Many Mansions
Many Mansions
Many Mansions
THE AUTHOR HOLDS THE COPYRIGHT TO THIS STORY. THIS IS POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM THE
AUTHOR.
Small World
It probably was a small house, but size throws off a child. What seems modest to an adult is
extravagance to a little one. It was the world to me.
It certainly seemed ample then. There were three bedrooms, which we called blue, green, and aircon.
Children’s names, these; one bedroom was painted blue, one green, and one had a new air-conditioner. I
don’t remember what we called it before the air-conditioner arrived, but it was yellow, with a parquet
floor and a deep dressing area. It was the room of my parents, which is why the new Sony color TV and
Betamax were there. The old TV was in the living room downstairs, a Zenith in a large cabinet with doors
that slid open. In front of it was a coffee table and the blue sofa where Tito Bing, when he was visiting,
would sit shirtless, leaving a deep, sweaty impression on the vinyl.
My mother sent most of us to piano lessons, and soon enough, a piano took its place in our living room.
We went to a music studio in northeast Greenhills, a short walk from the Greenhills shopping center. To
us that whole complex was simply Unimart, where my mother bought groceries; then came Virra Mall, a
modern marvel, not yet a seedy haven of smuggled goods. This was my small, well-traveled universe:
Ledesma Street to Unimart; further down Ortigas to Meralco, where my father worked and where we
played tennis on Sunday afternoons; and then on to Ateneo, where I had studied since grade school.
San Juan seemed pretty much the whole city then, because even my relatives were there. On M. Paterno
Street, adjacent to Ledesma, lived Tito Pepot with my father’s parents. Tito Tito and the Litonjuas lived in
another part of Greenhills, with Tita Letty and the Mendozas nearby on Mariano Marcos Street. Sundays
we heard mass in Mary the Queen, where I would marry my wife years later.
The big round dining table was new, and I suppose like a lot of families, we experienced that moment of
bliss when, having changed from a long table to this round one with a novelty called the lazy susan, we
were liberated from the forced courtesies of asking people to pass this or that dish. I wonder though if
something was lost, if the convenience of just turning an inner platform set on marbles until what you
wanted was right in front of you did away with the learned cordiality, the togetherness with one’s table
mates that taught you the give and take of community.
There were orange glasses and a matching orange pitcher, and at meals we’d have it and a blue one on
the table. Tito Bing would pour orange juice into his coffee, forgetting that the water was in the orange
pitcher, the orange juice in the blue one.
Ledesma Street was a short one, and quiet. Our house was unassuming, with walls of a modest height
and a green gate. The gate opened to a long three-car garage. We’d play football there, and Bombit, the
eldest, once fell on his wrist and broke it. On birthdays there would be parties, with folding tables from
one end to the other, balloons, spaghetti, hotdogs, ice cream, and our painfully cute posing for pictures.
Our next-door neighbor made coffins, or so they said. I don’t remember seeing any. Actually, I don’t
remember seeing anyone in that tiny gray house on our left. My mother says that some of the people
there had gone insane. Somehow, coffin-making and insanity come hand in hand, as we’ve learned from
old horror movies.
***
In high school I discovered the perilous thrill of chasing after girls. Going to soirées, meeting them,
getting their phone numbers, calling them up – how crazy it all was, to daydream an entire afternoon
away, my books on the living room coffee table, my head in the clouds. The studying could go to hell as
my mind floated in its hormone-induced bliss. It was a heady time, reveling in the rush of taking risks,
then wallowing in the crushing despair of rejection.
The Assumptionistas wouldn’t let you stay on the phone with them more than fifteen minutes. The
Scholasticans would talk for hours, and I loved that. Niña and I would talk often, it would be daylight out,
then it would be dark and I wouldn’t even get up to turn on the lights, and we’d talk some more. But I
should have seen how that affair would turn out: she lived on Vito Cruz, way beyond my familiar orbit. At
a certain point, we saw each other at a volleyball game in La Salle Greenhills, then asked "Was that you?"
later in the evening when I called. When you don’t know what each other looks like anymore, the
courtship has officially failed.
Then we transferred. It was 1984, I was fifteen and finishing my second year in high school. When we
were about to leave, we felt the excitement of moving to a new house, a bigger one, in a more upscale
neighborhood. It meant good things, that we were moving up in the world.
