Antonio Tay - Father, Grandfather, Great Grandfather

Originally from Jolo, Sulu and most recently from Long Beach, California, my beloved grandfather - Antonio Tay, “Lolo Diong” to his grandchildren and great grandchildren, passed away last Friday, May 11, 2012. Rest in Peace, Lolo.

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A Very Mini Reunion With an Assist From GPS

A friend from New York is visiting the L.A. area this week to see her daughter, grandson, ex hubby, and some friends. She comes from the same small town in the Philippines as I do and I hung out briefly with her close friend while we were in high school. We haven’t seen each other since 1973 when we were seniors in high school, and with the troubles that were going on in our town (my brother's account of what happened then: http://larrydlp.blogspot.com/2009/08/last-days-in-jolo.html and http://larrydlp.blogspot.com/2009/08/last-days-in-jolo-2.html), a lot of us never returned after moving on to other cities for college. We just reconnected in the past year in, what else – Facebook, as I have with a bunch of others from Jolo. My friend messaged me last week saying she will be in the neighborhood and invited me to meet with her. When she arrived in L.A. she called me and we arranged to meet at her hotel. I tried looking for interesting places to take her in the vicinity and the nearest one I could find was Playa Del Rey. I was thinking we would have lunch there then take a walk near the beach. When I was looking this up on the internet, the sun was shining brightly. The next day when I was supposed to meet my friend, the weather had suddenly turned gloomy. No matter, as long as it didn’t rain, we could still do what I planned.

 First I checked out Google maps to find a route from my home to her hotel. Eighteen miles away, not bad. Then I remembered that I had a rarely used GPS device in my car (I’ve used it a couple of times and in one of them I was given a circuitous route to my destination). Before I left home, I entered the hotel’s address on the device then set off for my destination. Listening to the prompts from the GPS, it was giving me a different route from the one Google maps gave me. I decided to follow Google and see the difference between the two. I had to take a couple of detours due to a fire and some kind of police activity and this is when the GPS device became useful because of its recalculations. I eventually made it safely to my destination.

So I went up to my friend’s room and knocked on the door. When she opened it, we gave each other a hug, then I saw a little boy with her. It was her 2 year old grandson. The first thing I noticed about him was his hair – short on the top and sides and about an 8 inch tail on the back! Funny parents! Anyway, my friend and I were excited to see each other after so long and couldn’t wait to catch up. There was a hitch to my plan of going to Playa Del Rey. We couldn’t drive anywhere because we didn’t have a child safety restraint seat for the boy to use in the car, so we had to improvise. I asked the boy if I could hide him in the trunk while we were driving. Just kidding! Ok, slight change of plans. I looked out the window and saw a strip mall with a couple of small eateries - a burger joint with outside seating and a Mexican restaurant. So we went downstairs and walked across a couple of intersections to get to the Mexican place. It was small but it looked clean and decent so we decided to have lunch there. My friend ordered a burrito and I ordered the chicken plate. The kid? Well, all he wanted were some balls from the vending machine, a Spongebob Squarepants sticker, and a small pack of M&M’s, most of which he spilled on the floor. What do you expect? He’s 2!

Lacking alternatives, with nothing to see or do in the immediate area after lunch, we headed back to the hotel for more catching up on what has been happening in our lives for the past 30 some years. It turns out we went to college in different cities, then she moved to the U.S. to be with her husband in 1987 (I came earlier in 1980 to run a marathon). There were more stories about other friends, relationships, chismis, and what the future may hold. I shall not go into details because most were personal topics and not for public consumption. In any case it was a catch up conversation which lasted about 6 hours before we parted company. Her daughter picked her up with the grandson to meet another town mate for dinner in another city. But first we had a requisite picture taken which we couldn’t do earlier because we lacked a photographer. Do you think the two year old would have been able to do it? Nah… On my way home, I decided to follow the GPS instructions instead of reversing course with the Google maps route. It turns out the GPS gave me a more direct route to and from my destination.

Hard for me to believe that I had a very enjoyable long conversation with my friend. I hadn’t had that kind of tete-a-tete with anybody in a long time, me being so private and isolative. Thanks, Leonie, for a wonderful talk and thanks to GPS for making it possible for me to meet with you again after so many decades. Apologies that I couldn’t take you to a classier establishment to have lunch. Perhaps next time. Oh, it was interesting to become a substitute daddy for a few hours too! For some reason the kid gravitated towards me and even fell asleep in my arms. Will this daddy thing rub off on me? Heck NO!

