Two thousand seventeen

FERNANDEZ

It was absolutely reflective of the times that this writer was drunk, hungover and otherwise mostly stayed in bed from the evening of the 30th of last year’s December until New Year’s Day, 2017. He was up on that latter day just to deliver a few books to friends in the morning, find his way to church for the required mass in the afternoon. In between, he was in bed.

And so for three complete days to cap the past year and start the new one, he was lazy. Or, lazier than he had ever been in 2016. And he thinks now, he deserved to be lazy that way. Through the past year, he hardly had any occasion to be lazy. And one needs to be lazy to be able to reflect on what went on in the year gone by, to relish the year, so to speak. And he might remember this to himself: For the whole of the past year he had been mostly writing. He hardly recalls the passing of 2015. Towards the end of that year he was writing his book on the late Martino A. Abellana, his former teacher and co-teacher at the Fine Arts Program of the University of the Philippines Cebu.

It was a challenging writing project for him from the very beginning even if most of the required research had already been done by the time he sat down to write. But the book had not yet formed in his head when he finally opened a file in his computer and called it, Abellana Book. Quickly he realized, he had not ever written anything before that was this long, save perhaps for numerous project proposals he had done for the school. And so, he just wrote. And for that whole Christmas season of 2015, he wrote as if the devil was after him. He remembers little else besides the table in his mother-in-law’s The Blue Apartelle in Baclayon, Bohol, where his computer lay. The guitar was close by for those times when he needed rest.

Otherwise, his daughter played and sang pieces from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, especially “To the Last Whale.” He remembers the song and wonders now if its emotional tenor had worked its way into the final text.

Only later would the book’s structure come to him along with other pivot-points that would finally form the book. In a sense, the book formed little by little and along a particular nature that he is still trying to understand even now. He remembers how the book did not form without unbelievable struggle not only with himself but with his closest friends. It was the repeating theme of conversation between them throughout 2016.

And he remembers one particular evening somewhere in the course of 2016 when a friend’s son went off to the United States to work. The evening after he left turned out to be quite mellow. And as to be expected, we all spent that evening watering our individual sorrows with wine, dark chocolate and good cheese. Late that same evening, someone said the word “kamingaw.” And thus was born both the title and the theme of the book. Everything seemed easier from then on. All that was really needed was more work, more work than he ever had to do before that time. And then he realized two things about himself and his craft. The first was how actually spoiled he was. The second was how he did not know he was even capable of that intensity of attention required in the act of writing and publishing a book. And it did not stop even after he handed the text to Estela, to whom he is married, who took over designing and laying out the book with Donald Abelgas of University of San Carlos Press, the book’s publisher. And that was 2016 for him. The book will be launched finally this year, January 10, 2017.

We will always remember 2016 as a tough and surprising year. Oh, it wasn’t all that bad, some will say. At best, it was an “interesting” year; certainly, more interesting than 2015. All the better to make us wonder about the coming year. What surprises does it hold for us? Whatever surprises, we are well prepared. The past two years have done their work. And we are certainly ready to say, “Bring it on!” We are bullish about 2017. But mostly because we have nothing much else to be but that.