There were no phones. For some reason, our application for two lines had been held up. Having just
moved, I became acutely aware of the lack of communications, a serious shortcoming in the eyes of a
fifteen year-old. In such ways were an adolescent boy’s inept attempts at wooing adolescent girls
doomed before they hardly had a chance to succeed.
To communicate with the outside world I simply upped and went to a friend’s house, Gerry’s in
Xavierville or Abe’s in La Vista. I would simply show up and take them by surprise. Was there some
emergency? they would ask. Why had I gone all the way there? Then they realized that without the
ability to call them, I had little choice but to pop up unannounced at their houses, ready to make myself
at home and partake of their meals. Teenagers can get away with such blithe effrontery.
But even with its isolation, remedied a few months after we moved in when the phone company finally
deigned to be of service, the house had its attractions. In fact, in many ways it was a dream house. It sat
on some eight hundred square meters, more than twice the size of the San Juan house we left behind.
And since the house my civil-engineer father designed used up less than half the lot, we had more room
to roam than we had ever had, or ever would.
I was especially fond of the wide backyard. Half of it was concrete, on which we thrashed around playing
our tortured brand of basketball with an undersized ball and a makeshift board and ring. The other half
was a garden, green and expansive; all we had at the back of the Ledesma house was a patch of dark soil
where nothing would grow. Afternoons I’d take the cover off one of the round patio tables and spread it
on the prickly bermuda grass. I’d lie there on the thick tablecloth that was just long enough for me and
gaze wistfully at a blue, blue sky. The open space of the backyard gave me a vantage point to the heavens
I haven’t had before or since. Not a bad place to live in for someone who sometimes wanted to just
ponder the sky, who wanted the occasional chance to escape to it.
I did that often, sitting on the sidewalk outside vigilantly watching the sun setting over what to me was
Greenhills (where the girl of special interest to me lived), or lying on that tablecloth in the garden. Or
sitting at the balcony that joined the rooms of my parents and Pixie, my sister, on the nights I’d suffer an
insomnia attack; my sister asleep in the master bedroom, I’d bring a chair from her room onto the
balcony. An insomniac, who sometimes has no choice but to be awake when the dark gives way to light,
can always treat himself to the dawn sky.
For the growing teen, perhaps the most important thing about the new house were the bedrooms. For
the first time I had my own room, no small thing in a household of five boys and one girl. An only girl
must have her own room, mother reasoned, and we used to envy Pixie her privilege. When we moved, I,
the third child, finally had mine. This was important. As a child staggers into adolescence, he grows
increasingly ornery when it comes to matters of privacy. At last I had a place where my things, and
thoughts, could be left undisturbed.
Late afternoons and early evenings I’d turn off the lights and play something on my stereo – Barbra
Streisand’s "Somewhere" or Boston’s "More Than a Feeling" or "Amanda," U2’s "With or Without You" –
anything that soared, and turn up the volume. I’d lie in bed facing the window. Or I’d open the window
and sit on the sill, my feet in the plant box, and let the music take me up into the deepening darkness.
***
It didn’t take long, though, before I felt that I didn’t quite fit here. Neighbors can do that to you.
On the asphalted tennis court at the park I played mostly with kids from around the village, kids ten,
eleven, twelve years old. And they were kids in their brash, self-absorbed way. I was never comfortable
around them, and I put up with them only because I enjoyed the game.
On the basketball court things were worse. The brash, self-absorbed kids of the tennis court were
replaced by brash, self-absorbed grown-ups. They found me quiet, but what was there to talk about? I
didn’t smoke, do drugs, party till dawn, or fawn over cars. In my eyes they were moneyed men in the
aimless, petty way I imagined you grew up to be if you didn’t see anything much that made sense
beyond what you could drive, wear, eat, smoke, or screw. I had nothing to say to them.
I sensed that it was a matter of time before I had to leave. The land surrounding our house was empty,
but for how long? Houses were going up all around the subdivision. How long until the banging and
clatter of construction work drove away the quiet, the burgeoning houses encroaching upon us and
obstructing our view? How long before the whole place was filled with the arrogant, chattering, idle
people I thought my neighbors were?
