Beyond the basics

At midnight after Glenda knocked out electric posts in Metro Manila and uprooted trees like they were weeds, my mother Sonia awoke to shouting.

It was midnight, what could the screams be all about?

When she opened her eyes, she realized why. The lights were back on.

Last Sunday after five days without power because her tree-lined neighborhood looked like a war zone of felled acacia and mango trees, my sister Val and her family sang Auld Lang Syne.

The lights were back on and “it was like New Year’s Eve in my house.” The refrigerator was humming, the dogs were barking, her children were exulting!

My friend and neighbor Rosary Ysmael posted on her Facebook page: “Electricity, Internet, cable are back. Tonight I will have a warm bath and sleep like a queen.”

In this day and age, food, clothing and shelter have ceased to be essentials to survival. Cavemen needed fire and sticks to survive because in their world, those were the basics in order for them to eke out a living and elbow it out with the fittest in their tribe.

Today, without diminishing the importance of family for survival, we need more than just the basics to survive.

We need the tools that have held us hostage for a better life -— electricity, phone communication, Internet, television and cable. We are helpless without them, and not because we have become materialistic, technology-dependent brats.

It’s because we have progressed from the cavemen, the bar to satisfaction has been raised, and from the moment the filament in a light bulb was lit more than a century ago, from the moment John Gorrie invented the refrigerator and Willis Carrier improved efficiency in the workplace with the air-conditioner, there was no turning back for the descendants of Adam and Eve.

What is it about light that elicits such glee, such merriment — such life — from people? Even when you remind them they are much, much better off than Yolanda’s survivors, people will not mask their impatience for the return of power to their homes.

My colleague Büm Tenorio’s nanay is willing to brave a trip to Manila just to have a glass of cold water because the corner 7-11 in their Laguna neighborhood has run out of tube ice. Yes, they still have no electricity!

* * *

Perhaps Glenda was a breather, a semi-colon in our fast-paced, busy schedules, whether we are homemakers or stockbrokers.

Then suddenly we have to have 3-in-1 coffee instead of espresso, and sleep in rooms with open windows, sans artificial cooling devices we have taken for granted.

Adobo becomes the dish du jour and coffee shops and restaurants with WiFi become a refugee camp for those who feel deprived of a basic right — Internet.

Restaurants with power make brisk business and the new heroes are those who are at their posts despite the howler.

Children are the most restless, but the most resilient. Daphne Oseña-Paez tells her young daughters that if their iPad batteries run out, they’re gone for good. So she leads them in art activities and they are kept occupied.

A friend who owns a big export chain sends a message that the downed tree in the entrance to our compound can be the stuff of several salad bowls. The twigs could be nests for flower arrangements. Our village manager is just so happy with her offer to recycle the fallen trunks.

In an emergency room especially after a big accident, everyone and his mother believes he is the top priority. He cannot wait for assistance, and understandably so.

After a howler, everyone home in the dark demands relief and Meralco has my sympathy and understanding, even if a friend, university dean Bob Zozobrado was still camping out as of yesterday at the Manila Hotel (you work hard, you get the comfort that you deserve!) because power had not yet been restored in his home.

Nature is a formidable foe and the Meralco linemen had probably never had so many poles in their lives to set upright again. In my life, I have never seen southern Metro Manila littered with so many felled trees and poles, twigs and leaves blanketing concrete roads like it were autumn in the tropics. I experienced Milenyo’s wrath in 2006, and since it unleashed it in broad daylight, I thought it was stronger.

But I didn’t see as many trees crisscrossing our leafy neighborhood then like it were a lumber mill.

Nature doesn’t choose its victims. And so you see rich enclaves without power and informal settlers with homes all aglow.

In the end, we all have to await our turn.

In a recent episode of The Good Wife starring Julianna Marguiles as topnotch lawyer Alicia Florrick, she is asked by a potential investor in her firm what she wants in life.

“I want a happy life,” she said, “and to control my fate.”

Amen. The first is easier. We can learn to take out the crayons in our drawers when our iPad batteries ran out. But Glenda has taught us the second wish is much, much harder to achieve.

We can fault our stars, but that’s just the way it is.

* * *

Last Sunday, our banker son Chino invited us out to dinner, a rarity. Ed readily agreed and when I saw father and son armed to the teeth with their laptops and iPads, I knew the underlying reason for Chino’s sweet offer. You see, we had all of the basics restored to our home except WiFi and 3G and LTE weren’t getting us wired, either.

During dinner, we talked about the basics in life and Chino said that for his generation, the Internet was more essential than cable TV, both for information and entertainment.

During dinner, he found himself staring at the untouched cheese-covered nachos for an eternity.

Because in front of him his middle-aged parents were furiously surfing the net, one on FB, the other on his e-mails.

The Internet is basic to what generation, sayeth you Chino?

* * *

The oft-repeated admonition that we should learn to live with the basics is, I think, overrated.

We grieve and sympathize with those who have even less than the basics in life. But those of us who can aspire to have more than life’s basic necessities should be encouraged.

Like Alicia in The Good Wife, I want a happy life and the means to control it when I can.

If I hanker for more than the basics like air-conditioning when it’s hot, cable TV and WiFi (not yet restored in my home as of this writing), it isn’t a sign of extravagance.

It’s a motivation to work hard, to lift the bar of the basics in my life so that which makes me happy — next to family — becomes within reach.

(You may e-mail me at [email protected].)