the bus ride

I wrote this on February 27, on the bus ride to go to my father.


I took an ordinary bus from Alabang to Lucena City because (1) there was no aircon bus in sight; (2) I had been waiting for a bus for over half an hour; (3) it was already 8am and the trip would take over 4 hours; and (4) I have always enjoyed riding ordinary buses on long trips to the province. Let me tell you why.


As you get farther away from Manila, the air gets fresher, there are more trees, and the people get more relaxed. Of course the bus stops get longer, but no one really seems to hurry. Along the highway lay little towns with interesting houses, where you judge civilization with whether there is a Jollibee or not. I look at the passing scenery as the bus takes me farther away from my 8-month-old daughter who's barely learning to walk, towards my 64-year-old father who will now relearn how to walk.


At periodic stops the food vendors board the bus: boiled corn at 3 for P10 pesos (I note with amusement that the same corn sells at 3 for P20 pesos where I live), bibingka and buko pie, boiled and fried peanuts, buko juice and C2, boiled quail eggs and greasy chips. When I travel with my daughter I spend a lot on these vendors. Now I note my fellow passengers with kids and I think that parents on road trips all wear the same expression of frustration-mingled-with-amusement.


The bus is filled with a fascinating mix of people. A teenage girl beside me has a paper bag filled with teenage-girl makeup, and she is holding a bubble-gum pink cellphone. I see her sneaking looks at my Palm Treo, and she probably thinks it's a gray, ugly, bulky gadget compared to hers. There's a mother with two kids on her lap, all three of them eating corn and shing-a-ling, sharing a single bottle of water. They look like they're having the time of their lives, while beside them a young man frowns. The bus seats are only for two people, and the mother has squeezed in one of the kids between her and the young man. Now the kid is falling asleep almost on the lap of the young man. The young man looks pissed off, but says nothing. It's a long trip; if I were the mother I would have paid for the kids' seats, but then I probably should be thankful that I can afford to pay for my child's seat when we travel.


The bus radio is playing 25 Minutes by Michael Learns to Rock, and to my surprise, when the chorus came, almost half of the bus started to sing along, even the bus inspector. It's enough to make you smile. (And yes, I know the song too.) I look out my hot window. On the asphalt is what looks like a rat, squashed flat by all the passing wheels in the highway. There's nothing left but a blot of black with a scrap of gray fur and a tail.


I'm hungry and I wish I had bought the bibingka. Vendors would probably swarm the bus again later... yes, the fourth batch of vendors boarded on my second hour in the bus. I bought the bibingka, and although the vendor boasted that it has buko, I'm well half into the bibingka and I haven't tasted a shred of buko. It's good, though, in the way that roadstand food tastes good. You can't buy food like that at home or in the malls. Part of the good feeling comes from the experience. You ask anyone who grew up as kids in the province if eating balut from the vendor at night is the same as eating balut aboard one of the provincial buses.


In airconditioned buses the passengers keep to themselves. They are mostly well-dressed, wearing sunglasses and carrying neat little bags. They buy bottled water and they have brought takeout food and donuts in boxes, which they eat with measured bites. They carry muted conversations and they don't look at their fellow passengers. There is probably a foreign action film playing in the bus video. In this bus, the floor is already littered with candy wrappers, half-eaten corncobs, rolling plastic beverage bottles. The FM radio is blaring (Boy, I miss your kisses... all the time, but this is... twenty-five minutes too laate...). Luggage is piled in the aisle. I can see a sack of rice, a couple of fighting cocks in a box with holes, boxes tied with twine, backpacks. A kid smiles at me across the seats, his face half-smeared with vomit (looks like he overdid the corn). The man seated on my other side mumbles an apology about being slightly drunk on the bus: he says it's his wife's birthday so he has to go home. He keeps his hands clasped around his hotdog bag (it's shaped like a hotdog and seems to be universally favored by construction workers) and calls me 'Ma'am.'


I will get off the bus a bit sticky with sweat, with my hair in stiff tangles and my face gritty with road dust. But the other passengers smile at me as they walk past, hopping over the luggages and the trash. The conductor makes little jokes about slow old women while he carries their bags and help them off the bus. The mother drags her two kids and four bags, and the smaller kid picks off a corn kernel from the seat and pops it into his mouth. Amazing.


For some, four hours of this would be sheer misery. For me, it was fun. It somehow reconnects you with humanity. For four hours, each one of us was immersed in this experience, buying food when the vendors came, fanning ourselves when we're stuck in traffic, watching each other, making little talk when it got boring. Each of us has our own respective destinations, and when we get off, we scatter. We will go home to the wives, visit relatives, conduct businesses, enjoy cockfights, sell wares, meet friends, take care of sick fathers. But the bus ride allows us to share each other, to experience other people, to do things that we otherwise overlook or ignore in our ordinary lives. We let the four hours carry us away to where we are going, and it is a fine ride. For me, it always feels like coming home.

one day...

