A Farewell, a Feast and the Travel East

A year ago, Sebastian traveled for the first time to the Philippines. He rode on boats and a goat and swam in clear waters.

It is fiesta time in Surigao City!

Every year, at this time, the city awakens.  The week-long festival to honor its patron saint, San Nicolas de Tolentino, reflects the colorful fabric of this area—my most favorite place in the world.  It is a city of sunshine smiles, vivid characters and ebullient spirits.  It is where my parents grew up, where many of my relatives—including both grandmothers—still live and where I dream of escaping every year.  High above Surigao City, the sky is a steady canvas of cornflower blue that flows seamlessly down into the indigo depths of the seas.  On the boulevard outside of the local landmark, the Tavern, the sun plays with finger paints—as strata of colors change with its ascent—while morning joggers pace themselves and waiting catamarans bob.

A patchwork quilt of odors settles around the city and is weighted down by the humidity.  What does Surigao smell like?  I close my eyes and I can feel the smoke from stalls of chicken being grilled.  My mouth waters at thought of devouring the juicy meat that had been marinated in soy sauce, 7-Up, calamansi, or Philippine lime, and garlic, with rice that had been steamed inside banana leaves, shaped into little pyramids.  I can smell the gag-inducing stench of rotting seafood—entrails and heads of fish—on the floors of the old fishmarket.  I can smell the chemical residues from insecticides that had been sprayed around canals and behind bushes.  And I can smell the heady fragrance from the dama de noche tree when its flowers open at night.

For a small city, Surigao is a constant thunderbeat of sounds.  Every day, I hear the cacophony of children shrieking on their way to school, of engines revving as cars remain stalled behind the mishmash of colorful tin tricycles, and of peddlers hawking food or wares. Swish swish goes the walis ting ting, the sturdy brooms that clear leaves and dust from front steps.  Clang clang clang goes the tin siding being hammered onto roofs.  Maaa maaa goes the goat, tied to a fence post in a neighboring lot where a rooster crows in the morning and dogs growl at night.

I love Surigao.  I miss Surigao.

Those from area and who have had to live far away from it understand me well.  My parents, for example, brought us to the United States to offer us a better life and bigger opportunities, but everyday they spoke in Surigaonon, the local dialect, to each other.  They regaled my brothers and me with stories from their youths.  We could see the longing for home written legibly across their face and in between the lines of the tales they wove about Surigao.

They would talk of a time and a place when men made harana, or serenade, their beloved under their windows at night.  We would chuckle at the shenanigans of the Amat Street Boys, the group of young men who were notorious for their hijinks, often under the influence of Tanduay rum or coconut wine.  My Uncle Leo—my mother’s first cousin—was often a protagonist of those tales.  I would listen and imagine the adventures of the different barkadas, groups of friends whose bonds were forged early in youth and endured for decades.  In Surigao, you are often defined by your barkada, by the friends you keep.  And your group’s name reflected what it was about, like Mischief or Queens or Bowties (names have been changed to protect actual groups).

Of all the stories they told, however, Mom and Dad loved to describe the ones from fiesta time.  When they lived in the United States, their homesickness grew every September.  My mom would sigh—wishing she was back in Surigao with her barkada, but it meant missing out on the start of a new school year for us kids.  So instead our vacations to the Philippines were planned in either June or July.

“But you must experience fiesta, Liza,” Dad would say at the end of every trip home.

Mom would nod, “Yes, one day you have to come in September. There is nothing like Surigao during fiesta.  The city is alive.”

Last year, I decided that I would experience fiesta finally.  It had been six years since I had been home to Surigao.  It was time to visit.  Though the thought of an 18-hour journey with a 17 month old was frightening, I very much wanted to introduce my son Sebastian, to my relatives—especially to his great-grandmothers.   Together with my brother Paolo and his wife, Sebastian and I would travel first to the Philippines and then afterwards to Japan, where our youngest brother Niccolo lives.  Unfortunately my husband, Skerdi, who had not been back in ten years, had to decline coming with us due to work.

The Travel East

The first thing my husband and I did when we brought our son home from the hospital after he was born was to apply for a passport.  We were raising a child not just of three cultures—Albanian, Filipino, and American—but one of the world—an explorer, a traveler and a xenophile.

The first time Sebastian rode an airplane was when he was eight weeks old.  He and his dad came with me to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where I had to attend a conference.  Since then, he has been on several flights, but never one as long as the trip East to the Philippines.

The last time I traveled with a toddler was when my brother Paolo was two years old.  My family and I were leaving the Philippines for the first time to live in Princeton, New Jersey.  I don’t remember much about the trip.  My mother told me I was airsick, and thus, medicated for most of the ride on Pan Am airlines.  When I woke up I recalled looking down at the flight pin on my lapel and my father chasing my brother down the aisle.  I scrambled to the edge of the row to witness Paolo coming back down—actually rolling back down the aisle like a runaway barrel until he crashed into the service cart and a stern-faced flight attendant.

Last year, we armed ourselves with a bagful of toys, books and snacks.  But Sebastian never needed any of those.  He sat on my lap—mesmerized by the plane and the people around us.  Maybe, he sensed that the moment—of traveling to the Philippines—was a bittersweet one for us.

The Farewell

On the eve of our departure, mom called.  Her voice was gravelly—far from being excited that her grandson and children were soon arriving.  Her cousin, Uncle Dennis, had passed away suddenly.   He was Uncle Leo’s older brother—a brilliant man who lived for the board.  When I was young, he taught me to play the game, but it was Paolo who acquired the gift of strategy.  I remember when Uncle Dennis challenged my dad, and the two would play chess for hours in the lanai of our former home in Quezon City.  The house was silent—as two heads bent over the black and white checkered board.  Uncle Dennis would best my father often—and with ease.  That was a difficult feat.

A few days before fiesta, the king surrendered.  Uncle Dennis died in his sleep.  He was in his early fifties.  His death shook us all, and as we took off towards the Philippines, tears that started as a rivulet became a rushing river of sadness.  I took comfort in the life, the spark, I held in my arms.  Sebastian laid his round head on my chest and stayed there until my breathing became steady again.

We arrived in Manila at midnight.  My parents met us with millions of kisses.  They took us to their home, where we spent the next few days in combined sorrow and glee.   Together with my parents, we traveled to Surigao.  When we arrived at our home in Amat Street, I smiled as Sebastian and I entered the iron gates of our whitewashed house.  I looked behind me to the house across the street where the Tandan family has lived for nearly as long as we’ve had our home.  I remembered the evenings my good friend Aileen Tandan, my aunt Marisyl and I would share a bench under the lamp post on the corner.  We would spend hours dreaming of our futures, of romance and of adventures.  That was nearly twenty years ago.

I walked through the living room to look for my 87 year old grandmother, Mama Ching.  The familiar scent of her chicken adobo welcomed us.  She walked gingerly into the room.  Four generations smiled at each other across the space.  Clutching his sippy cup, Sebastian shuffled forward.  Mama Ching did so as well, until the two stood in front of each other—the former tango dancer and her great-grandson.

“Hello, Sebastian,” her gentle voice greeted my boy.

“Hi!”  He waved at her, as he craned his neck upwards, then looked back at me for approval.  I nodded my head, and he shrieked in delight.

“Come, come….let’s eat.”  She held Sebastian’s hand and led him to lunch.

Later that afternoon, we heard drumbeats rumble.  The city was roaring to life hour by hour.  The fiesta was coming.

But it was hard to find joy.  That afternoon, we paid our respects to Uncle Dennis at the funeral parlor where his wake was being held.  The concept of a wake is an age-old tradition.  The body is laid for viewing for a week and then buried.  Family and friends stay “awake” with the loved one all night long.  At the funeral parlor, there were scores of guests.  Some were praying, while others sat quietly in front of the casket.  Outside, many played mahjongg or drank to celebrate my uncle’s life.

I walked to the front of the salon, where the chess master was sleeping.  I laid my hand on his and then stroked his cheek—smooth and still and frozen in time.  I mourned him as memories from my youth surfaced to my consciousness.  I loved Uncle Dennis; I would miss him forever.

