Inch by Inch, the house explains itself

 

On the wall, is a portrait of Bud’s great-great grandfather, Robert Gibson Bell. His wife’s name was Sophronia Bruce,  but her portrait is quite dour, and it just sinks the chi of a room, so she is scowling downstairs in a safe place. They were Scots, through and through. The chest of drawers came to us via my favorite great-uncle-in-law, Uncle Doug who lived into his nineties and had a debonair spirit. He and Aunt Margaret were fond of convertibles and date-nut bread. She was a housewife her whole married life and the story goes that she invested small amount of money from her household budget and when she died, she left Uncle Doug a fortune. So it goes with the unknown geniuses in a family.

One day my dear friend who is a very high up the art totem pole in the Philippines went with us to visit them at their storybook cottage in Natick, Massachusetts. He sat and ate and visited and they thought him tremendously charming and they never forgot him and to their last days they sent best wishes.

At the back of the chest you can see a big photograph of the beach at Cohasset, Massachusetts, the picturesque town my husband grew up in. It is still a lovely place to visit on a summer day.

Then you can see a clock which belonged to Bud’s great-great grandfather, the inventor of Bell’s Seasonings. The clock doesn’t run, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t aesthetically a restful thing to look at.

Two whale oil lamps one from the family, and the other from an estate sale stand at attention all the time.

The dearest thing on this surface is the photo of my grandparents, Mercy and Francisco Joaquin. This was Christmas of 1963, I think. This was at Cresta Ola their beach resort in Bauang,  La Union in the Philippines.

When I read stories about children who grow up in hotels or castles, I think of my childhood days at Cresta Ola, where the restaurant was our kitchen, and the hotel rooms our bedrooms, and the swimming pool our playground. The sun sank into the ocean every night and guests came down the driveway and added color to our march of days.

When I was back in the Philippines earlier this year, my uncle gave me the whole sequence of these photographs. When I look at them, I see so much. Most of all, I see my own small face in my own branch of the  family. My mother in her cat-eye sunglasses, my father in his blue tropical weight suit. There we were, in the most unusual place, in the most unusual life, frozen in time.

Yet, that time follows me everywhere, and my grandparents loom large over the landscape. The gifts given to me, the imagination, and the ability to dream with a huge canvas, come from this world.

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Story # 2

First of all,  I will be posting at least twice a week. The end of degree frenzy is winding down and I can focus on my slightly abandoned blog. Second, let me tell you about this little distressed plaster statue I got in Manila.

Whenever I look at this I have a warm feeling. I don’t see a plaster piece with a chipped nose. I remember seeing her up on a shelf. I am in a vintage shop on a sunny, breezy afternoon in Manila. I spent the morning in the company of my cousin and her pre-Cana group. There was a marvelous breakfast and jolly conversation. I listened to the most amazing ghost story ever. Afterwards we embarked on an afternoon of being together. My cousins Bernadette, Melody and Auntie Lynne were with me. We were on a treasure hunt. We had no idea what we would find.

On Facebook, I met Alex Castro of
http://andalltheangelsandsaints.blogspot.com
. He is one of my favorite bloggers. Our interests intersect in multiple realms; vintage paper ephemera, Manila Carnival beauty queens, and Filipino antique saint statues.  He mentioned a place in Cubao, at the site of the old Marikina Shoe Expo.

The Cubao Expo is like a tropical slice of Brooklyn. The old showrooms that housed shoe displays in Manila’s shoe export heyday are now transformed into vintage shops of all sorts.

We entered one called Remnants. An article about the store is here. It was like walking into a magical closet in a grandmother’s house. Eye candy everywhere. The stories roared out of the little pieces of exiled beauty. Does that every happen to you? When I am around old things in a flea market or an estate sale, I can feel the stories come out of the things. Sometimes I feel sadness, sometimes loneliness, sometimes there is love. My little plaster statue was on the top shelf looking down at me. Something about it grabbed me. I thought of a thousand afternoons in a room with capiz shell windows with the sound of merienda being prepared downstairs. I thought of the stand of sunlit bamboo near the library at University of the Philippines. I thought of my childhood in Baguio and La Union. I thought of the sparkling sea and the sound of guitars. I remembered the porch that wrapped around our house on Clark Air Base. Like pages of a book, the images flashed through my mind.