The parish church didn’t make me feel any better. It was just outside the village, and Sundays we heard
mass there with the rest of the subdivision and nearby villages. I never liked the church. I thought the
immense bug-eyed statue of Christ above the altar, to which all eyes had to turn, was ill-proportioned
and hideous. It only added to the feeling of strangeness I felt among my expensively coiffed, dour-faced
neighbors. And then there was the sound. No matter what they did, no matter how they tried, an echo
always bounced off the walls and made it hard to track the priest’s words. The word of God deserved
better acoustics.
Maybe it was no accident that my crisis of faith occurred at about that time. It was hard enough
grappling with soul-piercing questions of faith; it became tougher to hang on to God in a place that
didn’t seem to want you to. How could faith smolder in a house of worship cold as this? I stopped going
to that church, or any other.
***
I see now that such thoughts could probably weigh heavily only on the mind of a mid-teen, one grown
attuned, excessively perhaps, to the hollowness of conformity. I was fighting my quiet rebellions, against
family, school, social classes, God – the things that boxed me in and told who I should be, what I should
believe in, how I should behave. I was concerned, maybe too much so, with the incongruence between
who you were and who you pretended to be. It was too easy to judge.
And perhaps a teenager feels more acutely than others that he is an outsider. Was I one of them? Yes
and no, and I squirmed at the contradiction. There I was in their midst, living a comfortable life in one of
their cushy houses. I wanted the money and what it could buy (in a family of six children one feels that
there is never enough to go around). But I spurned the accoutrements of such a life, the status symbols,
the badges one wore to prove membership in what I thought was a vacuous elite.
I felt uneasy knowing I wasn’t poor, that my skin was pale, that I spoke in competent English, that my
tastes weren’t lowbrow, that I ate well, that we had cars and maids and an eight-hundred square-meter
house in a posh private subdivision, that I studied in an expensive exclusive school – that I was part of a
narrow stratum of society that did exceedingly well at fending for itself. This was who I was, and it wasn’t
all right with me. I had become what I scorned: a rich kid. It was one other thing to fight.
In the end, perhaps all this – the uneasiness, the awkwardness, the wanting to be both in and out of the
club – was simply part of the growing pains, endured during an adolescent’s labored and fitful evolution
toward a higher form of being. Perhaps I was simply suffering the displacedness one first comes to notice
as a teenager, the universal feeling of not quite being at home anywhere, even in one’s skin. I’ve never
lost that feeling. It’s probably just another part of the turmoil of living in a world that turns and turns
without asking if it’s all too fast for you.
***
Soon enough, my father told us that we had to move out. He no longer wanted to stay in the
construction arm of Meralco, which he had served for decades. He wanted to strike out on his own with
a new company, with his own people. And that meant earning less. The house had to go, or rather, we
had to let go of it.
In August of 1989, two months into my last year as an undergraduate in college, some five years after we
first moved in, we trundled out of the house on our trusty old Hi-Ace and a small truck my father
borrowed from the office. Years later, we would look back at the years we spent there and chuckle: those
were the days when we were rich, the days of our brief but failed foray into the ranks of the wealthy.
When my mind wanders back to those days, I’m often back on the balcony outside my sister’s room, up
at daybreak because I haven’t slept a wink, and I watch the darkness turn into a thin gray, then a blue
that grows more and more vivid, the wisps of clouds streaked with red, herald of the arriving sun.
"Night’s candles are burnt out and jocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top," wrote
Shakespeare. Those years in that house when I had a balcony seat to the break of day I knew exactly
what he meant.
We called it Ortega, but it wasn’t really on Ortega Street. It was on Mariano Marcos in San Juan, but we
had called it Ortega all our lives, and Ortega it still is. That was how we called it, the way the house on
Ledesma Street is "Ledesma," the house on Heron Street "Greenmeadows" (not Heron); the way my wife
calls the Malate house she was born in "Vermont," though Vermont Street has been J. Nakpil for ages.
It felt strange, karmic in a bad way, that we were moving into it. My Tita Letty and my Mendoza cousins
had stayed in that house all the years I was growing up, and they had just moved into a none-too-posh
subdivision in Marikina, not like the grander ones in the Ortigas area we were leaving. We knew it was
going to be a step down.
It was. From the surface sheen of Greenmeadows to this. The house seemed old, and more importantly,
run down. It stood on stilts, as we kids called them, the house raised from the ground a few feet, in the
style of older times for some purpose we no longer thought applicable. The doors didn’t have knobs, just
handles and hooks. They closed because of springs attached at the top. You’d hear them bang, the
springs squeak, when someone passed through. When typhoons hit, the house made a low rumble as
storm winds made the doors and windows jitter, as if it all would finally come apart.