The next day, we interred him with his chess board in a lot overlooking the sea.  As we threw the first few handfuls of dirt on top of the coffin, I imagined that he was in heaven playing endless matches of chess with all the saints and souls, whose goodness were akin to his. His mother, Mama Bebing, sat fragile, unable to yield her son, her first born, to the next life.  In her grief, she was blind to the approach of a little boy she had never met.  On his own, Sebastian neared her and placed his hand on her arm and caressed her gently.  He had no words to soothe her; instead he stayed with her.  Did he understand grief at such a young age?

“Who is this?”  Mama Bebing cried aloud.

Aunt Marisyl, her youngest daughter, answered, “It’s Sebastian, Mama.  Liza’s son.”

Mama Bebing looked down at the young life in front of her, at the boy who brought her comfort.  And she smiled through the thunderstorms of emotion.  It was the second time that day that Sebastian offered his comfort unintentionally.  At the memorial service, when our family  had stood with the casket for a final farewell, Sebastian had looked out at the masses grieving in the San Nicolas church.  He had smiled at the sea of faces ,and then he had smiled once more—it was one of comfort as we bid farewell to one of our own.

Fiesta Time

The morning after the funeral, we embraced the renewal of life and the fiesta.  We dedicated our celebration to him.

During fiesta, doors opened to those who want to mamista, usually to visiting family, friends and relatives from other neighboring regions, from distant cities or from other countries.   Homes overflowed with goodwill and food.  Kitchens worked endlessly to steam rice and leche flan.   Baskets of fruits and sayungsong—a dessert made of glutinous rice, brown sugar and coconut milk—were passed around to guests that dropped in.  Around the city, pigs were slaughtered and roasted in numbers, for lechon was expected at all the numerous parties celebrating the saint’s feast day.

Throughout the day, parades that featured organizations as well as ethnic dance rituals wove in and through narrow dusty streets–from in front of San Nicolas Cathedral to the Rotunda at City Hall.  In the Provincial Stadium, we watched Bonok Bonok, a perfomance by the local indigenous tribe, the Mamanua.   Dance troupes from various parts of the province of Surigao del Norte participated in a competition to showcase ethnic tradition or interpret local legends.  Colorful, woven costumes mimicked the bounty of Surigao.

On the final day of the fiesta, my parents held a large party on our farm a few miles from the city.  Our extended families, invited friends and residents of the surrounding village arrived in droves.  From noon to midnight, we feasted.  Even the winds joined in our fete as currents of cool air blew threw the pavilion. In his own revelry, Sebastian played with his cousins as he ran around unfettered, but closely watched, across the land.  Mesmerized, he spied a family of white herons nesting in a grove of treelings and marveled at the round watermelons and pineapples that we harvested.  His hands became sticky as he popped diced, sweet fruits into his mouth.  Then, he shouted in complete abandonment when he saw my parents trot out a kid, a young goat.  He tried to ride the animal as one would a horse.  F

Sebastian and the pet goat.

“Sebastian,” I asked, “What does a goat say?”

“Maaaa, maaaaa,” he responded.

“Great!” I clapped.  “Now tell everyone, what does a cow say?”  He had just learned all his animal sounds before coming to the Philippines.

He looked around, grinned and said with confidence, “Maaaaa Maaaaa.”

“No!  They say moo!  Let’s try another animal.  What does a duck say?”  I knew he loved ducks.  He would get this answer right.

He bent forward to hug his pet goat’s neck and once again said, “Maaaaa Maaaa.”

My two grandmothers held hands and watched my son and his unfailing energy.  Sebastian ran to them as if he understood their silent plea.  He widened his arms as far as it would go and hugged their knees and trembled as he squeezed them.  Then, he ran off to dance to the lively music where our voices accompanied the song with gusto.

I ride boats; I ride goats: The Final Journey (Part 4)

(Click here for Part 1.  Click here for Part 2.  Click here for Part 3.)

We left Surigao the day after the fiesta.  But the festivities did not end for our family.  Together with several of my cousins, uncles and aunts, we flew to the island of Boracay, known worldwide for its expanse of white sands and numerous resorts.  To get there, one had to fly to a nearby city.  Then we all boarded a large catamaran, similar to the ones my husband Skerdi rode on his first visit to the Philippines.  Sebastian’s eyes widened when he saw the boat.  I was reminded of Skerdi’s dream of being Robinson Crusoe and his excitement at sailing to islands of white sands and crystal clear waters.  When we arrived in Boracay, we dove immediately into the warm water.  Behind Sebastian, multicolored sails waved in the winds.  He sat on the beach and buried his feet within the fine granules of sand—just as his father had done on our last day on Naked Island.

I scooped the sea water and poured it over his head.  He trilled with laughter.  “Sebastian, let’s call daddy later, ok?”

“Ok, mommy, call daddy.”  He continued to wriggle his toes in the sand.

“What will you tell him, sweets?”

He crawled onto my lap, and we let the waves wash over our  legs.  “I say Daddy, I ride boats. I ride goats.  I ride planes. I jump in sand.”

“Now, that-that is a great story.”

It’s been a year since our visit to Surigao.  It’s been a year since the death of Uncle Dennis.  Another fiesta has ended.  I now have the same longing in my eyes as my parents did when we were growing up, for I miss Surigao, my most favorite place in the world.  It is the city that has embraced my Albanian husband and our son.  Today, as I write, I wonder when we will ride boats and goats, jump in the sands of Surigao’s beaches, and experience the colorful city again.  Let me go check ticket prices.

I ride boats; I ride goats: A Book Comes to Life (Part 3)

Guyam Island, Siargao, Surigao del Norte: Photo by pal Donavan Albert

 

(Click here for Part 1)  

(Click here for Part 2)  

We were alone. Where, I could not say, hardly imagine. All was black, and such a dense black that, after some minutes, my eyes had not been able to discern even the faintest glimmer.  

   

– Jules Verne  

   

   

Hagakhak means cackle.  Sailors will tell you that when you hear the “cackle”, that it’s time to leave the island, after which it was named.  The winds begin to swirl and course down the hillside and through the thick groves of coconut trees.  The tide rolls in with a fury.  The superstitious—which include almost all those who live by and depend on the sea—believe that the uninhabited islet, a couple of hours off the Surigao mainland, is haunted.  But then again, if one collects all the local lore across the province, then spirits touch all the nearby islands.  

Seamen will tell you that right before dawn is the best time to leave for Hagakhak Island.  By two in the afternoon, they will scramble to push the boat from its sandy shores and head back towards the mainland at full speed—as if chased by witches brandishing swords or spells.  

Just before sunrise—a couple of days after Skerdi arrived in Surigao City to meet my family for the first time—a large party of friends and relatives set sail for Hagakhak Island.  Skerdi stood at the prow of our yellow catamaran and looked out at the water—shallow and still.  The sun was just peeking above the horizon; it was yawning and gently fluffing the sea ahead, so that ripples and eddies converged into whirlpools.  A crewman stood with his feet at an angle atop at the left balancer of the boat.  He was reading the submerged map of corals, navigating us into a route of deeper water, but avoiding the whirlpools, into which people and small boats have fallen and funneled straight into hell, many have said.  Others less spooked out say the dead end up in Leyte, a province in the visayas, just north of Surigao.  

Skerdi had heard the tales being spun and passed around as we set sail, but he remained unfazed.  Communism, he had once told me, had eradicated religion and superstition.  Ghosts and God were not allowed to exist.  Instead, he saw the landscape ahead of him with eyes of a man who had long wanted to fulfill his dreams.  That morning, he was Robinson Crusoe.  

When we glided into a lush maze of islets, like marbles spilled across velvety waters, Skerdi looked back at me; I looked up from my book on ancient civilizations.   He shook his head disapprovingly.  How could one read when such a world unfolded in front of us?   He motioned for me to join him, but I shook my head.  Admittedly, I was afraid to walk the length of the narrow catamaran and fall into the water inadvertently.  

My mother’s first cousin joined him instead.  Uncle Leo, in shorts, had tied his t-shirt around his head.  Aviator sunglasses sat on the bridge of his nose, while he balanced his way to the front, carrying a thermos and a paper bag.  He stood beside Skerdi, who clapped him on his shoulder.  Uncle Leo poured out some coffee into the lid of the thermos and offered it to the other.  Then, he reached into the paper bag and pulled out a couple of hot buns.  Skerdi reached in for some as well.  Together, they ate their breakfast in silence. The husband of Uncle Leo’s youngest sister joined the duo.  

