SABBATICAL NOTES. 19 APRIL 2014. N4. SABADO DE GLORIA. Black is this Saturday, or the search for grammar and logic in our cities. I HAVE COME TO live in a transient home in the Cordilleras because I could not make a reservation with any of the lodging homes, pension houses, or mini-hotels I could find online. I have no complaint: I was given a room close to the laundry area, and no one bothers me here, not even the whirring of laundry machines that, for the sake of the Lenten Season, have decided to go silent as well. The air is crisp in these parts, and you know you could rest your tired body with the scent of pine, the smell of rain, and aroma of Ilokano adobo being cooked by the neighbors kitchen. I remember my sisters adobo cooking-Marie Solver--in Honolulu, and I wish to have before me now some slices of her Ilokano adobo with Ilokano garlic all over, the meat dry, but juicy and when pricked with a fork, gives off that pleasant garlicky taste even if you have not yet put the slice into your salivating mouth. There are soul foods, and you remember these when you are away. I remember that Sra Delia Caguioa Guran and Ms Hannah Dreiza insisted on my bringing adobo-cum-boiled rice from Madrid to Zurich, and they filled a lunch box for two people, and that food lasted for two meals, with each meal partaken with gusto. I saved my precious euros for two meals! Right now, I remember Leah Antonio Agcaoili paksiw-na-bangus, with a hint of ginger, garlic, black pepper corn, and some oil. When I have this before me, I forget what diet is all about. And with a steaming boiled rice, I forget what hunger and poverty and misery are all about. I guess that sometimes we need to feed the body too, even if the soul is seeing this lack of grammar and logic of our lives in big cities where everything is calculated, where all things are a matter of transaction, and where our lives are mechanical, the spontaneous and surprising never part of the equation. Sometimes I travel with only those things in my pocket: spontaneity and surprise. I do not want to know what happens in a predictable way. I work out some of the basic sketches of a plan, and I go from there. I go where the road calls, where the destination leads me, where the destiny is destiny. That, I think, is what life is all about, and upon waking up, I go to the coffee vendo store in the other street and there fill my jug with cappuccino, yes, that vendo-dispensed coffee that is plain sugar, with a hint of coffee and cream, but coffee in the morning just the same. The air is crisp at this hour, and that should suffice in making me imagine that my vendo-dispensed cappuccino is from a brew the beans of which came straight from a grinder. CORDILLERAS, on Black Saturday
Posted on: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 01:32:42 +0000
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