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Nangka-Nangka Questions Answered

galunggong or tamarung

After I posted the blog regarding Nangka-Nangka (a house of ill repute in our small town) in a closed Facebook group of my high school classmates, it was barraged with comments and answers. Within the first hour, there were already 88 comments.  So let me see if I can digest all this information in as little space as possible. Here are some information I gathered from my classmates in Facebook.

First, I was mistaken about the location. Famy said it was in the middle of Martirez St. in Upper San Raymundo district, and not past the Philippine Constabulary barracks which I thought. That immediately tells you how much I know or better still, don’t know about the place.

The second piece of information was that it was a house and in front of this house was a Nangka (jackfruit) tree, thus the name of the place.

Third, the women there were called Tamarungs, as Froebel reminded us. Well, Tamarung is a kind of cheap fish (galunggong in the Filipino language) which sometimes causes your tongue to itch. The correlation being, if you availed of the services of the women in Nangka-Nangka and you didn’t wear protection, you might develop an itch in your nether regions, or worse, a drip. Wait, maybe those two come hand in hand.

Here is a paraphrase of what Soraya told me. “I remember (in elementary school) when a group of 3 or 4 heavily made up girls with full red lipstick would walk in front of our house and the tricycle drivers would yell “tamarung!”. I asked my grandma why they were called tamarung and she said because they were bad girls from Nangka-Nangka. What is Nangka-Nangka and why is it called so? Because that place has a jackfruit tree on the pathway leading to the house.”

Fourth, per Famy, Nangka-Nangka has ceased to exist since the martial law days of the 70’s.

Several pieces of good information continued to come from Froebel who seems to be an expert on the subject, which brings us to number five. The tamarungs had competition in town! They were sea gypsies from the town of Pangutaran, who even preceded the tamarungs from the town of Jolo in that kind of business. Here is a direct quote from Froebel, “mostly boys back then went for the 'sea gypsies' rather than the girls in nangka-nangka. It’s because they are brunette..slim..young and they are very salty (sultry) :D” 

sea gypsies

Here’s more info from Soraya: the people of Jolo (called Tausugs), never bought tamarung fish because there were so many good variety of other fish to choose from the market, thus the tamarung were usually left to rot. Which I guess is what happened to your genital areas after you went to see the tamarung women.

And one last item from our prolific informant, Froebel. He says, “Back in the day (early 70's)...when I was in my teens, I hung out occasionally and sometimes on weekends at my uncle's house in Upper San Raymundo. Their house stood  right by the corner of the alley going to Nangka-Nangka and must have been 4 houses away from the nangka tree. There I listened to the legends, stories, gossips back in the day. According to the older people, when you visit Nangka-Nangka, you can negotiate with the tamarung about their prize range. With an older tamarung, you pay 10-15, sometimes 20 pesos. Younger ones will cost you double. But if you're short of cash, go there late at night (past 12 a.m.) and prizes can go down to 5 pesos guaranteed. Just like going to the movies (last full show), it’s cheap according to them. These tamarungs were local, pure-bred Tausug.” (*side note – at the time 4 pesos = 1 US dollar*)  Froebel adds, “When it gets slow in Nangka-Nangka, you can see the tamarungs heading West towards the docks. There they met with their no.1 rivals - the sea gypsies. Oh, talking about the sea gypsy girls, I remember a gypsy named Lily-Ann. she was a BO DEREK look-alike (from Bus-Bus district).If only she braided her hair like BO, it could have been her, only saltier!” 

(I wonder if there was some kind of Sharks and Jets feud between those two groups ala West Side Story…)

So there you go folks! Everything you’ve ever (or maybe never) wanted to know about Nangka-Nangka and its resident tamarungs.

Which brings us to the second part of this blog. We now know that Nangka-Nangka is defunct. My classmates and I were batting ideas around about restarting the business in our town. After all there was no competition to speak of. Prior to this, a couple of guys talked about hunting for buried Japanese treasure, but restarting Nangka-Nangka would be more feasible. This time we would plant a durian tree at the pathway and call the place, what else? Durian Durian of course! Please, you can look up durian on the internet yourself, can’t you? 