“Good morning, Skerdi,” Joy said.   Although he was a few years older than me, I still called him uncle. “Did you sleep well?”  He alluded to the previous night’s indulgence in coconut wine.  

Skerdi laughed, “No, Liza would have killed me if I didn’t show up this morning at the pier.”  

“Oh, already you are under the saya,” Uncle Joy nudged him with his elbow.  

Perplexed, Skerdi looked at Uncle Leo, who sniffed his menthol inhaler.  “Joy is teasing you Skerdi.  He means you are under the skirt.”  

“Oh? What does that mean?”  

Uncle Leo took another bite out of his third pan de sal and said with a shrug of his shoulder, “You know…under.”  

Joy piped in, “The woman stands over you.  So you are under her skirt.  She is in control.”  

The three sipped their coffee at the same time and then burst into laughter that echoed across the cliffs of the smaller, inner channel we had just passed through.  Birds scattered in fright.  

Skerdi continued to chuckle as he said,  “Well, Joy, a real man is afraid of his woman.”  

“Well, then, Leo is a true man!”  Uncle Joy bent over laughing; the older man pushed his sunglasses up his nose.  

Uncle Leo looked over at his wife.  “You know Skerdi, I am a lucky man.  My wife has endured me for over 13 years.”  

“Correction, suffered,” Auntie Tata yelled out with a laugh.  

The men moved closer back to where we had been sitting.  Skerdi sat with his back leaning against mine, his legs stretched out in front of him, ready to trap the rays of the sun.  I closed my book.  Uncle Leo stood in front of his wife, who pulled him into a kiss, which he made a show of trying to resist before succumbing into her strong embrace.  He looked at Skerdi and rolled his eyes.  Not wanting to be outdone, Uncle Joy sat beside his wife, Marisyl, and tried to sneak a peck.  

Auntie Marisyl, a pretty, no-nonsense senior nurse at the local provincial hospital, elbowed her husband in the gut.  “Hilas!”  She berated him for being unabashedly cheesy.  

Those of us on deck howled at the display.  Even Skerdi joined in.  

Welcome, welcome!  

   

Two hours into Skerdi’s adventure, we heard drumbeats reverberate in the channel, but no one was around.   Most of the islets we had passed were too steep to be inhabited. The music became louder as we went deeper into the passage.  The captain’s aide at the front of the boat held a 6-foot long bamboo pole upright, ready to push the boat away from the jungle of sharp corals beneath.  

Skerdi looked overhead at the circling terns.  Awed by the primitive atmosphere, he whispered, “I feel like I’ve just been transported back in time.”  

I squeezed his hand.  “One could get lost here.”  

“I know. I might start believing some of your ghost stories about this place.”  He pointed to the liana vines that dripped and hung like fringes at the bottom of the cliffs.    Several silver fish, thin like needles, broke the surface of the water and followed an arch to dive back below the coolness below.  

“Every legend is grounded on truth, you know?  Sometimes it’s a way of making sense of reality.”  

I told him of the town of Numancia—which is now called Del Carmen.  Settled by Spanish missionaries in the late 1500’s, it was once thought to be haunted by witches that preyed on local fishermen, who would paddle out in the morning into its thick mangroves.  At dusk, only their banca, or canoe, would reappear on the coast, empty of human and haul.  

“And so what caused the disappearance of the fishermen?”  

“A crocodile,” I said, as Skerdi looked with renewed awe at the still waters. “Yup, these mangroves are home to a rare and endangered saltwater crocodile.”  

Our catamaran cleared the channel, and the sound of drums beat louder.  We heard horns and cheering in the distance.  Portside, a village had gathered at their wooden pier, and the townspeople were clapping and waving at us.  None of us could discern what was being said.  Skerdi stood.  The crowd waved at him; he waved back. A sign was held high in the air.  It read, “Welcome! Welcome!”  

Skerdi grinned at the effusive gesture.  He came over and kissed me.   “Honey, that was really touching, but you didn’t have to do that,” he whispered.  

Confused, I replied that I had not arranged the welcome.  Skerdi looked at me skeptically.  

Uncle Leo leaned over and said, “Well, gossip travels fast in Surigao, even across these waters.  You are after all a local celebrity.”  

The captain passed the island.  He directed the catamaran towards Barangay Cantiasay—another small seaside village—to gather more supplies.   The country’s longest footbridge, spanning 391 meters, is located in Cantiasay.   On the way there, we passed a couple more towns.  At each one, the villagers once again gathered at their ports to welcome our boat with music and cheers.  

Uncle Joy nudged Skerdi from the back.  “Man, stand up!  This is all for you.”  

Blushing, Skerdi waved.  “What are they saying?”  

“I think ‘Welcome, Terminator!’”  

“Terminator?”  Auntie Marisyl asked.  “That doesn’t even make sense.”  

“Look at him, Syl.” Skerdi wore gray shorts, a gunmetal colored shirt and dark sunglasses.  “He looks like an action star.”  

Uncle Leo clicked his tongue. “Joy, you’re crazy.  They are saying ‘Welcome Spectator!’”  

With the palm of her hand, Auntie Tata smacked her husband’s forehead. “Leo, you don’t make sense.  Why would they say ‘spectator’?”  

“Because, Tata, he is spectating, of course.”  Uncle Leo raised Skerdi’s left arm in the air, and the crowd on land cheered.  

The debate continued until our party reached Barangay Cantiasay.  The town leader, or barangay captain, accompanied by a trio of musicians and a woman with garlands of flowers in her arms, met us.  We hopped onto the sun-bleached port.  

“Welcome!  Welcome!”  The barangay captain greeted us.  

His wife—the woman holding the garlands—placed lei around Skerdi’s neck, while a young girl came forward with a coconut.  

Skerdi took the offered drink, and sipped the juice through the straw.  “I can’t believe I’m drinking this.  A coconut!  A real coconut!”  

The musicians started playing again, while the towns’ folks who had joined us at the pier cheered, “Welcome, Evaluator!”  

My mother and I looked at each other.  I asked them to repeat what they had just yelled.  Once again, they shouted, “Welcome, Evaluator!”  

“What’s an evaluator?”  Skerdi asked while still sipping his drink.  

The barangay captain laughed and said, “That’s you my friend.  I mean, aren’t you the evaluator?”  

“No, I am the Albanian.”  

Murmurs of confusion swept across the small crowd.  “You are not here to inspect our town?”  

Uncle Leo stepped forward and clarified that we were there to purchase drinks and goods that we could bring to Hagakhak.  

The barangay captain smiled.  “Well, come…come.  If you have time, please let me show you around our humble place.”  Cantiasay was a clean, quiet barrio with gentle people, who subsisted mainly on fishing and the crops that grew on small lots—from bananas to rice to a variety of fruits.  

Skerdi pointed to a cluster of bananas.  “I’ve never seen a banana tree before.  What’s that hanging from the middle?”  

“The heart, Skerdi,” my mom replied.  “You can even eat that.  We cut it up and boil it and add coconut milk, peppers, vinegar and onions.  And the leaves of the banana are used to wrap food before putting it on the grill or in a steamer.”  

Uncle Joy emerged from one of the homes carrying a banana leaf.  “Skerdi, you said you missed bread.  Here have some.  It’s colo, or breadfruit.”  Uncle Joy pointed to the large green, spiny fruits growing from the tallest trees in the lot.  A woman holding a jar of brown sauce approached us.  

Uncle Joy said, “Try this.”  

“What is it?”  

“Latik, coconut jam.”  

Skerdi dipped the colo into the thick spread.  His eyelids fluttered as he savored the treat.  “Can I have a spoon?  This is amazing.”  

We all walked back to the catamaran after walking across the famous footbridge and chatting with the residents of Cantiasay. My mom thanked the barangay captain for his hospitality. As we were ready to set sail, we heard drumbeats start anew from the neighboring island.  

The barrio leader smiled and waved at us. He pointed to the distant shore, “Ah, the real evaluators.”  

Hagakhak Island  

Several rock outcrops, like stony icebergs, looked as if they were slowly rising from the waters around Hagakhak Island.  The sea surrounding the islet was deeper than around the others we had just passed or visited.  Our crew had mentioned that the area was a favorite of divers and fishermen for the rich sea life beneath.  We headed towards the thin strip of light brown sand ahead.  A rustic wooden shelter with a picnic bench was erected between two coconut trees.  There was also an outdoor oven made of white smooth stones.  The captain let the waves carry the boat onto the sand.  Skerdi stood and surveyed the scene around him.  He bent over the side of the boat.  The water was clear, nearly invisible.  