The interiors were tighter, the corridors narrower, and – perhaps the surest sign of our harder times –
there were fewer bathrooms. There were no marbled floors as in Greenmeadows, just narrow wooden
planks worn away at some places, and they creaked under your step. The windows weren’t sheets of
tinted glass on large metal frames; they were made of wooden and capiz panels, in the style of old
houses I see only in Manila or the provinces.
This house sat on an unusually shaped corner lot, with one road (Smuth, which we never did learn how
to pronounce) rising sharply upwards from Mariano Marcos, creating a pizza-pie slice of land. At the thin
end of the pie slice was the gate, which opened to a long driveway of concrete that was broken in some
places. When it rained, opening the gate was a chore; it was low, water collected just under it, and my
mother eventually bought boots and left them by the front door with an umbrella.
The plan was for us to stay here while our new house in Marikina, in the same middle-class village our
cousins had transferred to, was being built. We didn’t know how long that would take, but it seemed to
slow down when the Gulf War broke out and prices shot up. That was the attitude: we were here only in
transit. When you walked into the master bedroom, you could tell we didn’t intend to stay. Together with
my parents’ queen-size bed were single beds, a red sofa, and wing chairs, all refugees from the house on
Heron Street that was no longer ours. They seemed to be biding their time, waiting to be restored to
their rightful place, to a room more in keeping with their status.
***
The house may not have been much to look at. And commuting to anywhere was harder since it was a
long walk toward the nearest jeepney routes. The drive to Ateneo was longer. But it wasn’t without
charms. It had wide open spaces, for one thing. There was a garden, which wasn’t like the manicured,
sculpted showcase in Greenmeadows; it was thick with grass green and wild, not prickly bermuda. The
earth was soft under your running shoes. In the evenings I’d look out from the living room window at the
grass shimmering in the ghostly moonlight.
At dusk fat flies hovered eerily in the air, after darkness had relented but before the sun had come out,
as if presiding over some solemn ceremony in which the night gave leave to the day. I saw that strange
but wondrous rite several times because of my insomnia attacks. One summer I suffered a particularly
severe one. I’d go to bed at ten then be awake at two, unable to sleep anymore. I’d get up and play
games on the computer, watch tapes, read. When my mother got up at dawn I’d help her heat some
water for coffee, put ice in and fill the water jug, and sit at the kitchen table. We weren’t talkative at five
in the morning, so we would just drink coffee. When it started to get light out I’d take a walk or jog,
pounding the concrete and the soft earth and grass, making small circles in the yard, the fat flies that
buzzed softly paying no heed. I’d come in and eat a heavy breakfast, sleep the whole afternoon, then go
through it all again that night. Somehow, after weeks of this, I was finally able to fall asleep at midnight
and wake at eight. I counted my blessings, old house included.
***
The end came soon enough. The owners of the lot had sold it to a townhouse developer, and we had
until the end of March 1992 to move out. It had been nearly three years.
We packed up and started shuttling between this place and the next, but moving seemed like more work
this time than when we left Greenmeadows. The trips to Marikina were longer than the ones from
Ortigas to San Juan, and the traffic had only grown heavier. We’d be able to make only two, maybe three
trips a day before pleading exhaustion. The Hi-Ace got worn down quickly. On our last trip we stuffed
everything that would fit into the cars, just barely fitting into them ourselves, and drove out for the last
time.
It was also my last day as a teacher in the Ateneo High School: March 29, Sunday, graduation day. I’d
taught there two years. That last year I’d met Hilda. On my first date with her in the middle of August, I
came home at six in the morning. We had been on the couch in her living room talking until two, fell
asleep, and woke up at five thirty, my head still on her lap. My mother opened the gate, a look of worry
on her face, as if afraid she’d lost me to someone else. She did. One week later Hilda agreed to be my
girlfriend, my first ever. Five years later we were married.
After two years on probation at Ateneo High, my contract wasn’t renewed, and on that last day I stuffed
what was left of my things into plastic shopping bags and, after the ceremony and a complimentary
dinner, threw them into a car and drove off into the night. No job, new house, no teary farewells.
