My First American Thanksgiving

On board a Northwest Airlines plane, I tried to read myself to sleep without success. The words of an American humor columnist reverberated in my head—he wrote that Thanksgiving was celebrated only once a year because the minute one sets eyes on one’s family members, you realize the reason you have to meet them infrequently.

When Nov. 26 dawned, the voice of my sister-in-law Emily F. Marquez could be heard outside our guest bedroom door. She was up bright and early for a communal breakfast buffet awaiting us at The Marriott Hotel in Torrance, California. My family members were still stretching in their pajamas; Emily was ready to drive out of the driveway and couldn’t wait for my eldest girl Kimi to step out of the shower and dress. We got a severe five-minute scolding about American promptness and observance of schedules. Then she paused, unclenched her hands on the driver’s wheel, turned to us and said, “By the way, Happy Thanksgiving!”

The hotel was about half a mile away. When we reached the garden terrace, nephew Chico Fernandez announced that we just won the early-bird prize. Hurray for Filipino time.

And then the waves of Fernandez sets and sub-sets arrived, and Michelle Fernando Kanor’s cackle rose above the din of excited conversation. The tiny adorables shook hands solemnly or bussed the aunties, uncles, grandaunts and granduncles some of whom they were meeting for the first time.

My assignment was to organize games—the first I could think of was a quiz on the odd nicknames of my spouse Rolly and his six other siblings. Tig is Lucy Fernando, Kithel is Thelma Martin, Tasio is Maxlen, Aki is Emily, Nano is Nani, Banong is Willie and Rock is Rolly. The last operates under the illusion that he must’ve gotten that name from ’60s “Pillow Talk” heartthrob Rock Hudson. Maxlen the oldest brother dashed this illusion, saying Rolly the youngest was such a hungry child, he would even eat darak (duck feed).

It was a good sign that the second generation knew enough family history to answer my questions correctly. The prizes, Subic t-shirts from Nani and wife Nancy, who developed Moonbay Marina at the Subic Bay Free Port in Zambales, were disposed off quickly.

The preschoolers in the group like Joshua F. Bandy and Kamea F. Miranda read the words on their new shirts. If the US economy improves, Subic is the next destination of another grand Fernandez reunion five years down the road. Next year is too soon. Willie said, “Magkakasawaan agad (We’ll tire of each other too soon).”

A cousin on my side once sent a card that read: “Familiarity breeds contempt, but look what yours bred.” And it showed dozens of brats.

We had none of that familiar contempt on the Fernandez side. Kith and kin here imbibed in some way the example set by the formidable matriarch, Justiniana Beltran. Psychologist April Desiree Fernando, the eldest grandchild, articulated these lessons well in her recollections of her late Lola Uste whom she addressed as Nanay:
• It’s okay to feel things deeply and articulate colorfully;
• Be thrifty but have a generous spirit;
• Being strong can sometimes be confused with going about things alone;
• Silence can be both painful and healing, but you have to sit with it long enough to figure out what is happening.

Her Uncle Maxlen recalled the heroism of the patriarch who died in a vehicular accident. Liberato Fernandez sent many youth to school without his family’s knowledge. In one of their walks, Maxlen asked his Dad what he would do if Maxlen jumped into the raging river below them. The older man said he would save his son even if it meant giving up his own life.

In a video showing the Philippine-based siblings talking about their parents, Nani said he wished his mother had lived longer to see her children to be the successes that they are. He added that he has tried to keep his father’s own lesson to heart: to remain ever humble no matter how high a station in life he reaches.

It was a sister-in-law, Chingbee Fernandez, who summed up the ties that bind this family together in the lyrics to the song entitled “We Are Fernandez Family”: “Wherever we may be we are family / When times are hard / We’ll always have each other …/Sing to the world / We are Fernandez family.”

By the time the evening of speeches, games, dancing, singing, drinking and laughing ended, the littlest ones had gone up to their rooms while the male adults repaired for more sharing at a bar.

Someone said Thanksgiving should be renamed thanks living. I totally agree. It didn’t matter that there was no leftover turkey for sandwiches the morning after.

