bring me back to the straight and narrow path.

From a poet and friend, I also received a book wrapped in beautiful paper you wouldn’t want to tear. The book is Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, as translated by Stephen Mitchell. I’d lost my copy of Rilke’s book, which was sent to me decades ago by Fatima V. Lim, another poet now living in the United States.

Mitchell is a brilliant translator. His foreword reads: “I felt, as many readers have felt, that the letters were written for me. From the very first pages, where solitude is considered a positive experience, my life seemed to acquire a new clarity and sanction. So even before I read a line of Rilke’s poetry, I regarded him as a spiritual teacher and came to treat him, in that small, light-green covered book, with the greatest respect, the way some people keep their copy of the I Ching wrapped in silk.”

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