A few days later, my mother would go back to try to retrieve some more things. The gate was open, she
said; someone had shit on the driveway. Faucets and other fixtures were gone, tiles torn out, the place a
mess. I’m glad I never saw that. Then they torched the house, easier and cheaper than tearing it down,
and I suppose that was good, as good a way as any to go.
Work on the house would continue, but it remains unfinished eight years later. All the interiors, after a
few years of intermittent work, are done. But the exterior remains unpainted, still the same cement gray
as the day we moved in, though grimier now. Marikina’s factories aren’t too far away. The garden
remains ungreened; earth, stones, weeds, and leaves are where I suppose bermuda grass will be put
down someday.
In my eyes the Marikina house is an attempt to return to the successful Greenmeadows plan, but with
more modest means at one’s disposal. The living room of the Cinco Hermanos house features much of
the same furniture, a similar look. The sofa and wing chairs seem at ease again. My mother’s growing
collection of angel figurines is the new twist. But there is less space in this room, as in most of the rooms
in the Marikina house, since it is a smaller house on a smaller lot.
The kitchen is carefully planned, as was the earlier one, the cooking and eating areas clearly demarcated.
There is again a formal dining room, and the new one seems to have been designed for the long narra
dining table, a lovely Designs Ligna item, perhaps the one most beautiful piece of furniture we have,
bought on the cheap from relatives leaving the country in a hurry when we still were on Heron Street.
Upstairs are the boys’ rooms. The beds were the ones custom-made for the Greenmeadows house, the
same ones we’d slept in since then. It was a loft or an attic, my mother insisted, which is why the stairs
had such narrow steps. But this "attic," curiously enough, had two big bedrooms as well as a wide hall.
To those of us who actually inhabited these rooms, the curiosity was an annoyance. There was no
bathroom, so if you had to go to the toilet in the middle of the night you had to go down the stairs and
come back up again, by which time you were at least half awake.
Perhaps there was no difference between the two houses more basic, and more dramatic, than their
location. This part of Marikina is not quite the same as the swanky part of Ortigas we inhabited for five
years. Cinco Hermanos is split by a road, cutting it into two phases, that leads on one end to Major
Santos Dizon, which connects Marcos Highway with Katipunan Avenue. The other end of the road stops
at Olandes, a dense community of pedicabs, narrow streets, and poverty. The noise – from the tricycles,
the chattering on the street, the trucks hurtling down Marcos Highway in the distance, the blaring of the
loudspeaker at our street corner put there by eager-beaver baranggay officials – dispels any illusions one
might harbor of having returned to a state of bliss.
***
The first floor is designed to create a clear separation between the family and guest areas, so one can
entertain outsiders without disturbing the house’s inhabitants. This principle owes probably more to my
mother than my father. After all, she is the entertainer, the host. The living room, patio, and dining room
– the places where guests might be entertained – must be clean and neat, things in their places. She
keeps the kitchen achingly well-organized, which is why there are lots of cabinets and a deep cupboard.
And she put them to good use. According to Titus, the fourth, who accompanied her recently while
grocery shopping, she buys groceries as if all of us still lived there. I don’t recall the cupboard ever being
empty.
That became her way of mothering. As we grew older and drifted farther and farther away from her
grasp, defining our own lives outside of the house, my mother must have felt that she was losing us to
friends, jobs, loves – forces beyond her control. Perhaps she figured that food, and a clean place to stay,
was what we still needed from her. So over the last ten years or so she has become more involved in her
cooking, more attentive, better. She also became fussier about meals, asking if you’ll be there for lunch
or dinner so she knows how much to cook, reprimanding the one who didn’t call to say he wasn’t
coming home for dinner after all, or the person who brought guests home without warning. There was
more to it than just knowing how much rice to cook.
I know it gives her joy to have relatives over during the regular Christmas and New Year get-togethers,
which have been held in our house for the past half-decade or so. She brings out the special dishes, cups
and saucers, platters, glasses, bowls, coasters and doilies she herself crocheted. Perhaps I understand
better why her Christmas decor has grown more lavish each year.
After seeing off the last guests after the most recent gathering, she sighed, "Ang kalat ng bahay!" I didn’t
see her face, but I could hear her smiling. My father replied, "Masaya ka naman." It wasn’t a secret.
Sundays we come over to the house, everyone who has moved out, and have lunch together. Sunday
lunches were always differently esteemed in our household. Now that some of us have left, I sense that
my siblings try harder than they ever did to be there. I know I do. I try not to deprive my mother the
chance to do what she does best.