 Famy mentioned that this could be a very lucrative business because of the presence of U.S. Marines in the area (they are there to train local troops). Salma inquired as to who would like to volunteer to be the Mama San of the place, while Soraya said a feasibility study must be done first. I said we should name the place - Durian Durian: A Notre Dame Alumni Cooperative – brought to you by Batch ’73. It was suggested that Famy should have a large advertising banner placed in town. Business partners from our batch would have included nurses and health clinic workers (free condoms and AIDS tests!), doctors (free consultations and treatments for STD’s!), a banker, a dean of computer studies, a mental health worker (me!), and other venture capitalists.

Well everyone, it sounds like a plan so let’s get the ball rolling, get the show on the road, get it kickstarted, and get the men back on the Tamarung saddle!

*DISCLAIMER. Part two of this blogpost was not intended to be a serious discussion of starting a prostitution business. My classmates and I were only joking around with our posts on Facebook and we were all having fun with how the conversation went. Besides, if Mother Superior ever read what we talked about, she surely would have given each of us 10 slaps of the ruler on the palms of our hands if she didn’t get apoplexy first. Thanks for playing along.

I would never have been able to compile this information without the help of my partners in crime, whose expertise and knowledge of the subject matter, I’m eternally grateful for. Thanks to Froebel, Famy, Soraya, Ric, Jane, Leonie, the director, producer, screenwriter, makeup artist, waterboy, etc., etc., etc… But most of all, thanks to the Tamarungs of Nangka-Nangka for making this blogpost possible.

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Facebook Discussions About High School

Former classmates from our little town of Jolo (in the province of Sulu in the Philippines), and I have been having a discussion on Facebook about happenings in our lives during those days. Even though I say classmates, it wasn’t true in the real sense of the word because we were divided by great distance into the Notre Dame Girl’s Department run by the Dominican Sisters, and Notre Dame Boy’s Department, managed by the Marist Brothers. The discussions centered on secrets people had in high school regarding crushes, admirers, real or imagined relationships, and such. It’s so funny at our age to be pondering these things (we are all in our mid 50’s). Could that mean that we are still young at heart despite our chronological ages? So far, few if any have spilled the beans. Some of these supposed secrets were already known back then but they were never overt. Apparently, a few people knew more about them than others. Those who were in the loop are beginning to drop hints about what purportedly happened. Most, including me were either innocent, utterly clueless, or just lived  sheltered lives under the constant supervision of conservative and very strict parents.

So that got me digging into the deep recesses of my mind to try to remember what I did in high school and why I wasn’t socially active (and still not to this day). Well, I was more involved in sports back then. As a freshman, I played basketball, then learned tennis in my sophomore year, broke my left ankle in a motorcycle accident as a junior, then it was back to tennis as a senior. A lot of my free time was spent at the Bureau of Public Highways tennis court initially, then Jolo Tennis Club, and at the Notre Dame gymnasium tennis courts. In between, there was hunting birds with my cousin (he shot the birds with his BB gun and his maid dressed and cooked them. We even ate a bat and a kingfisher once). There was also table tennis at the house of one of our teachers (Mr. Villanueva) on some weekends. All those physical activities left me no time to be socially involved with male peers or girls. That, and the aforementioned constant supervision of conservative and very strict parents. But then again, that may be just be my reserved personality. My younger brother turned out socially much better under the same parentage after all. By the way, nowadays I socialize better while running. There is something about opening up my sweat glands that make me open up my vocal cords too.

Addendum 8/10/11 @ 400 P.M.: I was not with the boy’s department students taking the jeepneys  from Plaza Rizal to Gandasuli because I usually hitched a ride with the Nangquils  whose father was the district engineer, from their house in BPH. This made miss admiring the PYT’s from the girl’s department while the jeeps circled the plaza.

So my dear classmates who by chance happen to read this -  sorry for not having any juicy secrets to divulge to you, however I’m intrigued to hear about yours. I can only offer you this Beatles song:

Listen,
Do you want to know a secret?,
Do you promise not to tell?, whoa oh, oh.