I turned to look at my cousins who were laughing over records – such blithe spirits. Here we were on a typical afternoon between lunch and dinner. No agenda, just spending time. The most normal thing in the world, spending time with family. Here in the States I spend lots and lots of time with my husband and children. We never see his cousins.

In the in-law family,  a rigodon must be danced. One misstep and heads roll. Like a mystery novel, secrets must be kept, questions must not be asked. It’s sort of like communist Cuba, strict adherence to party propaganda has to be adhered to.

What a relief to be in Manila with my own blood. I had missed it so much!  Now the work is to build a bridge back, with a life that can be lived in both places. More than anything I yearn for these hours with my family.

After shopping we wandered into a charming restaurant called  Bellini’s  . The place was empty. We ordered like princesses on a holiday without spies. Our laughter bounced off the sunlit frescoes. The golden light of late afternoon in Manila told us it was time to go. We chatted with the owner, a former paparazzo who married a Filipina. He seemed like someone who won the lottery. I thought he did.

Like all the other special days in the Philippines, that afternoon had a feeling of extreme normalcy. That feeling which I often allude to is a feeling of extreme comfort, of belonging without explanation, a feeling of being understood and accepted. I guess it is a feeling of love.

 

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Sixty five years ago

Sixty five years ago, the U.S. forces were wrestling of Philippines from the invading clutches of the Japanese Empire. In this fight to the finish, they carpet bombed my hometown of Baguio. My grandfather built bomb shelters next to the Baguio Cathedral, and in other locations in Baguio. He was a mining engineer, and so he knew how to build tunnels.

On the morning of the bombing mission, my family knew the drill. They were staying with the Catholic bishop, who was a good friend of the family. The Blessed Sacrament would be taken from the Cathedral tabernacle to the underground shelter. The Bishop would give Holy Communion one last time, give them the final absolution, and then they would wait.

My mother was fourteen. In fact her birthday would pass during those days. I always think of her as a little girl, because in her narrative, she always sounds like a child, deferring to her parents in a high pitched voice. She never told us the story until a few years ago, when Hollywood released, “The Great Raid” about the rescue at Cabanatuan. She told the story to my children. We sat around the table and she reached into some unaccessed piece of memory and told us what happened.

At the end, we are all in tears. At fourteen, you have an idea of life and death. You have a sense of dread. You can feel terror. So there they were, in the bomb shelter. They had received the Last Sacraments, they huddled together in the embrace of their parents who held hands around their children. There was Patricia, 14, Teresita, 11 Buddy, 8, Sonny, 4, and baby Mary Anne. It must have felt like being on the Titanic.

Lolo started praying out loud, when the high pitched whistle of the falling bombs began. There was, of course, tremendous noise, the force of the concussion, and earth quaking. I can just imagine them bearing it in however children can bear things. I can just imagine my grandmother holding my grandfather’s hands, truly, for dear life.

Then, unbelievably, it was over. My mother did not know if she was dead or alive, and felt her face. She could feel blood coming out of her ears and nose. Then someone opened the door and she could see a pinpoint of daylight.

They staggered out into hell. There was fire all around them. A decapitated head blinked its eyes. My mother said the bishop’s palace was a smoldering ruin. The only thing she could think, at that time was of a dress she had. Her only dress. She reverted to her teenager’s mind and thought, “There goes my dress. How will I ever get another dress?”

They weren’t done yet, the war wasn’t over yet. They still had to refugee on foot down the mountain, and refugee back up to Baguio. If you have never heard of Baguio, I will tell you this. It was a beautiful American city in the highlands of the Philippines.

I have often pondered how it would be if our city would be invaded and taken over by a cruel conquering army. How would it be if we had to withstand a carpet bombing? I think of the people in Baghdad. I think of the people in Bosnia. It is always so hard on the people who survive. It leave scars, believe me, it does.

I carry scars from my mother’s war experiences. I carry a fear of lack, a fear of what might go wrong. So, unlike my husband whose parents grew up in relative security, I fear things he would never think of. Because encoded in my DNA, are memories of terror that became normal.

At least I know this, and have worked to overcome it all my life. The war was the single world event that formed the psyche of my mother’s family. Many of their reflexes are still as children in the war. They all miss their parents, even if their parents died in the 1960′s.  Time, of course, has abated the pain, but their absence is still palpable. How can you ever let your parents be human beings if they saved you over and over again when you were a child?