Ever had a full day? Here's mine:


Worked for eight hours in the office, battling about 150 emails, answering calls, drafting reports. In the middle of it all I had to pick up the books I ordered, requested new ID pictures, and filed a loan. I ate lunch with Susan at Yoshinoya in SM Megamall, then we went to the home section, where Susan somehow convinced me to buy 30 neon green dinner plates for when we entertain at home. (I had not stopped to think that 30 people will not actually fit in my house.)


At 4pm I opened my notes for my Management class. I missed the first session last week because I was taking care of my dad's wake, and we had a case analysis to submit. By the time I progressed to the list of my assignments for Managerial Accounting I was seriously rethinking the wisdom of my decision to get an MBA at Ateneo.


Had class from 5:30 to 9:00 pm. I declined my husband's offer to fetch me because I thought there'd still be a shuttle--- but there was none. So I took an aircon bus to Alabang. But the bus stopped at the queue in Ayala. After half an hour people were muttering their annoyance, and since it was already quite late I started asking the driver how much longer we are staying in the queue.


The driver would only say that it's the way it's done; they have to queue and pick up passengers, and if we're in a hurry, so is he. He even said that if we were such in a hurry we should have taken a taxi home. The nerve! So I decided to get off and transfer to a new bus. The driver was outside. I asked him if they would charge a different fare for my ticket since we were only in Ayala, but he said they don't allow refunds, and I could complain to authorities if I wanted to. Besides, he said, his conductor was somewhere else at the moment, so we could not discuss the ticket. We started arguing, and I realized that it was 10:30 pm, I was wearing a nice dress and high heels, I was hungry and I needed to pee, and I was fighting with a loud-mouthed, ill-mannered, long-haired driver over a P46.00 fare.


So I transferred to an ordinary bus that bounced and roared and rattled, but I could have kissed the old sweat-smelling, road-grimed driver when we reached Alabang in 15 minutes. I got there ahead of my husband and had to wait 15 minutes more. I cursed the aircon bus driver all the way home.


When we got home I thought of eating only some oatmeal, because it was already 11:30 pm and I had to wake up early, but the food on the table was ginataang alimango at kalabasa, and in the fridge was buko pandan. I forgot the bus driver and the oatmeal. I was still eating one hour later.


Since I was afraid to sleep on a full stomach I rearranged my clothes cabinet, and by 1:30 am I decided my digestion process is well on the way, so I went to bed.


Then the baby woke up at 3 am for her bottle. And again at 5 am. I have to get up at 5:30 am because I have to bring my 7-year-old to school.


Sometimes you have to sigh. :-)

death (2)

There is one image I keep pushing away. It is my dad's face when the doctors were trying to revive him in his hospital bed, and a part of me knew that he was gone.

The end wasn't melodramatic. No doctor came in to tell us he was failing and it was time to say goodbye. In fact, he was already scheduled for physical therapy that afternoon, and after his second session he was going to be discharged.

It wasn't like he gasped or struggled for breath. One moment he was lightly snoring in his sleep, the next moment he was turning gray. When I called the nurses the realization that he might be gone was like a thump in the chest. They tried to revive him twice, but the heart monitor was flat.

The same thump in the chest would come at odd times: when we cleaned out his room and I saw his sandals, and there was the thought that he would never wear them again; when I checked the row of canned goods and powdered milk in boxes that he had stocked, and I found out that half of them had already expired in 2008; when I saw my address from the letter I sent him, stapled to the wall; when I took back the picture of my youngest daughter from his things, the grandchild he never got to see in person.

The thump in the chest is a reminder that he is gone. I dreamed of Daddy last night. It was his birthday, and we all went home. He was pleasantly surprised and he was so glad to see all three of his granddaughters. I woke up with his lopsided smile in my mind, and then, again, there came the image of his face in the hospital. His eyes had been half open, and they remained that way, even when they left him covered with a blanket and allowed us to say goodbye.

death (1)

I read somewhere that the sad thing about the death of a loved one is that it absolves the dead from all the guilt. The living is left grieving for all the things left undone.

Daddy died on February 27, after he had a double stroke. He was 64. From then, until now, there doesn't seem to be any correct way to say goodbye.
I cannot seem to function well. I am distracted, and everything I touch seem to remind me of all the things I failed to do for Daddy. I listen to my iPod and I think of all the music CDs I was supposed to bring him. I arrange my Readers Digests and I think it is good that I finally got to show him the November 2008 issue where I wrote a story about Nanay. He was so proud. I wish there had been more moments like that, while he was still alive.

I wish I had cooked more meals, visited more often, tried harder to understand the man he had become. But it is always like that, isn't it? We always think there is enough time, so we keep putting off the things we could do, the little things that in the end would mean so much. Memento mori. So true.

So we all punish ourselves with guilt, and call it grief. I will probably mourn for him in my own way, in my own time, but for now all there is is this heaviness.