Skerdi walked halfway down the plank and then jumped into the shallow water.  He sunk down on his knees and removed his sandals.  Then he washed his face, partially made sticky by the coconut jam, with the warm salty seawater.  

“I can’t believe this.  I can’t believe I’m here!”  

“Enjoy it, honey, we only have a couple of hours here.  Paradise is fleeting.”  

I too jumped in—hesitant at first.  When I was 16, on an island hopping expedition, I once dove from a boat into a crystal clear lagoon.  I had misjudged the its depth and ended up scraping the length of my entire left shin against the top of a reef.  But our catamaran had cleared any corals.  It was just sand all around.  

Skerdi and I threw our rucksacks far into the shore, away from the waves.  As we sifted the sands with our feet and hands, we heard a cackle. Skerdi shook his head, “That was a monkey.”  

“Monkey? The island is uninhabited.”  

“Yea…of people.”  He pushed me, so I fell back into the water.  Skerdi laughed, heady from the experience.  

The rest of our party of friends and relatives walked to the shelter between the trees.  Like most Filipinos, they stayed away from the sun to avoid turning brown and coarse. Auntie Lillia, another of my mother’s cousin, started cooking rice on the outdoor stove. Uncle Joy heated up the coals; while one of the crewmen set up a hammock between two other coconut trunks.  

The sun was high overhead, and the island—nay, the thin strip of beach—belonged to us.  If we had actually owned it, we wondered, what would we build on it.  

“Nothing,” I remarked.  

Skerdi closed his eyes and imagined.  “I would build a secret home hidden from view by the trees with a steps leading to the water.”  

“You know, the house would be haunted.”  

“I knew you’d say that.”  

Later, Skerdi joined Uncle Joy and two crewmen holding spears and nets by two longboats  They pushed those off from the shore, ran into the waves and then hopped into the bobbing vessels.  Together, they paddled in unison.  Skerdi sat astern.  He turned back to wave at me.  They were going to catch our lunch.  

Thirty minutes later they reappeared—with a bounty of plump fish.  They landed several meters away from us, where Skerdi watched as the fish were gutted, scaled and rinsed in the waves.  Uncle Joy carried the bundle and promptly laid the fish across the grill.  Smoke rose into the air, as he waved it away with a palm frond.  

Moments later, Uncle Joy placed the charred fish across banana leaves placed lengthwise down the table, cobbled out of halved bamboo stalks.  My mother took the head of one fish—the cheeks and eyes were her favorite parts; while I grabbed the steaming roe sack.  Uncle Leo carved out a large chunk of the sweet fish and placed it in front of Skerdi, who then dipped it into the small saucer filled with soy sauce, the juice from calamansi, or Philippine lime, and chili peppers.  He ate with his finger, scooping rice and then fish into his mouth.  

After we ate, our group dispersed.  Some paced the shoreline, while others napped—in the hammock, on the sand, or back on the boat.  Skerdi and I sat on the beach and let the waves wash over our legs during the last few minutes we had on the island.  The tide was coming in fast.  To our left, the catamaran was bouncing vigorously, loosening the plank away from the boat.  The crewmen pulled on the ropes that had been tied around coconut trees and pulled the boat closer in.  

We suddenly heard the cackle rise out of the top of the islet.  Skerdi still believed it was a monkey, and not a witch, that made the spooky sound.  No one cared, though, for the winds grew stronger, and the tide crashed against the beach angrily.  It was time to go.  

As we headed back to the mainland, the boat listed from side to side.   It heaved and then sunk with each wave that chased it.  Occasionally, a douse of water washed over the deck.  Many had scrambled inside, where they trembled and prayed.  The sea had become a powerful enemy, and we were at its mercy.  A few of us remained stubbornly on deck, but we held onto the railing, in case we were flung from the boat.  Only Skerdi remained calm, smiling.  

“Honey!”  I shouted, over the increasing fury of the winds and waves.  “You need to hold on!  You can’t swim!  Hold on! Or go inside.”  

Skerdi—wet from the mist that sprayed upwards and then settled on our skins—watched our boat speed forward.  He roared out a guffaw.  

“Whoooeeee!”  He said, “I am Robinson Crusoe!”  

He laid back down on top of the deck; his head was propped up by my backpack, from which he pulled out the book I had been reading.  And serenely he read the rest of the way back, as the waves kept the rest of us shivering, silent and imprisoned in fear.  

Paradise Revisited  

   

Isla Daku, or the Big Island: Photo by Donavan Albert

 

A few days after our excursion to Hagakhak Island, Skerdi and I–along with 20 others—boarded a passenger ferry for Siargao.  We were headed for General Luna, on the eastern side of the island.  Tourists that eschew the more popular resort or beach destinations in the Philippines—like Boracay or Palawan—prefer this still undeveloped, less commercial attraction.  Surfers from around the world make a pilgrimage to the region, in order to surf at nearby Cloud Nine.  

Our group opted to stay at a small resort—a group of no-frills cottages by the beach.  It had a central outdoor dining area, a kitchen and a water pump, where many of us bathed using buckets to pour the cold ground water over our skins, dusty and heated from the journey.  By the time we had settled in, the sun was disappearing.  We would explore the nearby islands the next day.  

Skerdi and I walked out along the boardwalk and watch the world darken around us.  Behind us, raucous laughter broke through the silence.  Where we stood, only the stars and the planktons in the sea shimmered.  

Skerdi pulled me into his arms, “Finally, we’re alone.”  

“Has it bothered you that we haven’t had time together?”  

He gathered me closer, “No.  I know you’re family means everything to you.”  

“Thank you.  I know it’s hard.  You’ve traveled so far from Albania to be with me.  And we’ve rarely been alone, just the two of us.”  

Skerdi put his arm around my shoulder.  “In another week and a half, we’ll be flying away from each other—me to Tirana, you to the US.  We won’t see each other for another three or four months.  This time we have now—whether alone or with others—that’s what I’m focusing on, and I want it to last.”  

“I told you, paradise is short-lived.”  

“So let’s have fun.  Don’t worry so much.”  

Skerdi clasped my hand in his, and we walked back to the others.  We listened to the ribald stories and bawdy jokes over a feast that the resort owners had prepared for us.  Jumbo squid and prawns were grilled and heaped on a platter.  Cubes of fresh fish were prepared ceviche-style in a marinade of coconut milk, palm vinegar, chilies, onions and ginger.  Skerdi avoided this dish, kinilaw; instead, he preferred the skewers of pork barbeque—loin and pork belly, previously marinated in lime juice and soy sauce and then grilled.  We also ate steamed saba, three-inch plump bananas, with ginamos, anchovies cured in salt.  For dessert, we fought over a cornucopia of fruits, including papaya, pineapple and sliced guava, which we dipped into rock salt.  

The next day, several motorized canoes waited to shepherd us a few miles across the water to Isla Daku, or the Big Island.  

“Let me show you something,” I told Skerdi, who followed me over the crest of a sand dune.  

“Oh wow,” he exclaimed when a wide expanse of golden sand stretched out before him; the beach was flanked on the left by groves of palm and coconut trees and on the right by crystal blue waters.  

“I have another surprise for you,” I teased.  “I’ve made arrangements for us—just you and me—to stay longer.”  

“Really?”  

“Yeah, we’ll be moving to a cheap pension closer to the center of town.”  

“Do you think I can call long-distance while we’re here?”  

“Of course.  Your parents?”  

Skerdi nodded, “Yes, they’ll want to know if I’m ok and what I’ve done.   I want to tell them I’ve ridden boats from island to island.  I’ve eaten mangoes, breadfruit, coconut and goat.  Truly, my favorite book has come to life.”  

We spent the rest of the day with my family exploring and frolicking in the sands of Isla Daku.  Locals stopped often at our shack by the sea to sell us the catch of the day or fresh baked goods, like rice cakes made of cassava and coconut.  In the afternoon, we took the canoes to Guyam Island across the strait.  There, Skerdi was perched on a rock eating grilled bananas and drinking more coconut juice.  His chest had turned a golden shade of brown.  He looked out towards General Luna and Isla Daku.  In between the two larger islands, an embankment of white sand suddenly rose from the water.  