The children of Liberato and Justiniana Fernandez and their spouses in a photo taken by KIMI FERNANDEZ

Bawdy Broads

It speaks a lot about us that when the first volley of picture taking took place, we automatically grouped ourselves near the dessert end of the buffet table. I refer to High School Batch 1973 of St. Paul College, Quezon City.

We met last Saturday at the Hathaway Estates home of Celia in Los Angeles for a reunion that took months in the planning.
Almost half of the 17 Paulinians flew in from the East Coast, three of us from the Philippines. The rest were California residents.

I recognized everyone on sight, but hesitated when I faced Angelica, a pediatrician from Bakersfield. Still soft-spoken, she re-introduced herself. Yes, she seemed the most angelic among us, laughing soundlessly at our selective recollections and later, the tales from the nurses among us.

Marilou recalled the English-speaking classmate who pronounced the word diaphragm “dia-fragem.” No one could recall who it was, but that was good for a guffaw.

Lucy talked about her first years at a US hospital and how a Pinoy colleague was asked by a patient to look for her pocketbook. The nurse asked, “What is the title?” The patient repeated, “I want my pocketbook!” The nurse again asked, “Who is the author?”
Later, she and Lucy found out that pocketbook was a synonym for purse. Or bag, as we called it in the Philippines.

Someone asked who among us was still menstruating. There was still one who said she still had regular periods and how she impatiently looked forward to menopause. Marilou couldn’t hold back an envious, “You mean you’re still lubricating?”

Somehow the talk moved on to penis sizes, and Lucy swore that the men with the longest ones were the Puerto Ricans. She peeked beneath the sheet covering an anesthetized patient and saw a penis that stretched just above the man’s knee. “And that’s not even at an aroused state,” Lucy said.

Marilou said, “Wow! Pity his lover. She must have a lacerated vagina!”

Pinky cried out, “You know why Miguelito Cotto just lost? Because he had to drag around a penis that long and that heavy so he couldn’t avoid Pacquiao’s blows.”

All that talk about phallic sizes made us hungry again. Before long, someone wished aloud for Vigan longganisa with omelette and fried rice. Her wish was Celia’s command. So past midnight, we had an early breakfast while the rest of the City of Angels slept.

At the last round of picture taking, when the chill was in the air, Celia yelled at the guys clicking away with the digital
cameras, “Hurry! Our clitorises are freezing!”

Missing the Marapait

Perhaps the unwanted visitor named “Pepeng" delayed the much-awaited appearance of sunflowers. Their yellow blooms cover the vacant lots of Baguio that haven't been overbuilt yet. I hope it is just a delay, not a no-show. In the meantime, I’ll content myself with my friend Toottee Chanco-Pacis’s version of the last-quarter sunflowers. She calls this piece "Love the Sun." A fellow flower lover says give them two weeks; they'll come out. Yes, the green stalks are still very much around like cock-eyed optimists.

The Waters of September & the Aquarelles

The boys, as we call Roland Bay-an, Norman Chow and Patric Palasi, went down to Manila on the evening of Sept. 25 , bringing with them in Tam-awan Village’s old Volks Combi large-size framed watercolors (minimum size of 18” x 24”) for the Sept. 26 opening of “Baguio,” the first Metro Manila show of the Baguio Aquarelle Society (BAS). Before noon, they had taken down the previous works hanging on the French Corner’s walls and installed the new watercolors.

Meanwhile, the other members of the year-old group were on the road that fateful Saturday, eager to make it to the 5 p.m. opening. Jennifer Cariño and Merci Javier Dulawan found themselves stuck to their seats in separate buses for more than double the six hours it normally took to traverse the distance between Baguio and Cubao. Somewhere in Bulacan, as they neared the Balintawak exit, the traffic ground to a halt.

The concern of a few others (Baboo Mondoñedo, Toottee Chanco Pacis, Fara Manuel and myself), who made it down earlier, was the torrential rains were making the streets, roads and highways leading to the Alabang venue impassable. The text message reached us around noon: opening moved to Oct. 4, Sunday, 5 p.m.