Epilogue
The dispersal began in the mid-eighties when Bombit went to the United States and never returned. He
left some months after we’d moved to Greenmeadows, yet I have no memory of him there. (In memory
there are no things, only worlds. Things never exist by themselves, but only with and against other
things, between backgrounds and foregrounds, swimming in contexts. This is how we can remember
that something is out of place, like a fancy wing chair in the master bedroom of a worn-down house, like
an eldest brother in a house he left behind.)
I remember him only in Ledesma, the rough playmate, sometimes the bully who held us in his thrall, who
would jump on cockroaches with glee, who would take alarm clocks apart and not put them back
together. I remember him in the green station wagon, pillows in the back, disappearing for days visiting
his girlfriend in Manila. In the US they would get married, have two kids, and divorce messily. The guest
room in the Marikina house is for him, for his hoped-for return.
***
The exodus resumed in 1996 when I got married and moved to Diliman. Pixie, my only sister, the fifth
child, married in December 1999 and moved to Blue Ridge. Titus, the fourth, transferred to a Makati
apartment with his wife after their wedding this past March. Raul, the second, and Mikko, the sixth and
youngest, are left with my parents.
My father is what most people would call a man of few words. He was a father of few words as well.
These past few years I’ve tried to talk to him more and more, which is special because we never did
when I was younger. We often talk about money. I am amazed to learn how little we had in the first
place, and I wonder how we could have afforded the Greenmeadows house, how much he has lost
keeping the company he started afloat, how much he still owes here and there.
To me it makes more and more sense for him to sell the Marikina house, use some of the money to pay
off his debts, buy a condominium with two or three bedrooms, and live off the interest on what remains,
which would still be substantial. I’ve mentioned this to him a few times, and he seems receptive. But I
wonder if there’s such a thing as a transfer threshold, dislocation fatigue that accumulates over a lifetime
of setting up in one place then moving. By my count the Cinco Hermanos house is my father’s eighth
home. Will he and my mother be too tired, too weary for another relocation?
***
A few years ago my father and his brothers and sisters sold their house in San Juan. Built in 1948, it had
lasted nearly half a century, sheltering my grandfather and grandmother and their eight children. They
had planned to build a condominium on the lot, but the real estate bubble of the mid-nineties convinced
them that it would be better to just sell. It was sold.
That was not my father’s first house, though it seemed so to me. Born in 1935, he lived near
Pinaglabanan church, then in 1940 at the corner of M. Paterno and Alfonso XIII, with relatives. In my
mind the Paterno house was his first, not just because I hadn’t seen the first two (the first is gone, the
second rebuilt). The Paterno house was where his father and mother lived, and I’d always imagined them
and their children making do in that structure that weathered the decades.
When we were little, my siblings and cousins, we spent Sundays there. I learned how to ride a bicycle on
the long driveway. We played tennis on a neighbor’s court after climbing the back wall. In the grassy
front yard we played baseball, and I hit the first homerun in that tiny ballpark. We fished for star apples
with long bamboo sticks, picked dewy santan, got caught in the thorny bougainvillea bushes retrieving
errant pingpong balls. The last time I passed by the lot the house had been torn down.
My father would have been thirteen when he moved into it; he was over sixty when he and his brothers
and sisters let it go. It made sense to sell it, but I wonder if anything was bargained away in the
transaction. He had lost his parents years before. Was losing the house a final orphaning?
***
Is this the last one? Am I here for good? Or should I keep the boxes and packing tape handy? Houses
provided us the necessary certainties – somewhere to come home to where you’d find your family, your
things, a hot dinner, a bed or a good couch. Write to me here. Call me at this number. But I’ve changed
addresses and phone numbers enough times to know better. Perhaps that’s what houses are really
about: the fundamental uncertainty of life, the slowly learned fact that the reference points by which we
draw our maps and chart our course are ever shifting, and a life’s cartography is never quite done.
That isn’t necessarily a sad thing. Perhaps the houses are no longer, but somewhere inside me I am still
marveling at the break of day, at the way the moon illuminates the grass, at the way the lives of those
I’ve lived with have crisscrossed and intertwined with mine, no matter how tangled up it all sometimes
got.
This essay won First prize for the Essay in the 2000 Palanca Awards