“What’s that?” He asked Uncle Leo.  

“Naked Island,” the other replied.  

Naked.  

Naked Island was disappearing, as the tide washed over the breakers a few miles beyond.  Skerdi and I needed to get into the canoe, where our guide waited.  He watched us from the beneath the brim of his wide, woven hat.  Skerdi, in cobalt swim trunks, lay motionless on the white powder.  The water surrounding the sandbar was rising.  We had spent most of the day lying on the beach—just us.  The others had already headed back to the mainland days before.  

It was our last day.  

Skerdi looked at me.  Unshielded, the sun had bronzed my skin; freckles dotted my cheeks, like islets in the water.  We had been silent while we stretched out and burrowed our feet in the white sand.  We both wondered what the landscape of our lives would be like once we sailed back to shore and flew away from paradise back into the reality of being apart.  

Would we stay together?  Would we ever come back here?  

I must have said my thoughts out loud, for Skerdi answered.  “You worry too much.  Just know I love you.  That should be enough.”

I ride boats; I ride goats: Part 2

A boat guide reads the ripples of the sea to navigate us around whirlpools and spires of corals.

It happen’d one Day about Noon going towards my Boat, I was exceedingly surpriz’d with the Print of a Man’s naked Foot on the Shore.

– Excerpt from Robinson Crusoe, by Daniel Defoe

South to Surigao

(Click here for Part 1 of this series.)

The moment the plane crested through the thunderclouds hovering over Manila, Skerdi felt the light.  It had filtered in through the closed shades of the cabin and cast a glow across his face.  He squeezed my hand—and I felt his own buoyancy drift further upwards.  We were heading to the land of levity.  That’s what I call Surigao City, located in the northernmost, eponymous province in Mindanao, the largest island in the archipelago.  It is where light and laughter dwell.

Manila was far behind us. For the past three days, it had been downcast while we toured the capital and its outskirts.  It was June; the wet season had just descended.  The weather had already prevented scores of planes from taking off.  Skerdi and I were lucky, however, the day we left for Surigao ten years ago. Our flight had left on time, and the skies had cleared once we left Manila.  Skerdi would soon be meeting my extended family and friends.

Ten minutes into the flight, we raised the shade on our window.  We were far above and beyond ziggurats of clouds. Immediately, our heads tilted backwards; our eyes blinked and squinted from the streaming brilliance of light.

Skerdi held my right shoulder to anchor me to his side as we both looked out at the view below.  Green had turned into indigo.  Verdant fields and hills sloped into black, endless and unfathomable waters.

“The sea,” he whispered as he pressed his nose to the glass, “It is so dark.”

“I know,” I said.  “Out there, east of Surigao, is the Philippine Deep.  You can sink Mt. Everest into its deepest point and there would still be 2 km. of water left.”

Amazed, Skerdi shook his head.  “Imagine diving down there.   What would we see?”

“But you don’t even know how to swim,” I teased.

He laughed, “I know, but I can imagine.  When you grow up in Albania, during the old Communist regime, you’re told what to think.  You’re not taught to imagine.”

I rubbed the top of his hand. “And yet, you’ve always wanted to be like Robinson Crusoe and sail the seas and…”

“And live on islands. And my other favorite book made me want to explore the world beneath the dark waters.”

“Jules Verne,” I said.

He pressed his lips against my forehead.  “Yes, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea…I became an explorer in my mind.”

For nearly fifty years—during the regime of former dictator Enver Hoxha—Albania isolated itself from the rest of the world.  Hoxha had even turned the country’s back away from Russia and China, both of who, he had felt, departed too much from the purity of Marx’s teachings.  Thousands of bunkers, where soldiers had stood guard, dotted the hillsides overlooking the sea.  No influences from the West were allowed into the country.  Free thinkers were likewise isolated and secreted.

“I used to imagine being in a submarine, watching giant squids shoot past, and traveling to other countries undetected.”  He continued to look out at the dark depths.  “You can probably fit thousands of submarines down there, and they would still never find each other.”

“Hmmm…except by sonar,” I said. “Wait until you see the islands off of Surigao.  As you get close to shore, the sand becomes white underneath the clear blue waters.  You’ll see fish around natural breakers, the coral reefs.”

Skerdi thought about Vlora where he taught for a couple of years at the university.  It was a seaside city and was considered the northern gateway towards a long stretch of pristine beaches: the Albanian Riviera.

“The Adriatic [Sea],” he said, “is crystal clear, even a few kilometers from shore.  You remember, right?”

I nodded.

He pointed to the scene below him, the seas of Jules Verne and Robinson Crusoe, and said, “That, down there, that looks terrifying.”

“Yea, well,” trying to reassure him, as I leaned against him and closed my eyes, “life’s always scarier from far away and far above.”

Happy Congestion

We arrived in the airport in Butuan City, an hour and a half away from Surigao City. The flight into the former was much less turbulent than it would have been into the latter.  When the plane landed, gusts from its propellers bent the banana trees around the airport forward—as if in welcome.  On either side of the airport were crowds of people waiting; they were pressed against the chain-link fence.  The sun was directly overhead, and the sky was empty of clouds. Weather is an odd phenomenon across the Philippines.  In June, Surigao (and Butuan) experiences drier weather, while the area in and around Manila is plagued with rain.  Clouds would not mar the day Skerdi sets foot on shores of white sand.

My mother and thirteen friends and extended family members had arrived to greet us. These were my people, those that have loved me and have grown up with me—all were eager to catch a glimpse of the first man I had ever brought to the Philippines.  They watched us walk across the tarmac.

Skerdi affected cool well.  He wore dark shades and a baseball cap.  He grabbed my hand and my backpack as we headed into welcoming arms and met faces of unspoken opinions.   Inside the arrivals area, I introduced Skerdi to my mother and then to the array of aunts, uncles, cousins, godchildren, nieces, nephews and friends who had crammed into three hired minivans.

This scene exemplified my childhood—happy congestion.  In Quezon City, our home was always full, whether it was at 3 am—when the mah-jongg tables were still running in our screened lanai—or at 3 pm—when friends dropped in for a merienda of banana-que, grilled banana kabobs, or ginataan, root vegetables, fruits and tapioca balls in a sweet, coconut stew.  My brother Paolo and I often shared our room—and sometimes our large bed—with visiting relatives. Five or six sets of arms and legs tangled across each other.  Sometimes, we sacrificed the softness of our mattress to the older relatives, while Paolo and I slept on the banig, or woven mat, in the living room.

Our home in Surigao City was just as crowded.  Maayo—visitors would shout though the iron gate.  You would hear the word throughout the whole day, as guests dropped in unannounced and then were ushered into the kitchen for a meal.  When my family spent our summer vacations there, my parents, my brothers and I would cram into a room and spread out across beds and cots pushed together.  The rest of my mother’s family would fill up the other bedrooms.  Skerdi grew up in a less rambunctious home with his parents and brothers. There had been room to breathe and quiet to think.

At the airport, Skerdi tried to remember the names of everyone crowding around him.  I had advised him to call the older ones either by tita (auntie) or tito (uncle). I watched as my family nudged each other and raised their eyebrows in silent communictation.  They all expressed the same thought: Hazing would soon begin.

Hazed; Unfazed

With a population of over 120,000 people, Surigao City is located on the mainland of Surigao del Norte, while the province’s other islets and larger islands are situated far from the eastern coast.  The families of both my parents come from the area.  When my parents want to escape Manila for Surigao, they reside in the house in which my mother grew up, on Amat Street.  Now, my maternal grandmother, Mama Ching, and several cousins call it home.

Surigaonon is both the name of the province’s denizens as well as its dialect.  Many Surigaonons possess sharp wits and tongues.  They are lighthearted and funny, but loyal.  They can often be righteously critical of outsiders.

There were three large vans that my family had hired to transport us back to Surigao.  We rode in the first car, where my mother and her cousins sat.  Uncle Leo patted the seat beside him in the first row; Skerdi sat there.  Uncle Leo, mom’s first cousin, had helped watch over me when he had lived with us in Quezon City during his university years. He was known as one of the Amat Street Boys, who had been notorious for their hijinks.  Like Uncle Leo, many of them are charming ruffians, who used to sit in the patio of our home swigging Tanduay rum and eating pulutan, or fatty snacks eaten with alcohol.  Fried dog meat was a favorite—of theirs.  When asked what it was, they would look at my pale face and reply, “Just chicken.”