Now and then I’d check the Facebook home page and grow alarmed at the calls for help. After assurances from friends through SMS that they were safe, except for some seepage in lower parts of their houses and soaked documents, things would be better in the morning. Or so I thought. The last image in my mind before I slept was of Brenda Fajardo, my former professor in modern art, ready to clamber to the roof of her house because her first floor was completely flooded.

As soon as the skies cleared on Sept. 27, I took a cab from Kapitolyo, Pasig, to the Victory Liner terminal in Cubao. The cab’s floor was wet, the seat damp and the cabbie’s eyes swollen from lack of sleep. He had spent a harrowing 12 hours stranded somewhere in Pasong Tamo, Makati. His last passengers, en route to the domestic airport to pick up a returning relative, paid him P350 out of P500+ fare. He said it took them close to six hours to cross EDSA from Cubao to Pasong Tamo. When the waters rose rapidly, the passengers, who expected their balikbayan relative to pay the balance of the fare after pick-up, decided to head home in the MRT, leaving the cabbie stranded with his vehicle.

I never thought I’d write and paint myself to irrelevance, but apparently I just did. It has been difficult to put on a mask of normalcy each day and night I continue my routine, little things like attending classes, doing my minimum load of housework, eating a meal with my family. Anyone who survived the worst environmental disaster in Metro Manila is wracked with a form of guilt and must be moved to do his/her bit in the huge rehabilitation work that lies ahead.

Just the same, the Baguio Aquarelle show must go on. "Baguio" opens today, as earlier mentioned, at the French Corner on Commerce and Filinvest Avenues, Westgate Center, Filinvest Corporate City, Alabang. Part of the proceeds from sales made will go to the cause of the Ondoy victims/survivors.

Photo shows the Aquarelles safe under an Ifugao hut minutes before they felt Typhoon Kiko's fury (Photo by EV ESPIRITU)

Odette, Lola O, O.A.

The Benito sisters, Nieves and Lourdes, the eternal Odette who liked to refer to herself as the Black Swan, were not only tall and willowy, they were the perfect hosts, each in her own fashion.

Where the more cerebral Mrs. E (the name by which Nieves B. Epistola was called by her students and proteges in the ’70s) selected her own society that hung around her porch on M. Viola street at the UP Diliman campus, Odette, the queen of hearts, flung open the doors of the old Heritage Art Center at its original location in San Juan to all and sundry. She was its moving spirit when it changed location to Cubao. And when it burned down and moved to another location, her Blue Ridge home acquired a democratic gravitational pull of its own, attracting artists, chess players, ideologues and environmentalists.

Mrs. E liked to tell stories about her kid sister: how she gifted her with Benjamin Spock’s book which became Odette’s bible in raising her four sons; how bored Odette was with being a corporate banker’s wife and how she went into a rice-selling business, to Ate Nievs’ chagrin. Mrs. E thought of giving Odette an art book this time and that started her on art dealing. The sideline turned into a main line until Mario Alcantara and sons took over the business.

Even when she was the doyenne of that mini-cultural center, venue for book launches, concerts, bazaars and plays, including Miss Rita Gomez’s unforgettable performance of The Human Voice under Anton Juan’s direction, I intuited that Odette’s heart was not into the day-to-day running of a business, even if it allowed her to interact with her kind of crazy wonderful people.

Her office opened to a balcony where she’d be seen with nose buried in a book or bent over a chessboard while a heated argument went on at the Manansala Café below. Once, I saw Mario looking totally pissed off because Odette suddenly jumped into a car with a bouquet of flowers to meet Miss Gomez somewhere and left him to handle a gallery full of visitors. It was a quintessentially Odette gesture to give artists a sense of their importance in her, and by extension, the community’s, life.

Famed for her punning, this talent of hers found a creative outlet when she and some friends formed the core of Los Enemigos. If humor could help bring down a more than 20-year-old dictatorship, Los Enemigos should share part of the credit.