Closer,
Let me whisper in your ear,
Say the words you long to hear,
I'm in love with you.

p.s. Diana A. in early high school and Ohara N. much later, and one other who happens to be on Facebook who shall remain nameless… I started to type in their last names but I decided otherwise to protect the good names of the innocent. Thanks for letting me share.

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The Simplicity of Life in a Small Town

Writing this reminds me of an old Barbra Streisand song with the lines “could it be it was all so simple then, or has time rewritten many lines”.

Children growing up nowadays lead hectic and complicated lives, with a sensory overload of electronic games, cell phones, after school activities, and the internet. What I remember best growing up in a small town was its simplicity. The only electronic item we had at home was a radio and the town had only two stations, though if the conditions were right, we would get Voice of America and a Manila station. We didn’t have TV in those days. Cleaning the house? Most people had hardwood floors then, way before they became popular in homes again. So we didn’t have vacuum cleaners because we didn’t have carpets, or even electric polishers or special fluids to make the hardwood floor shine. What we had was floor wax and a coconut husk scrub. You spread the wax with a rag by hand while knelt on the floor and afterwards while standing up, you step on the scrub with one foot and start moving it back and forth. It’s hard to paint that picture here, but my Filipino friends won’t have a problem understanding it. And if you didn’t have floor wax, melted candle did the job just as well.

 The one and only traffic signal in town was a small booth where a policeman steps in and turns a lever with a sign on top –stop on one side and go on the other side to indicate which street at the intersection stops and which one goes. Public transportation consisted of jeepneys and tricycles and if you had to travel out of town, you went on bus-like transports simply called trucks, because basically they were flat bed trucks with benches and a roof with no walls on the sides or the back.

Entertainment consisted of movie theaters, some of which were infested with bedbugs which bit into the back of your legs while you were sitting on the wooden chairs. One way to prevent this from happening was to spread newspapers on the chair before you sat down. There were a lot of restaurants in town and most of them served Chinese cuisine, but one of the perennial favorites was a Satti place, satti being local delicacy. It consists of skewered chicken meat, a special hot soupy sauce, and chunks of sticky white rice. Other entertainment venues were a couple of night clubs (Sky Room and Sea Breeze?). A frequent hangout for me was the local tennis club which was next door to our house. I learned to play the game in high school and became a member of the club.

Festivities like weddings or some other private parties thrown by wealthy people were considered whole day affairs because the partying lasted all day. This didn’t happen often but only on very special occasions.

When people exercised, it was usually a pre-dawn walk around the Jolo Wharf to breathe the fresh sea air, or jogging on the asphalt pavement of the airport runway.

The electric power plant of Jolo had a very loud (air raid) siren which blared at 7 a.m., 12 noon, and 5 p.m. to signal the start of the days’ work, lunch time, and quitting time respectively. People adjusted their clocks and watches based on that siren. How’s that for simplicity of time keeping? Would you believe that workers went home for lunch and perhaps a siesta before going back to work in the afternoon? Well, that’s the truth and I guess we got that from the Spaniards who colonized the country for more than 300 years.

Other things I remember but not necessarily about our town was going on a trip every year to Zamboanga City for the Fiesta Pilar. I had to be absent one or two days from school depending on what day of the week the fiesta was celebrated. One thing I looked forward to as a young child going to Zamboanga City was riding the calesa which is a horse drawn carriage and a main form of non-motorized transportation in those days. Another thing was begging my parents every year to buy me a helium filled balloon which string they tied to my wrist so it wouldn’t accidentally fly away. Other than celebrating the Fiesta Pilar, the birthdays of my mom and lolo Lawa (of Lawa’s Café, whose coffee addicted the town population to no end) were celebrated too. Mr. Lawa never failed to give his extended family a Christmas ham every year. Anyway, it seems that I’ve digressed from my main topic at this point.

I’m sure my townmates have their own share of memories of how simple it was in those days of growing up. My memory is not so intact anymore to remember all my experiences, but I hope this has awakened some forgotten slices of life in other people, and if that happens, please do share. Thank you so much.