My poor grandparents, what did they bear? My poor mother, what things did she see and hear that she still cannot fully process? War is horrible. We should think twice or thrice about the legacy of violence around the planet when a child is witness to horror and brutality.

And interesting thought about the Philippines and all who witnessed the horrors of war. I don’t know how people dealt with it except through repression, because there was no therapy movement. It looks to me like people just buried it and went on. If Americans have a triumphalist view of history, then Filipinos has a triumphalist view of life. They like to look on the bright side. Ever optimistic, they buried the pain of the war deep where it wouldn’t come to them during the day. It just wasn’t spoken about when I was growing up. I never even heard of the plight of the “comfort women” until I was a grown woman in San Francisco. So much pain, my island home, so much suffering. And such a beautiful country.

When I was a little child, the war was right next to us. The servants told us of the atrocities, my mother never did. Stones will tell the story of that sort of violence.

Sixty five years ago, the bombs fell and my family live to tell the tale. Many other people we know collectively, people who were part of the family story, didn’t make it. That is how it is in the time of war.

I am very grateful to be here. I am glad my mother has these years of peace and plenty in California. As a mother, I am so sorry my family had to endure that. It scarred them. Some of it was transferred to us. You don’t have to look hard.

Only with compassion can everything be forgiven. The conquering Japanese, the Americans who liberated with bombs, the encoding fear that shaped that generation. May they all have peace now, for the rest of the road.

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The Good Knight

My grandfather, Francisco G. Joaquin, was a knight of St. Sylvester. When I was a very little girl, I took it for granted that he was a special man. He had a sword in his bedroom, and a hat with gold braid on it, and a uniform. These things were tucked away, but I knew where they were. I also knew where his medal was – the one with the ribbon and the cross. It was in the drawer of his Art Deco dresser, with the full length mirror and all the little drawers. He had a library, a room full of books adjacent to his bedroom. The sleeping chamber was separated by a heavy curtain from the reading room.

He was my lolo, my grandfather and he moved with a kind of quality that I would later know as gravitas. In that reading room he could look across to Mount Santo Tomas. The dining room was down a step from the bedroom, and he would sit there, sometimes- lost in thought, in the time after my grandmother’s death. Even though he seemed sad in those last years -I always felt secure around him, I always felt that he had the answers.

I didn’t find his kind of Catholicism difficult to adhere to. I thought all of it was a great mystery, and that I was blessed to have been under his care.

We, all of us, were blessed to have been under his care.

My father was the one who told me that Lolo was a knight. We were living at Clark Air Base when he told me. My father was from the South and he was chivalrous. He told me about brave deeds and I understood what knights were. I have always loved fairy tales.

Lolo was chivalrous, a true gentleman. He was refined in that he loved to read, to discuss theology, and to play the violin. He would accompany my grandmother, Lola Mercy, as she would sings the old love songs, an art form called harana.

Then the war came, and the beloved violin was smashed. Toward the end of the war, he built bomb shelters. That sounds like a safe thing to recount. In reality, if the Japanese knew that he was building bomb shelters, he would have been shot on the spot, because that would have been a recognition that the US Armed Forces were returning to reclaim the islands. So he managed his crew of seminarians, and they built the shelters on the grounds of the religious orders who had their mother houses and retreat houses in Baguio. He built the shelter that saved my family’s life, and the life of the Bishop of Baguio.

When the bombs finally came, the bombs that destroyed Baguio, his shelters held. Because of his efforts so many people, civilians and religious were saved.

The news of his heroic work made it all the way to the Vatican, and he was made a knight. I often ponder the image of my grandfather kneeling before the altar at the Baguio Cathedral, while the words were intoned to create him a knight.

I always knew he was special, but because I have his letters and his books, I KNOW who he was. He was an exemplary man, pure in thought, word and deed. He adored my grandmother. He was brave and sober.

They died too young.

I think that he watches out for me. He looks down at me and knows that I was too young to appreciate him when I was under his care. I appreciate him now.

When I was of an impressionable age, I saw him pray, I saw my grandmother pray. I knew they tapped into a great power. Their faith was unwavering. When my sister Lizzie was in her last months, she reminded me that Lolo and Lola prayed for everything. They prayed for the good business outcome, the safety of their children, the safety of their trip. “We should do the same thing,” Lizzie said.

Ah, there’s another one who went too early. Another one who was fine and noble and true.

Because of my grandfather’s decision to send us back to the Philippines when I was ten, I was able to live in the environment he created, and benefit from his influence.