It was as an environmentalist, however, that Odette hit her stride. As she said, “This is a rainbow coalition where the left, right, center can come together.” Sometimes her alliances with whoever was environment secretary at the moment, from Fulgencio Factoran to Victor Ramos to Angelo Reyes and Lito Atienza, would make her friends flinch. But if it could increase the country’s forest cover, she would’ve wined and dined the Devil itself.

She wasn’t anyone’s patsy, though. On his first day of office at the vital Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Atienza turned up wearing his signature Hawaiian shirt unlike the outgoing Reyes whose military training made him dress more formally to give importance to the office.

Odette described the incoming secretary’s shirt as “kukur couture.”

I asked, “How’s that again?”

“Kukurtinahin!” she gasped and laughed.

Her commitment was so total that she turned around the awful garbage situation in her exclusive subdivision. Blue Ridge became a model community where members learned composting and waste segregation. Troops of schoolchildren would fill her sala where she, actor Roy Alvarez or her other amigas/amigos in the cause would lecture and demonstrate how easy cleaning up the environment is. There was always a feast of suman and other kakanin and juice afterwards so the children would get a firsthand exercise on how to dispose of biodegradable banana leaf wrappers in her backyard by burying them.

At one of Gilda Cordero Fernando’s parties in the mid-1990s, wary that all that would come out of Odette’s mouth would be another mini-lecture on garbage (a joke that went around was: “There’s nothing in Odette’s mind but basura!”), I made small talk, wondering aloud what the key to longevity was.

Her answer came quick: “I’m going to live long because I’ve decided to take on toxic waste. Ridding the planet of it will take forever!”

Illustration is Odette as I see her now: from black swan to green butterfly

‘One Brain Between You’

Based on the repeated ovations they received from last night’s audience at the Cultural Center of the Philippines main theater, the Alban Gerhardt-Cecile Licad tandem can, in all probability, expect a comeback on these shores, hopefully under a more hospitable administration.

It was not the first time they performed together, but the team work and the chemistry between the German cellist and the Filipino pianist were pitch perfect that they indeed played (I use “played” the way a child would) as though they had "one brain between" them. This term we borrowed from an enamored fan, Lex O’Brien, a jazz musician, who saw the duo perform in Maryland, USA.

We hope to see and listen to more of the same, live performances of works by Chopin, Beethoven, Janacek and Shostakovich, in other places of the country outside the Center.

Our fervent hope doesn’t end there. My personal prayer is that the prodigies who grew up to be world-class musicians will not be held down by someone invoking the pull of utang na loob to a former patron, and they will not live to again see the day when they will be trotted out like “a carnival of animals,” as one pundit referred to the tribute to the Imeldific One. These musical and performing artists are not indentured servants.

The CCP management will do the country a service by reviewing the clause in a visiting artist's contract that disallows her/him from doing provincial engagements before a CCP show.

Tonight’s performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26, with Ms. Licad as soloist under the baton of Oscar Yatco, is worth the wait. Writer Pablo Tariman quoted the pianist’s mother, Rosario Buencamino Licad, who “compared the energy needed by the concerto to a couple making love. ‘When your partner is about to reach a climax, you can’t let that energy down. You have to sustain it. Otherwise, everything about this piece will just fall flat on your face.’”

The Woman Who Would Not Be Dame Vanessa

Today I'll do a Frank Cimatu by posting a photo and a short paragraph, barely a story. Just follow these links: http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/story/redgrave-honoured-in-london_1115359
http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/story/redgraves-secret-dating-past_1115847

"If I think of a woman of truth, of loyalty, of integrity, of passion, of compassion, a woman with a great heart and a woman of all elements, I think of Vanessa Redgrave."--Ralph Fiennes in presenting Harper's Bazaar's Women of the Year award to Vanessa Redgrave

Suffice it to say I've followed her from Camelot to Evening and all the pictures, teledramas, news items and films in between. How she met up again with her ex, Franco Nero, is straight out of the lyrics of "If Ever I Would Leave You."

Somewhere in my files and unopened boxes is a photo of her marching on a London street and taking up the Palestinian cause. I can't think of an actor who comes close to her. Magic Meryl maybe?