In the back seat of the van, Uncle Leo shushed me as I continued to describe his former antics.  “Shhh, Li, that was the past. I am reformed, a changed man.”

His wife, Auntie Tata, guffawed and then spurted out, “The only thing changed is the coins in his pocket!”

“Psst, Tata,” he tried to silence his equally formidable and funny wife, “don’t give him a bad image of me.  He will go back to Romania thinking I’m not a good man.”

“Albania,” Skerdi corrected.

“Haha, yes, yes, Skerdi, Albania, land of vampires!”  Uncle Leo shouted, clapping the other’s back vigorously. Skerdi tried to correct him again, but was interrupted instead.  “Welcome to the Philippines, my friend.  Tonight we will drink and eat!  Tomorrow, we will drink some more and eat again until you become very fat.”

“Salamat. Thank you!”

“Oh, so you know some Tagalog already?  Very good.  We do not speak very good English here, so you have to learn.”

“I don’t speak English good either,” Skerdi countered.  “After we drink, we will understand each other better.”

Uncle Leo paused, stared at Skerdi, and then roared.  He then tapped the roof of the van. The hired driver exited out of the airport lot.  An hour ride was going to feel like a day for Skerdi, I thought.

“So you like the Philippines?”  My uncle continued.  “Do you find it beautiful?”

“So far, yes.  But I am excited to see Surigao.  Liza has told me that the islands and beaches here are beautiful.”

“Yes, yes…I particularly like Yo-ban Beach.”

I scooted forward and rested my chin on the back of their seat.  “Where is that Uncle?  I’ve never heard of it.  Is that one of the islands?”

“Yo-ban is located right in Amat, where your…”

“Leo! Stop it!”  My mother shouted from the back row.  “Don’t listen to him, Skerdi.”

“That’s not a beach?”  We both asked.

“No,” Mom explained, “Yo-ban is banyo backwards.  That means bathroom.”

I collapsed against the chair and sighed.  Skerdi started laughing at the joke.  Oh, dear, I thought, the ride was going to be a long one—for me.

Still chuckling, Uncle Leo continued, “Do you like Filipina women?  Beautiful, right?”

Skerdi looked back at me and smiled.  “Well, I don’t know about others, but so far, I like what I see.”

Oh no, I thought as I rolled my eyes, this was going to be really long car ride.

The whole van erupted in cackles and whistles.  From the back, my cousins roared out, “Ka hilas! Hilas!” Skerdi was being embarrassingly cheesy.

When the catcalls died down, Auntie Tata offered Skerdi a snack.

“Maybe he wants some fruit,” someone had said.

Someone had then torn open a plastic bag.  Immediately, bile rose in my mouth; Skerdi’s face paled.  A rotten scent suffused the van. No one said anything; everyone waited to see what he would do next.  A piece of yellow, fleshy fruit came forward.  My nose sunk into my tank top as my chest heaved at the smell.

“Skerdi,” my cousin offered, “would you like to try this?  It’s durian.”

Muffled by my shirt, I tried to explain that the fruit was highly prized, in spite of its smell.  A lover of durian, my mother bellowed out from the back, “In fact, in Asia, it is considered an aphrodisiac.”

Skerdi looked skeptical.  “Thank you,” he said, as he took the proferred piece.  “It can’t hurt to try.”

But it did.  I saw the subtle tics in his face as he tried to swallow the offensive fruit. I handed him a bottle of orange soda, which he gulped down quickly.  Then he smacked his lips and wiped his tongue with a napkin before taking another drink.

“Sorry about that.”  I gave everyone around me a hard stare.

“People like that fruit?”

I nodded and rubbed his back.  “I can eat the ice cream and the candy, but definitely not in its natural form.”

“Interesting.  At least I tried it once.  But I must admit, I’m not sure I can try it again,” he announced.  The van erupted into fits of laughter again, but I could tell he had gained a measure of respect already.  Uncle Leo gave me a nod as he placed his sunglasses back on his nose and took a sniff of his menthol inhaler, which he carries with him everywhere.  He slid into his seat and asked Skerdi about Albania; while I caught up on life in Surigao with the others.

Welcome to Amat Street

We arrived at our home—the whitewashed house surrounded by bougainvilla bushes—on Amat Street a short time after lunch. Skerdi’s luggages were left in the van.  He and I had decided to observe propriety; consequently, he would be checking into the Gateway Hotel, beside the Provincial Hospital, off of the main highway leading in and out of the City.  It was one of the two bigger, and more tourist-friendly establishments, in town.

There were other reasons why we wanted Skerdi at the hotel.  Our home was hot; only two rooms—both occupied—had a cooling unit.  We kept window shutters open, letting in light but also dust, heat and noise.  By 5 am, the din of tricycles ferrying passengers around town could be heard.  Skerdi’s hotel was a short ride from my home, but it offered a cool and quiet room to rest.  We decided that he would come to the house for meals.

I led Skerdi through the living room and formal dining area and entered the large kitchen, where we ate.  It opened into a large walled-in courtyard.  Behind our home was a grade school, owned by our neighbors across the street, the Tandans, whose patriarch had once been the mayor.

In Surigao, news spreads fast, and Skerdi’s arrival piqued curiousities. Grade school students, who had just come back from having lunch, gathered around one of the windows of school’s upper floor.  They were looking into our home–at Skerdi.  They tittered and chattered about the visiting kano—short for Americano, a general description of all white men. In the courtyard, a large female hog that had been tied to one of the outdoor posts on the patio was sleeping on the cool concrete shaded by more bougainvilla bushes in pinks and whites.

Skerdi raised his eyebrows, “Pet?”

“No,” I responded, “dinner—but for tomorrow night.  We’re having a party here in your honor.”

One of the helpers, a student worker, who lived with and helped care for my grandmother was swatting away flies from the round table. On the countertop by the refrigerator, a large basket of yellow mangoes greeted us.  Skerdi recognized it right away and smiled.  He was looking forward to eating that particular fruit.

My grandmother was in the dirty kitchen when we arrived.  Most homes in the Philippines have two kitchens—the clean and the dirty, where most of the cooking is done.  Auntie Tata went to the shed where my grandmother was frying fish. Slight and lithe, she walked out into the kitchen and wiped her hands on her apron.  She smoothed stray hairs back into a bun.  I enfolder her into my arms and kissed her cheeks.  Cataracts had clouded over part of her right eye.  She smelled of fish and her favorite perfume, Joy by Jean Patou, which she must have misted on right before we arrived.

“Hi Li,” she said grabbing my arm. “I made you several jars of atsara.  Go look in the fridge.”

“That’s right, Li,” Auntie Tata chimed in.  “She has been cooking since yesterday.”

I lifted my fragile grandmother into a tight hug, though afraid to break her.  “Thanks Mama Ching!  I want you to meet someone,” I said, as I brought her forward. “This is Skerdi.”

Skerdi walked in front of her, bent over and leaned in to kiss her on the cheek.  She giggled like a young girl again, “Hello.  Welcome to our home.  You must be very hungry.”

“Yes, actually I am.  I just had a small piece of fruit in the car.”  He looked around with a teasing smile.  “Liza told me you are a very good cook.”

She giggled again.  Mom and I looked at each other.  “I try. I hope you will like my food.  Has Liza ever cooked for you?”

“No, not yet, but I hope one day soon.”

I explained to my grandmother that he lives in Albania and that we see each other every few months.  She ushered him to a chair and then directed the helper to start bringing in the food.  Auntie Lillia, my mother’s cousin who lives in the outskirts of the city, has known me since I was a baby and has helped care for our family and hers over the years.  She made us fresh juice from calamansi, Philippine limes.

We sat down to a lunch of squid cooked in soy sauce, vinegar and garlic (adobo), a clear soup of clear glass noodles and clams, crispy fried anduhaw, a silvery, medium-sized fish that had been cured in salt for a few hours, and steamed dayo dayo, or snails.  There were several platters of vegetables including the pickled green papaya Mama Ching had prepared the day before as well as steamed pako, coiled ferns, and mustard greens blanched and dressed with vinegar and garlic. Beside each plate was a covered bowl of steamed rice.

Skerdi leaned over and whispered, “Do you have bread?”

“Are you serious?”