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The Tricycle: A Human Powered Taxi

Ever heard of the Smart car? Of course you have. It’s that tiny two-seater motor vehicle popular in Europe and has been sold in the U.S. in the past few years. Where I grew up, we had our own version of such vehicle, but it was human powered. It was called a tricycle, otherwise known as a pedicab, or phonetically in the native Tausug dialect, a tarasikul, or jokingly since there were no taxis in our town, a taxikul. It consists of a bicycle and a sidecar, plus a headlight and a ringer. Normally, what we consider a tricycle is the three wheeled kids’ toy. In our small town, this is what a tricycle looks like:

It’s supposed to seat two passengers but with small children seated on their parents’ laps, you can have as much as four riders plus the driver. I don’t think you can fit that many people in a Smart car. If it rains, the driver attaches a transparent plastic cover on the front and sides of the vehicle while he remains exposed to the elements. When I was growing up, it used to cost between 15 to 25 centavos for a ride, depending on the distance travelled. Imagine how strong the legs of the driver needed to be to propel that vehicle especially uphill. Their legs were the engines that made the tricycle move, fueled by rice and fish. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an overweight tricycle driver. From what I hear, they use motorcycles now and I don’t know how much the fare is anymore, or if any of the drivers have gotten fat.

Picture used with permission from and courtesy of elementary schoolmate LTG.

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The Unblogged Weekend

I haven’t been able to blog too much in the past week because I’ve been busy with other things. It’s not like I have a deadline to catch or have a ton of readers waiting with bated breath for the next blog post. Hah!

A couple of days spent with my high school classmate plus a birthday party on day three didn’t leave me much time to enjoy my usual routine of doing nothing. Even though ideas come to my mind from time to time, if I don’t write them down, the feeling passes and I would have forgotten what the idea was. With the break in my routine due to entertaining and being entertained, I kinda lost control of my calorie intake which I’ve been trying to stabilize in the last couple of days.

I enjoyed spending time with my former classmate who is currently visiting the U.S. We were in school together from kindergarten through high school then lost touch after that. The last time I saw him was in 1989 when I was on vacation in the Philippines and got in touch with him, after which he took me out to lunch. I don’t even remember the details of that day almost 21 years ago. This time, it was my turn to show him around. First I wanted to give him something he hasn’t experienced in the Philippines before, something authentically American. So I took him and his aunt to a restaurant called Johnny Rebs’ Southern Roadhouse, for a taste of the South. While he ordered a sirloin steak (not too southern, I thought), his aunt ordered pork chops (getting closer to the south), and I had the blackened catfish (now that’s more like it!). The ambience of the place was unlike the usual eatery. At the entrance, I could hear a cat meowing, but didn’t see a cat. Upon entering, you immediately notice the peanut shells strewn all over the floor (I already read about this so it was not unexpected). When I used their bathroom, I heard a rooster or hen crowing and cackling and noticed there were chicken figurines perched near the ceiling with a recording of them doing the chicken noises. I came to the conclusion that the meowing I heard at the front door was also a recording. Funny stuff!

I was supposed to take them to downtown Long Beach afterwards to show them the Pike, Shoreline Village and the other sights of Long Beach, but after taking them to my condo, we got hung up searching for some of his relatives on the internet, then upon getting back to his aunt’s house, a couple our townmates came to visit and we just ended up reminiscing about our small town in the Philippines. It was not until the next day that I was able to take my classmate on a tour of downtown Long Beach, but not before we had lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant and had pho. At least I was able to get him to experience two different types of cuisine he has never had before. See how one can lose control of the calories in just a couple of days? Anyhow, we walked around the Long Beach Convention Center, the Pike, Shoreline Village, Aquarium of the Pacific, and the lighthouse (Parker’s and the other taller one), and took a bunch of pictures which are currently posted on Facebook. Upon returning home, his aunt had her grandkids home and we were off to Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant to entertain the kids. While the kids played games, we sat around and ate pizza. The kids were burning their calories while we were storing them.

The next day, I met with our AREC running group and did 12 miles (more on this later), then I went to a nephew’s birthday party, where my aunt cooked some Filipino goodies which I managed to partake of generously. Oh my goodness! Three consecutive days of engaging my body with all these good food. No wonder I lost control. By the time Sunday came, I was all but ready to decompress from the overindulgences of the past few days. I stayed home, watched a few movies, tried to reboot my mind and body so I could be fresh and ready to go back to work the next day.