One thing I did in those early days of being back, was to go to mass with him early in the morning. I loved it. He didn’t say much, he was sad after my grandmother had died. There was a comfort in sitting next to him.

Kids understand when the grown ups are telling the truth. All his life, he carried a father wound, because his father was not like him. All his life, he tried to be a good Catholic. I thank him for this. He is someone whose example was never false.

We will never know all that we lost, or all that we were spared from until we are behind the veil. So much of life is pushing forward through the fog.

I pray, I hope, I trust. My grandfather’s example, imprinted in my memory, is my map. Thank you, Lolo, for this.

*reposted in honor of his work during this anniversary of the carpet bombing of Baguio City in 1945.

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The Good Knight

My grandfather, Francisco G. Joaquin, was a knight of St. Sylvester. When I was a very little girl, I took it for granted that he was a special man. He had a sword in his bedroom, and a hat with gold braid on it, and a uniform. These things were tucked away, but I knew where they were. I also knew where his medal was – the one with the ribbon and the cross. It was in the drawer of his Art Deco dresser, with the full length mirror and all the little drawers. He had a library, a room full of books adjacent to his bedroom. The sleeping chamber was separated by a heavy curtain from the reading room.

He was my lolo, my grandfather and he moved with a kind of quality that I would later know as gravitas. In that reading room he could look across to Mount Santo Tomas. The dining room was down a step from the bedroom, and he would sit there, sometimes- lost in thought, in the time after my grandmother’s death. Even though he seemed sad in those last years -I always felt secure around him, I always felt that he had the answers.

I didn’t find his kind of Catholicism difficult to adhere to. I thought all of it was a great mystery, and that I was blessed to have been under his care.

We, all of us, were blessed to have been under his care.

My father was the one who told me that Lolo was a knight. We were living at Clark Air Base when he told me. My father was from the South and he was chivalrous. He told me about brave deeds and I understood what knights were. I have always loved fairy tales.

Lolo was chivalrous, a true gentleman. He was refined in that he loved to read, to discuss theology, and to play the violin. He would accompany my grandmother, Lola Mercy, as she would sings the old love songs, an art form called harana.

Then the war came, and the beloved violin was smashed. Toward the end of the war, he built bomb shelters. That sounds like a safe thing to recount. In reality, if the Japanese knew that he was building bomb shelters, he would have been shot on the spot, because that would have been a recognition that the US Armed Forces were returning to reclaim the islands. So he managed his crew of seminarians, and they built the shelters on the grounds of the religious orders who had their mother houses and retreat houses in Baguio. He built the shelter that saved my family’s life, and the life of the Bishop of Baguio.

When the bombs finally came, the bombs that destroyed Baguio, his shelters held. Because of his efforts so many people, civilians and religious were saved.

The news of his heroic work made it all the way to the Vatican, and he was made a knight. I often ponder the image of my grandfather kneeling before the altar at the Baguio Cathedral, while the words were intoned to create him a knight.

I always knew he was special, but because I have his letters and his books, I KNOW who he was. He was an exemplary man, pure in thought, word and deed. He adored my grandmother. He was brave and sober.

They died too young.

I think that he watches out for me. He looks down at me and knows that I was too young to appreciate him when I was under his care. I appreciate him now.

When I was of an impressionable age, I saw him pray, I saw my grandmother pray. I knew they tapped into a great power. Their faith was unwavering. When my sister Lizzie was in her last months, she reminded me that Lolo and Lola prayed for everything. They prayed for the good business outcome, the safety of their children, the safety of their trip. “We should do the same thing,” Lizzie said.

Ah, there’s another one who went too early. Another one who was fine and noble and true.

Because of my grandfather’s decision to send us back to the Philippines when I was ten, I was able to live in the environment he created, and benefit from his influence.

One thing I did in those early days of being back, was to go to mass with him early in the morning. I loved it. He didn’t say much, he was sad after my grandmother had died. There was a comfort in sitting next to him.

Kids understand when the grown ups are telling the truth. All his life, he carried a father wound, because his father was not like him. All his life, he tried to be a good Catholic. I thank him for this. He is someone whose example was never false.

We will never know all that we lost, or all that we were spared from until we are behind the veil. So much of life is pushing forward through the fog.

I pray, I hope, I trust. My grandfather’s example, imprinted in my memory, is my map. Thank you, Lolo, for this.

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