We took Mama to the airport this afternoon. We left at 1:45 for her 4:45 flight, giving ample room for delays. It started to rain. She mentioned that it was sunny in California, she always checks the weather. That’s my mother.
When it was time to leave for the airport, she stood at the base of the staircase in our old house while the children hugged her effusively. I heard her voice catch, the way it does when she would really like to cry, but won’t.
All the way to Logan Airport, we kept the conversation light. We hate goodbyes in this family. Goodbye has meant dire things in the past. It meant, I won’t see you for years. Or, I don’t know when we will be together again. Or I will never see you again in this world.
Now our goodbyes are full of promise. We have travel plans. We have Skype, we have Facetime. We have all-you-can-talk phone plans. Airline prices will go down and California is on every airlines destination. We chatted, talking about the upcoming graduation of my niece.
The conversation turned to manual typewriters. I have a new hobby, I am collecting manual typewriters. I feel that the sound of writing is the sound of a typewriter, and they aren’t being made anymore. After the successful repair of a very dusty and grimy German typewriter, I have suddenly become typewriter rescuer, and have several waiting in the wings on eBay.
I pulled up picture of the manual typewriter I was chasing on eBay. It is the kind Ernest Hemingway used, a Royal Quiet De Luxe. Mama started talking about learning to type during the war.
They fled to Itogon, a village some stretch from Baguio. The family was living with Fr. Alfonso, a Belgian priest who was one of my grandfather’s best friends. While they waited with the interminable wait for the next thing, my grandfather wanted them to keep busy. So she and my aunt both learned to type from a book. Then they would have typing contests. It was a happy, encapsulated memory of childhood during a terrible time. I asked her what kind of typewriter it was, she said it was a Royal. Of course, dear readers, you know what is next, the typewriter was the very one that I bid on and won today.
All during this very busy and over-scheduled month, when we had visitors and commitments, graduation preparations, end of school year rushes – I would observe Mama’s breakfast ritual.
She only ate twice a day, and came downstairs close to noon. Her daily breakfast was an egg, garlic fried rice, and Spam, or longaniza. She liked to cook her fried rice in a non stick pan and toss in a good shake of fried garlic. Then she would take a cup and put all the rice in it, and turn out a perfect Filipino breakfast plate. “It looks nicer,” she said. This made me smile.
I noticed this morning when I checked her room that she had taken the sheets of the bed and folded the quilt neatly. The room smelled like her perfume.
This trip, she didn’t need a television, but would come down the stairs, one step at a time to watch her line up of “Dancing with the Stars”, “Revenge”, and “Hawaii Five-O”. When her shows weren’t on, she kept busy with her Kindle Fire (a very nice gift from my brother), and her music on her iPhone. She’s on Facebook and keeps up with her large extended family. She doesn’t understand techno-phobia in her generation.
In 1988, when I was the mother of two very small children, I graduated from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree. I remember that is was a big deal for Mama, and we all went to dinner at the Harvard Club. I was exhausted from my schedule, and opted not to go to the diploma ceremony, thus failing to find out that I graduated cum laude. In those days, I was just ten years from the time I left the Philippines. As a young mother with babies in the wings, I rushed through commencement more preoccupied with my husband’s career than my own achievements. It was a great day for Mama, and for my family who didn’t know I was an intellectual.
This time, decades later, I was fully aware of the importance of graduation. I spent six years commuting to Cambridge, family in tow, in all kinds of weather. I juggled research, interviews and deadlines and took care of my family.
I looked at the looming commencement day with an odd sort of disbelief. Was it really going to happen? Then I found out that Harvard only gave two tickets to the morning ceremonies, and four to the diploma ceremony. I worried, begged, and prayed for four more tickets so all my children could see me walk. I got them.
Mama was a trooper that Thursday morning. She looked like a million bucks in her black coat and long string of pearls. Glamorous and poised, she walked with her cane with a grandchild at her elbow.
Our daughter who works in Boston came home on the late bus last night to see her grandmother off. It warms my heart to see the easy affection my children have for their grandmother.
At the airport today there was curbside check-in, and a chatty attendant complimented Mama on her youthful beauty. I said, “She’s eighty-one.”
This always gets a grand reaction. I enjoyed it for a moment, then added,” Can you believe she had eight children?”.
To which the gentleman said, “Oh, children keep you young!”.
It was a merry send off, the wheelchair man appeared and took her tiger patterned carry-on bag. Settled in her chariot, we kissed her goodbye and waved her off.
Save for the storm that blew outside the walls of our castle, all was well. To borrow a line from Downton Abbey, “You’re a storm braver if ever I saw one.” That’s my mother.
At the beginning of her visit, we were treated to dinner by an old classmate of mine. We sat around the table talking about old Baguio. We ordered drinks and oysters and anything we wanted off the menu. Mama ordered lobster. She also ordered a margarita, which is what she has always ordered as long as I can remember.
She toasted in Spanish. “Salud, amor, pesetas, y tiempo para gastarlo” (Health, love, money and time to spend it). This was an old family toast – it came down through the generations from my Spanish-speaking grandparents. It’s a vestige of the old days, like her little ceremonies of neatness.
She is a lady without servants, and she slowly keeps everything around her beautiful. She has been a widow for almost twenty years, and longer contends with my Daddy’s chaotic bedside. (Which looks like mine – a jumble of books and small things). I know she would rather have him and his mess, but this is her life now. I see my grandmother in her and her convent school breeding is so apparent.
I’m very proud of my genteel and strong mother.
I raise my glass of wine tonight with the same toast. Long may she live, and may all her descendants prosper.