He laughed, as he watched the listening relatives get up to look in the cupboard for leftover pan de sal. “Well, no.”

I punched him in the arm.  “What do you want?”

“Maybe a little of everything,” he looked at the spread.  “Does your family always eat like this?”  In Albania, a typical meal consisted of one dish—usually a stew or gjelle—with bread and feta cheese.

“Yes, and we eat six times a day.”

“Six!?”  He looked around the room at the family.  “And no one is very fat?”

Uncle Leo sat down beside Skerdi and slurped his noodles.  “That’s because we have many extra-curricular activities.”  He winked, earning him a slap on the back of his head from his wife.

Auntie Tata admonished, “Stop that Leo.  You will scare him.  Skerdi, we have pre-breakfast, then breakfast, and the first merienda, then lunch, then second merienda, next dinner and then midnight snack.”

Skerdi watched me spoon some soy sauce with chili peppers over my rice, and he followed suit.  “Midnight snack?  You don’t sleep.”

Uncle Leo’s younger brother-in-law, Joy, sat across from Skerdi.  With a handkerchief, he wiped off his brow.  “Yes, sleep is optional.  Sometimes we play mah-jongg and chickicha, a card game.  We will show you as long as you have money on you.”

I cleared my throat.  “Don’t listen to them.  They’ll rob you blind.  So what do you think of the food?”

“The soup is excellent, and I like this adobo a lot.  I’m still not sure about the vegetables.”

Later, when the table was cleared, Skerdi asked for a cup of coffee.  I placed a large round spoonful of Nescafe granules into a cup and poured in sugar and hot water.

“Can I have a mango now?”  He asked after finishing his cup of coffee.

A Man and His Mango

There are many ways to eat a mango.  The best method is to slice it twice—one cut above and one below the pit—into two cheeks and one seed.  Hollow out a cheek slowly with a spoon and let the fruit sit on your tongue. Savor the sweetness.  At the first spoonful of mango into his mouth, Skerdi closed his eyes and hummed.  Then, he licked his lips and dropped his spoon into the bowl.  He grabbed the cheek and inverted the flesh.  He bit into the juicy meat so that yellow rivulets of juice ran down his stubbled cheek and down his forearms.

“Can I have another one?”  He asked as he sucked off the remaining flesh from the middle, the seed.

Auntie Lillia placed several more cut ones in front of us, as we sat in silence eating mangoes.  Me with a spoon, and Skerdi with his mouth.  Our lips were sore and red from the itchy fibers of the fruit.

Mom, who had been digging into the spiny jackfruit in front of her, asked Skerdi if he wants to go see some islands while in Surigao.

A wide grin broke open; yellow fibers were stuck between his teeth.  “Yes, that would be great.”

Uncle Leo picked at his with a toothpick.  “Skerdi, we will go when the waves are not so high.  So we wait until I hear word from the boat operators when it’s ok.”

Mom looked at me and advised that we tour the city first and check him into the hotel.   “Tomorrow, the house will be preparing for the party so get some rest.”

That afternoon, we followed my mother’s suggestion.  We walked around Luneta Park in front of San Nicolas cathedral and had an afternoon snack of siopao, steamed pork buns, at the outdoor bistro in front of City Hall.  We took a tricycle to the Gateway, where we checked him into a room facing the inner courtyard.

“So tomorrow if I took this back to your place, what would I say?”  Skerdi hauled his suitcase into the room.

I helped him unpack his belongings.  “Nothing, just wait for me to pick you up.”

“Seriously, honey, I need to learn this. Three weeks is a long time for you to be coming here to escort me to your place just because you’re scared something might happen.”

“All right.  It’s 2 pesos for a ride.  Just say, ‘Amat, kina Tandan’.”

“What does that mean?”  Skerdi sat on the bed.

“The street is Amat, and you want to go to the Tandan house.”

“Oh, ok.  And when I want to get off?”

“Just say Para, or stop.”

He repeated the words back to me in a stilted accent several times.  Even at dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, he practiced.

The Feast of Flavors

In Surigao, one can hear the rooster crow at about 4:45–the motors of tricycles rumble a quarter of an hour later.  Swish, swish go the walis ting ting, or stiff brooms that clean the sidewalk of debris.  Shops and bakeries open first.  At 5:30 am, our helper comes back home, carrying 2 plastic bags filled with hot morning buns.  Pre-breakfast.  The buns sustain whoever is cooking in the kitchen, usually Mama Ching.  My great-aunt, Uncle Leo’s mother, or Mama Bebing, is already dressed and on her way out to church.

The morning after our first arrival, I woke up at 7:30, ready to pick Skerdi  from the hotel.  I rushed out of the bedroom and clambered down the few steps.  Skerdi was already in the living room, reading a newspaper.

“Hi.  Good morning.”

I rubbed the remaining traces of sleep from my eyes and ran over to kiss him.  ”What…how did you…why didn’t you wait for me?!”

“I told you I could do it.  It was easy actually.  I thought I could walk over here, but I didn’t know if I had to turn left or right out of the hotel.”

“And the tricycle driver, was he nice?”

“Oh, yeah.  Do you think all drivers know your home, rather the Tandans?”  He kept me locked in his hug. I nodded into his shoulder.  ”My room was nice, but felt empty.”

“I know, but at least you slept well.  Now it’s time to eat well.”  I led him to the back.  ”And I have a surprise for you.”

I uncovered the lid from the plate of buns, that were still hot.   “This is great!  What are you having?”

I smiled as we unearthed the other breakfast splendors: shrimps sauteed in garlic, fried eggs, salted duck eggs with tomatoes, and dilis, or fried anchovies.

As we ate, he noticed that pig was missing.  ”Don’t worry, you’ll hear him soon.”

A few minutes into our breakfast, a pained squeal rang out from the empty lot next door.  Skerdi and I walked over.  I turned my face away and hid my face in Skerdi’s shoulder.  The swine had been gutted and hung from a sturdy branch of a tree.  The preparations for the feast was about to start.

Over fifty people arrived at our home in Amat to welcome Skerdi to Surigao.  In the middle of the kitchen sat our pig on a banana leaf–it had been roasted until its skin had crisped.  Lechon, I taught Skerdi, who devoured the succulent meat with gusto.  In the courtyard, Uncle Leo and other male cousins and friends sat drinking tuba, fermented coconut drink, and San Miguel beer.  In the living room, paid danced instructors taught ladies how to perfect the tango, cha cha, rhumba and the sexy soca dance.  Women in their eighties like Mama Ching and young teens were on the floor swaying and gyrating.  Others sat around helping themselves to seconds and thirds at the buffet.

The feast was resplendent.  There were platters of different types of pancit, or noodles, skewers of chicken barbeque, and pots of stew.  Skerdi lifted one lid from a pot and looked in at the reddish concoction.

“Try it, it’s called caldereta, a stew made of goat.”

Skerdi took a large serving of the stew, but avoided the vegetables.  He was intrigued by the contents of another pot, which had diced meat in a thick black sauce.  I explained that it was dinuguan or tripe cooked in pig’s blood.  Without blinking, Skerdi heaped that onto his plate as well.  As he tried the various dishes, one of the dance instructors came over and asked me to be his partners for the soca.  Both my grandmother and mother were already dancing, so I set my plate down to join them.

My instructor twirled me a few times and then spun me into his arms as we both sank down to the floor, while we swayed our hips.  Skerdi stood, immobile, by the pig.  His face had turned red as he watched us dance–our bodies pressed closely, innocently together.  Uncle Leo walked up to him and pointed to the drinks.  Skerdi followed him.  He gave Skerdi a pat on the back and then turned around to reassure me, with hand gestures, that he would talk to him about our culture.  I sighed.  Balkan fire, once lit, was difficult to pat down.

The party ended at 1 in the morning.  Skerdi spent most of the evening with my uncles and cousins, who, in drunken, broken English, peppered him with questions and coconut wine.  I reminded Skerdi that we had to set sail by 6am the next day.  Everyone quickly dispersed, and Skerdi managed to find a ride back to the hotel.

