Keepsakes (excerpt)
Even if you don’t know that your mother is hiding something, one day you’ll find it inside a packet stored in some neglected drawer. Almost every woman I know collect things for sentimental purposes, and shelf them according to era. For many women in my mother’s generation, mementos are preferred over a photo album (really, you only save image relics to brag about those once shapely hips) and are actually more purposeful. Women like my mother get a kick out of remembering something that they felt in order to be cheered up or tortured one day. (Boggles me why bother keeping so many memories of past feelings when you can manufacture your own at present). It could be an unassuming tissue from a restaurant in another city that she’s been to only once, and kept it because maybe she wiped her tears with it over a postponed tryst. It could be the great lola’s brooch heirloom that was pinned on her uniform every day until the matriarch died. It could be a photo of a man once loved back in college who disappeared toward the “middle age” since everyone went on a frenzy, jumping on the domestic bandwagon. My mother for instance was fond of keeping letters, random scribbles, and holiday greeting cards from lovers and friends. She also made it a habit of enclosing them in bubble wrap – a crude method of preservation which managed to keep a hint of scented flora but failed to ward off that peculiar mature smell so distinct of oxidized paper. How both person and memento turned out with the passing of time, sounds to me as some kind of remarkable coincidence.
Yes, I’ve been snooping around in fact, as I was shuffling through that aged pile of someone else’s treasure, I found this poem written on my second birthday. It goes, “…Lo and behold! / I raised you above my head / with my own hands / pray, hope, that you / should so much as look upon / the grass that grows upon my grave” dated July 12, 1990. I mean, this is so tellingly morbid! How could she keep something like this! When you think about it, there are only two possibilities. One, that mortality was such a pervasive theme at that time of my mother’s life and that maybe, just maybe, she secretly wants to outlive me, or; two – mind you, this is the most problematic – she actually wants me to read it. Believe me, I would be a lot more consoled if it was the former. I know she may have brooded about life when she had troubling issues with her family back in the late eighties that lasted until 1992. Those were really trying times… If I may digress, I remember the day when we were leaving our apartment in the city for a much more secluded subdivision. I was four and it was pouring hard, and people were running back and forth trying to secure boxes of our lives into this big truck parked outside Burgos street, which in my opinion at that time, was the narrowest street in the world – the wonders of childhood depth perception. We left the place so that we would become a legitimate nuclear family but I realised much later it was because mom was exhausted to her wits of being the workhorse or martyr eldest daughter archetype for the B(o/u)ndalo family – whichever spelling you prefer. I remember she looked so determined that day, wearing a salakot on her head and I joked that she looked like a farmer and I laughed like it was the funniest thing. I mean, children have no concept of dignified occupation and in my case I had no concept of provincial life either. When it was time to leave, she lifted me by putting an arm under my armpits and she ran toward the truck’s front seat like her life depended on it! It probably did. And as we sat inside the warm front seat of the truck, the storm seemed like a minor setback. Looking back, it must have been an important day for her to leave that place. And I somehow wish that I kept that salakot.
Like a flash, memory can take you to a landscape of emotions. Therefore, a space occupied without a single memory is for amnesiacs and psychotics – people who live there by their choice or not have no care of the forgotten.
My mother asked me finally, “Now, tell me: what do you think about that poem? How do you understand it?”
I said to her, “I don’t know how to understand it, it just makes me cry.”
I said to myself, life is so frail. As frail as I was when you carried me as a baby in your hands.
***
Often there are old folks and relatives who ask me, “How’s your mother”? To me, old folks ask too many rhetorical questions. I wonder what my mother would say to, “How’s your daughter?”