Please forgive any grammatical errors in this entry. If you find any, please let me know because I didn’t have time to proofread it very closely.

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Lost in L.A.

My elementary and high school classmate from Jolo, Philippines is visiting the U.S. and is currently in Southern California after coming from Florida and New York. His aunt called me and said she was picking him up from a relative’s apartment in L.A. Since she doesn’t drive on the freeway, I looked up a route in Google Maps (both our cars were GPS-less). There were three options and I picked what I thought was the most direct one. Things were going well until we were only about a mile and a half from our destination. When we got to the hustle and bustle of downtown L.A., we somehow got misdirected between 4^th and 3^rd Streets. We had to stop and ask for directions thrice. The first two men we asked gave us incorrect directions, until we finally asked a woman who sent us to the correct location. What was supposed to be a 50 minute drive on surface streets ended up about an hour and a half. Even when we arrived at our destination, Google Maps gave directions to turn into a certain street which turned out to be a parking lot. Oh well, at least we found the place and were able to pick up my classmate and take him back to Long Beach. Going back, we were again misdirected but found our way much quicker. The place we were trying to find: White Memorial Hospital. Not exactly in the heart of L.A., but in the Boyle Heights area. Next time, I’ll just plug in the hospital’s name into Google Maps since the hospital’s address is on a major boulevard, instead of 1818 Michigan Street, which was the address of the apartment building.

When I told my friend’s aunt that we were going on an adventure when we left Long Beach, getting lost was something I did not expect. So I suppose the lesson we can learn from our misadventure is this: ask a woman for directions instead of a man.

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First Blog Post and First Long Run of 2010

With this first blog post for 2010, I offer a brief look back at a few good things that happened in 2009: reconnecting on Facebook with people I grew up with in a small but now troubled town in the Philippines, making new running friends, and finishing a marathon again after four years without running one.

And now to start the New Year with a long run with some of the runners I met over last summer and fall. Doing a long run of two hours (before GPS) was something I used to do on the first day of the year before I got permanently injured. It seemed like a good way to get the year started. This year, with the help of a group of running friends, I got to experience it again, albeit on the second day of the year.

I was planning on running 10 miles with the 7:30 group last Saturday morning until I started receiving emails that the people I usually run with at that time of the morning would not make it because they were extending their New Year’s Day festivities. I immediately contacted the early group whom I ran with the previous week, to find out what time they will be starting their 14 mile run and if I could join them. They were very welcoming but they were going to start at 6:30 A.M. Jeepers! I would have to get up earlier again for the second week in a row, but if I didn’t want to run by myself, I would have to muster up and be counted, and that I did.

We were going to do the 5 minute run/1 minute walk intervals and started well enough and I could feel that the pace was slightly faster than when we ran 10 miles the previous Sunday. Maybe it was just the early morning chill that made us go a little faster than usual. It was a similar out and back course as last week but instead of turning around after 5 miles, we extended it and turned around after 7 miles. On the way back, I felt that I had to use the bathroom and sprinted ahead of our pack to a building which I thought the bathroom was located. I was mistaken. It was the next building. In the meantime the pack had caught up with me and I had to sprint after them to catch up after I had relieved myself. Well, those two episodes of sprinting affected my comfortable stride and breathing so much that I never got my steady rhythm back. After about 10 miles I could feel that I was bonking and getting dehydrated and was using my arms a lot to propel me forward. At that point I had a feeling that I would be very sore the next day. My stride and breathing felt so ragged that I must have also lost my mind momentarily because I started waving to a couple of people whom I thought I knew. They must have wondered who let this crazy running man out of the asylum. As if that wasn’t bad enough, on the path near the Long Beach Yacht Club, water was leaking though the walls from the sea due to high tide and we had to wade through huge puddles and got my new shoes soaked. Without the group I was running with, I would have been tempted to walk the rest of the way from there. When we finished, I was so exhausted and felt drained the rest of the day, and still had to report to work that night. That’s the reason why I couldn’t write this blog until today. Needless to say, I had a rough night at work and struggled to stay awake, but I survived it. I felt that if I had to run a marathon last Saturday morning, I wouldn’t have made it to the finish line based on the way I felt after 10 miles. But then again, I don’t think I would have been sprinting towards a bathroom during a marathon.

