May Today Be Better Than Good
1.
Mr. Fredericks prepared lovely strawberry ice creams, and had always greeted everyone by saying, “Mate!” It must have been a Kiwi thing. He had always bid goodbyes by saying, “May today be better than good.” He bid a final goodbye a little over twenty-four hours after All Souls Day, and it wasn’t at all a good day. No one saw it coming. He had felt a sudden sharp pain in his stomach early in the week, as though something inside had burst, and when it had become clear that something was seriously wrong, the mother of Mr. Fredericks’ gorgeous five-year-old boy Josh – Miss Dimaisip – took him to the hospital. Or wherever it was they attended to the sick in the provincial municipality of Matalam, Cotabato, where he lived. I have been to Mr. Fredericks’ house, early this year, a three-hour bus ride from Davao City past Kidapawan City, rural and simple and yet a place where unhappiness seemed not to exist (there are many such places in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao), and I played with Josh and had delicious Filipino lunch and admired their vegetable garden. In the front yard there was a wooden playhouse, and little Josh, who certainly takes after his cheerful father, peered through the small cracks and openings of his own abode to watch this stupid man from Manila gush, “Aw, how cute. Look at those hazel eyes.”
At the hospital the doctors operated on Mr. Fredericks. Cut him open. The next forty-eight hours saw a somber exchange of phone calls and messages between Miss Dimaisip and Evelyn, who was Mr. Fredericks’ business partner. Her last message read, “Please help me pray for Ian as he travels to the Great Beyond to meet his Creator.” Cause of death was renal failure. He was sixty-three.
2.
What a name, Pius. I know him because of his continued service at San Isidro Labrador Chapel, despite – you know – rumors. But it is his name which should perhaps explain why my most vivid memory of this middle-aged bachelor neighbor of ours is when he had attended my grandmother’s wake at Saint Peter’s in Quezon City. There was something innocent about it, even something holy. He’d brought his guitar, as well as those teenage boys and girls – Len Len, Jenny, Men Men, Rey Boy, among others – who’d otherwise have had nothing else to do but whistle the time away on street benches or place their fathers’ bets for the Santa Ana horse race. Led by Pius, and flanking the open casket of my father’s mother, they sang a chorus of church songs. During mass Pius sort of doubled as a lay minister, spreading cloth over a makeshift altar, assembling the chalice and ciborium and things at a makeshift tabernacle. After mass he left his guitar in a corner and stayed with us, cleaning crumbs from cookies eaten by those who’d come to offer their condolences, encouraging them to sign the memorial guest book, making sure everything was in its proper order. Pius.
Well, he died, too. He was forty-seven. Diabetes. Recently he’d been covering his neck with a makeshift scarf while walking around the neighborhood; he had this wound on the back of his head, from the nape downwards, this wound that wouldn’t heal and he wouldn’t show and which people who had nevertheless seen it described as being the size of a plate. “That’s impossible,” my thought went, when mother announced at the dinner table that Pius had died. “Are you kidding me? Maybe the size of a saucer. Not a dinner plate, I shouldn’t think. That’s horrible.”
3.
My mother’s mother remains at the hospital in Tuguegarao, the Cagayan province where my parents grew up and met each other. Lola Auring had fractured her pelvis at the height of super typhoon Pepeng and has since been under the constant watch of nurses, doctors, her children, her children’s children. It’s been a month now. At the hospital she suffered a stroke and, on another occasion, stopped breathing for one minute, provoking a panicked explosion of prayers and petitions from my mother. My sister Lourdes took pictures of Lola when she went there to visit, but I don't want to look at them.
Here in Manila, meanwhile, people are reeling still from the devastation left behind by Pepeng, Ondoy, Ramil, and Santi, these goddamned typhoons whose entrances we had watched on CNN or ANC. We had watched, that is, when power didn’t fail. When power fails, when the greater entities cite one reason or another for the loss of what would be rather impossible to live without, we can only scramble to find something to do, something that would put off ennui, something that would make us happily ignore a gloomy headline, the enveloping dark, the faltering flashlight, the sad news of death and dislocation. I, for one, and despite the circumstances, would resume reading a novel. I’d grab my guitar. These efforts perhaps are successful in the same consoling way that memories of life and light succeed in helping us accept death and darkness, disaster and powerlessness. It’s usually only to an extent; for a time that we will always look at as a long time, absence would be the looming presence. But we come to realize that the end of a story heralds the beginning of another, that the fading of one song frees us to sing a new one.
















