First day of 2017 with Keira, Carissa, Myself and Izzy. Happy New Year from this bunch!
“KEIRA, do you know how tita Joom and I met?” asks Carissa, as she packs the last of her daughters’ things into the suitcase, they were flying out in three hours.
“How?” Keira is now five, and the last time I saw her was two years ago, also in this bedroom, on this bed, and she was extolling the virtues of White Fowa, rubbing the Asian tonic on her Arizona skin.
“Well, tita Joom was my mother in a play.”
Carissa was barely 16 when we met. She played Francesca/Kikay to my Aling Atang in Little Boy Production’s longest running “New Yorker in Tondo.” We fell instantly in love with each other, and I became a regular at her mother’s kitchen. When I was new at Sunstar and was saving my pennies, Carissa would message me that a new batch of bottled sardines had just been sent to their house (her mother had just become Cebu’s first woman governor), and “would [I] like to have some for lunch? Mommy’s not here man pud.”
Of course Ma’am Gwen always caught us with a bowl of rice, an opened bottle of sardines, and homemade margaritas when she dropped by unannounced for lunch.
Fourteen years later, the alcohol is a bottle of Moet, and we’re still in Ma’am Gwen’s kitchen. The grub now includes my favorite adobong uga by Salie, the family’s all around supergirl.
I’m always here for the Last Supper, I joke, alluding to our little tradition of me arriving to have dinner with the family and staying until she is sent off to the airport, our “gavage hangtod goodbye.” “First supper,” corrects Carissa. “Of 2017 yot!”
I tell Michelle, who is married to Carissa’s Manoy Paolo, that stepping into this kitchen always feels like I’m entering a timewarp. And a good one. From that small apartment in Happy Valley to this compound in Sun Valley. The house is much bigger, but the layout is eerily the same. Almost exactly, I point out.
The only reminder that time has passed is when Jules, Michelle’s son, enters the room. All of, gawd, six feet now? He used to be a baby that Carissa and I would collect at the playhouse at the mall, where we’d use our collective charm because that one time, we lost the claim stub for him.
Carissa’s gift is a book called “Big Magic” by Elizabeth Gilbert (who wrote “Eat Pray Love,” among other things, as if a tinge of fame would add more heft to the gravitas already seeping from the first few pages of her book). In it, my first lesson:
1. LIVE IN A STATE OF UNINTERRUPTED MARVEL. “He had seemed not quite of this world, they said. He seemed to live in a state of uninterrupted marvel, and he encouraged them to do the same.” Elizabeth writes of a poet she admires in her book, and uses the same set of words that people have always associated with Carissa and myself. I guess we’ve both weathered life’s curve balls (oh did we have a couple of those or what?) because we choose to marvel. Like the posh Francesca she portrayed so well onstage, Carissa’s inner Kikay will always be the one that wins the day.
2. DON’T SELL YOUR MAN TOO MUCH, SOMEONE ELSE MIGHT BUY. I’ve cut ties with several disingenuous friends by the end of last year simply because they broke my trust. I put a ridiculously high premium on friendships because I’d like to think I am as sincere as they come. To make matters worse, these were people I would gladly do anything for, and for the asking. So yes, I sang the praises of a guy
I liked very much, and their eager ears listened, and their envious souls got
to working. So keep your relationships private: gun for the relationship where they know of you, but nothing about you. Then again, if they get their greedy little hands on your guy, as this lesson implies, they will always have to buy him.
3. FOLLOW THE QUEUE. Filipinos are notoriously allergic to lining up for anything. I am not. In fact, as a general rule of solo travel and in the general area of food, one must find the longest possible queue and get on it. They couldn’t be all wrong, right? I applied this to possibly my first real solo travel, the one I made on Christmas day to Japan. Unplanned, on the cheap, and on the fly, I chanced on the best eats and treats in the beautiful country because I was on the lookout for the longest line.
Just three lessons of many I am bound to learn as 2017 progresses. We’re all still, after all, only three days in.