Thank you, Michael, Nick, Rosie, and Tina, for carrying me the rest of the way when I was struggling. You helped me accomplish something I haven’t done in a long time. And Happy Birthday, Tam, Tina, and Rosie on your natal days in the first week of the new year.

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The Fight That Broke Out At the Birthday Party

I went to a nephew’s 18^th birthday party Saturday evening. Eighteen already?! I can still remember when his mom (my first cousin) was a baby in the Philippines and when her parents were at work, my parents used to “kidnap” her from next door so they could babysit her. Not only that, my younger brother and I benefited from it because we went to the beach unplanned to have impromptu picnics, usually in the afternoon when my father was done with work. Nobody went to the beach in the afternoon in those days much less on a weekday. The reason why my parents were so fond of my cousin was because they never had a daughter and just had us two boys. My brother and I didn’t mind of course, we were just as fond of her and the picnics were just a bonus. Too bad this didn’t last too long because soon enough my cousin and her parents moved to the United States. I didn’t see her again until 1980 when I moved here.

And now her oldest offspring just turned 18. Did we time travel, flash forward, breach the space/time continuum? It doesn’t seem that long ago somehow but now we are here.

As I posted on Facebook yesterday, I went to a birthday party and a fight broke out: the Pacquiao/Cotto fight. In a totally unexpected turn of events, the post dinner activity involved waiting for the aforementioned boxing match to start on TV. My cousin ordered the pay per view event from the satellite TV company and we only learned about it when we arrived at the party. So instead of the usual card game, parlor games, or karaokefest, we were entertained with the sweet science of boxing on the tube. After a couple of hours of watching the undercard, the main event started.

I don’t really watch or follow boxing except for what I read in the sports section of the newspaper, but I know about this fighter from the Philippines named Manny Pacquiao who is much revered by his countrymen. He even has at least a couple of movies made about his life already. When Pacquiao fights, something like a Twilight Zone episode happens in the Philippines. The streets become deserted because all the vehicles disappear and the populace are glued to TV sets. I’ve never seen him fight so it was a treat from my cousin to show us this event at her home, even though most of the guests were not of Filipino background. My cousin married a white guy whose last name is the same as the fast food chain with the golden arches. I was surprised to see how fast the fights went. Three minutes each round plus one minute break, and no sexy girls parading around with placards showing what round it was. It was just slam, bam, clinch, punch, counter, then ring the bell and the round is over. No time wasted. So in spite of four undercards, the fights went pretty fast.

Well, we already all know the result of the fight so no use rehashing the whole twelve rounds here. Pacquiao won in a technical knockout 55 seconds into the 12^th and last round. Being born Filipino, of course I was rooting for him and was hoping for a knockout and since Cotto was being pummeled so badly, I wished that the fight ended sooner than later.

Well, my dear cousin, thank you so very much for inviting me to your son’s birthday party. It will forever be remembered as the eighteenth birthday party in which a planned fight broke out. Fortunately, it didn’t involve the celebrant. Welcome to adulthood Ryan J.

Public comments below, private comments may be emailed to: noelotp562@all2easy.net

What Dessert Used To Be (or the fruits of my childhood)

Remember when after a meal, dessert used to be fruit? Growing up in a place with an abundant variety of fruits, they were readily available to satisfy everyone’s sweet tooth. Cookies and candy bars were rare treats. Sodas (we called them soft drinks) were sometimes split between two people. And by the way, the cookies we had were similar to the Nilla wafers nowadays. We had no chocolate chip, peanut butter, sugar, oatmeal raisin cookies then. Doughnuts were homemade and they were just plain which you dipped in sugar.

I don’t know if I can remember all the fruits we had available then, but I’ll try. Most of these are sweet fruits but some of them are sour which you dip in salt, preferably (for me) salt with freshly crushed red peppers. Durian, mangosteen, lanzones or buwahan, langka or nangka, marang, mango, mampalam, star apple, carambola, atis, coconut, banana (smaller yellow ones), papaya, oranges (what were the small oranges called?), tambis, camias, grapefruit, wani, baunu, pineapple, tambis, macopa, santol, and guavas. Grapes, Sunkist oranges, and apples were only available in a grocery store and were expensive because they couldn’t be grown locally. My Tausug friends, if you can add any more fruits from the place where we grew up in, which I forgot about, please do.

Unfortunately nowadays, an after meal sweet would probably be chocolate bars, or cookies, or ice cream, or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (I like PB&J). If had pies or cakes here, I would probably have that too, so it’s good that I don’t buy them. Even if the fruits I mentioned above were available here, it would probably be very hard to wean myself away from the refined sugars that I’ve gotten used to, but it could be possible. Make those fruits available to me and I’ll turn a new leaf, or in this case a new but old dessert of childhood.

Public comments below, private comments may be emailed to: noelotp562@all2easy.net

A Few Random Thoughts Post Marathon

Now that the generalized muscle soreness is subsiding, my regular aches and pains are returning as expected. I was wearing a knee strap at the race which I really don’t like using because I’m allergic to neoprene. It gives me a rash.

The perils of carbo loading: you eat a lot of carbs for three days before the marathon, during which you decrease the amount of exercise that you do because of tapering. Your stomach expands with the extra food which increases its capacity. After the marathon, the capacity of your stomach remains at an expanded state and it’s more difficult to attain satiety than during your pre-carbo load days, so you tend to eat more to feel satisfied. The result – weight gain. But that’s just my theory based on experience. This year, I didn’t alter my diet significantly so I didn’t get the resultant weight gain.

I don’t know when I’m going to start running again. It feels like I gave it my all last Sunday and don’t feel the need to run again soon. Maybe I’ll try on Friday and Sunday.

I haven’t lifted weights in more than a week due to pre-marathon tapering and post marathon recovery. I’ll have to get back to that routine soon.

I got my seasonal flu shot at work tonight. My right arm is sore. We don’t have the H1N1 or swine flu vaccine yet. I hope we get it soon because I don’t want to look like the picture above.

My CPR certification is expiring at the end of the month so I signed up for renewal at work which is exactly on the day that my current one expires. If I don’t do it, I’ll get suspended.

I haven’t thought of what to reward myself for finishing the marathon. Maybe I already pre-rewarded myself when I bought the treadmill.

Every year a week after the marathon, and for the past two years, Kate and Deb have been hosting the Win Freeman Post Marathon party otherwise known as the Liars Party, where people share stories about what great time they had running the full or half marathon. Shall I go to the liar’s party or not? I RSVP’d in case I make it there. I have a tad bit of social anxiety and I’m more comfortable socializing while on the run. Was that last sentence TMI?

I’ve been back to work the past two nights and wore my marathon technical shirt the first night. One of the patients was a spectator in the race and she told me that she was in awe of all the runners and volunteers. It has been a good couple of nights so far. Oops, I’ve spoken too soon. We are expecting two admissions after 1 a.m.

The security guard I wrote about last week is back tonight and the staff remains wary of him. The picture I included in that blog resembles his body type so well.

It was my mom’s 78^th birthday yesterday in the Philippines and I talked to her on the phone before I left for work. She is 15 hours ahead of us here in the U.S. She sounded well and said she felt good except for her arthritis. She had a full day planned to celebrate with her friends. She didn’t receive the birthday card I sent yet but I hope it gets there now matter how delayed it will be. One of my aunts said it takes more than a month – about 2 days from the U.S to the Philippines and the rest of the time seemingly by pony express from Manila to Zamboanga, if it gets there at all. My mom was able to attend the Notre Dame High School Grand Reunion because it was held in the city she lives in and she met some of her former classmates and childhood friends. My Uncle Dante and Auntie Lita also attended and they came from Jolo, the town I was born in.

Mama was happy to hear that I was able to finish another marathon because in the past four years I’ve been telling her I couldn’t cover 42.16 kilometers anymore. All’s well that ends well.

LarryDLP’s Last Days in Jolo

My brother wrote about our family’s personal experience when the Moro National Liberation Front attacked our town of Jolo, Sulu, Philippines in February of 1974. I was no longer there when it happened since I was in my freshman year at a university in another city. While I was reading his blog I went through what may have seemed like symptoms of post traumatic stress because he wrote so vividly about the incident that it felt like I was standing beside him as he was seeing and experiencing what was happening around him. Here is his story titled “Last Days in Jolo” : http://larrydlp.blogspot.com/