The Sail to Hagakhak  Island

At 5am, the morning after the welcome feast, twenty of us stood on the docks watching the stillness of the water.  The strata of purple hues had ebbed into light blue as the sun stretched its arms.  In front of us, my uncles and the crew of the catamaran were loading crates of food and drink into the boat.  One by one we walked gingerly across the thin plank.  The boat bobbed lightly as each of us hopped aboard.  Skerdi looked behind him at the city and then forward to the sea ahead.  He was the last to board.  A few of our company of friends and family stayed inside the cabin,  embracing its illusion of safety, while the rest sat atop, on deck, to feel the breeze.  Skerdi sat beside me and then pulled down his baseball cap and donned his sunglasses.  He interlocked his fingers with mine.

“Where are we going?”  He asked me as I smoothed out the sunblock across the bridge of his nose.

“To Hagakhak Island.  It means cackle or loud laughter.”

“Does anyone live there?”

“Yes, I think, but only a very few people.  Some say the island is haunted by witches.”

The boat pushed off from the dock and headed east into the sun.  A crewman balanced his way forward to the very front of the boat.  He read the waters as one would a book, inferring depth and activity below the surface of waves and ripples.  Then he would signal his interpretations to the captain.  We slowly navigated the calm waters and enjoyed the labyrinth of mangroves and islets.  Coconut and palm trees surrounded us.  As the sun rose and penetrated the sheet of water, we could see live corals where orange fish darted in and out.  Inside the cabin, and on deck, many slept.  Skerdi and I let the gentle wind cool us as we enjoyed the vista.

“Are you hungry?”

Skerdi nodded.  ”How long will the ride take?”

“About two hours.”

“Two hours and I’ll be in the water just like Robinson Crusoe.”

I smiled at his childlike dream. “Yes.  Until then, would you like something to eat?”

“Yes,” he said as kissed my fingertips lightly, “another mango please.”

I ride boats; I ride goats: Part 1

A noiseless, patient spider,

I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;

Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;

Ever unreeling them–ever tirelessly speeding them.

– Excerpt from Noiseless, Patient spider, by Walt Whitman

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Today, Sebastian and I sat on our balcony eating bowls of mango ice cream.  We watched the drizzle tickle the leaves that reached out from its stems, outstretched through the grilles.  Earlier, we, too, felt the rain on our palms; it sent my son into a fit of giggles.  We—plants and people—were all seeking relief from the August heat.  On this fifth day of rain, the temperatures have dipped slightly, but the humidity still has us imprisoned.  As we licked the melting sweetness from our cold spoons, breezes swept occasionally through the balcony, along with it the mingled scent of mint that has tussled with lavender and the heavy perfume of ripening cherry tomatoes.  It is an aromatic tug-of-war.  These three are among the cluster of plants that have been growing out of clay-colored pots along the perimeter of the balcony.  This is where we hide, my boy and me, in our secret garden, on the top floor, where butterflies come to suckle nectar from zinnias and golden finches land on blooms of dwarf sunflowers.   It is a sanctuary where Sebastian sifts through dirt, smells the herbs and overzealously picks peppers before they’ve ripened.  It is where my daydreams collide and tumble into reality, and resurrect themselves into pages and pages of ideas.

The afternoon was awash in wet shades of green and charcoal shadows.  Only the sunshine smile of my son and the orange stickers of mango around his lips and down the front of his shirt brightened the monochromatic outdoors.

“Mommy,” my 28-month old son suddenly shouted, “look!  Plane!”  He flung his spoon outward towards the skies, as droplets of cold sweetness dripped on my toes.

In the far distance, above the tree line and rooftops, a plane broke through the thickness of the roiling rain clouds.

“I see it Sebastian.”

“Mommy, I ride airplane?”

“Why, Sebastian?”

“I see Bella and Lolo,” he pronounced.

“But you’ll see them later on the computer,” I said, remembering that I had a date over Skype with my parents.

“Ohhhh.”  He concentrated once more on the diminishing bowl of ice cream before him.   He looked up again and said, “Mommy, I like mango. Yummy. Thank you mommy.”

I smiled at my son, at his enthusiasm for all things that go vroom and all fruits of every color.

Sebastian watched the plane descend slightly.  “Mommy, I go on airplane.”

“One day soon.”

Mangoes in Manila

I thought about the last time Sebastian had been on an airplane.  A year ago, the two of us—along with my brother Paolo and his wife—visited my parents in the Phlippines for three weeks before spending a couple of days in Tokyo with my other brother, Niccolo.

I remembered when Sebastian ate mangoes in the living room of my parents’ apartment in Manila.  It was the morning after we first arrived.  The sun had just painted the room with a beatific glow upon its ascent, and the Pasig River below sparkled.  It flowed and slithered through the city like an ochre serpent.

With a few hours of sleep tucked in pouches under eyes, my family sat in silence and watched the tableau of dawn drifting into morning.  A plate of salted dried fish, daing, which had been fried alongside eggs, was placed in the middle of the dining table.  A bowl of pickled green mangoes was set on one end of the table beside a platter of steaming, jasmine rice.  Shrimp paste and crushed chilies swam in a saucer of palm vinegar.  There were also glazed, sweet buns sprinkled with grated cheese and granulated sugar—ensaymada.  At the other end of the table sat a regal basket of yellow mangoes with black sugar bruises and of purple mangosteens.  It was my mother’s welcome.

I jiggled Sebastian on my knees.  He pointed to the ripe, plump fruits.

“Manu,” he asked, unable to pronounce the word.

The texture of the flesh of a ripe Philippine mango—the champagne mango—is as soft as rich flan.  Cooled, it is often better than ice cream. After eating the first fruit, Sebastian smacked his lips loudly and then pressed his two pointer fingers together.

“More,” he had indicated, raising his eyebrows, widening his grin, and blinking his eyes.  His long lashes swept up and down like a mimosa plant.  He indulged in another one—this time with rice. Since then, every breakfast during our entire stay, Sebastian would only eat mangoes with rice.

Like my son, I love mangoes.  I looked forward to the weeks my great-uncle would visit from Surigao.  He stayed with us in Quezon City, where I spent four years of my childhood, and brought with him one suitcase and a bushel of mangoes.  Sometimes,the basket had heaps of the bell-shaped tambis or kilos of budbud, sweetened rice or cassava encased tightly in banana leaves.  Most of the time, however, he hauled mangoes.

During one visit, I rushed home from a friend’s house and left my bike to sit in the rain.  The screen door banged loudly behind me.  I sat at the table and devoured several mangoes in a few minutes.  My lips became swollen and red from sucking the last remaining flesh from the pit.  Outside, the red bike laid pitily in the rain, a few steps from dry shelter.  There was nothing I could do; the heady aroma of the of the mango anchored me to my seat.  Mango ice cream, mango cake, green mango shake, green mango salad—I loved anything with mango in it.  In our backyard, I used to climb our mango tree and yanked down a few young ones—still without pits—and scrambled straight into the kitchen.  I would sit cross-legged on the floor and dip the pale green fruit into the sweetened soy sauce.  Crunch. The rest of the mangoes were hidden in the pockets of my school uniform.

When I went to Albania the first time in March 2000 I brought several bags of dried Philippine mangoes as gifts.  It was the first time my husband, Skerdi, had ever had one, albeit a dried version.  He wondered what the real fruit tasted like.  That was when we made plans to see each other again in June—in the Philippines.

A Man Goes to Manila: Skerdi’s Story

It wasn’t the welcome I had intended for Skerdi.  Ten years ago, he and I were in the midst of a long-distance relationship.  We planned to meet each other in the Philippines, where we would spend a few days in Manila and the rest of the three weeks in Surigao City.

Unfortunately, Skerdi arrived an hour before I did at the airport in Manila.  I wanted to warn him—the airport would be chaotic with balikbayans, Filipino expats who had returned home, often with oversized boxes of gifts.  Porters would teem around him as he exited the airport.  The June rain would smell sour and smoky.  I wanted to wait at the bottom of the ramp, where I would have had the time to freshen up and not smell like stale airplane seats.  Most importantly, I wanted to reassure him that my family would like him.

Instead, Skerdi was the one waiting at the arrivals section with arms outstretched—and smelling fresh.  Yes, he smelled fresh.  I looked at him closely and took another deep inhale.

“You don’t smell like smoke.”  In fact, I asked him, if he had had a cigarette yet.  Long flights are hard on smokers.

“I quit,” he stated matter-of-factly.

“Really, but why?”  I was curious, for I had never pushed him to stop (nor encourage, either) his pack-a-day habit. There were some demons that one needed to have the will to fight alone.

“I did it for you, really.”  He explained that he had quit cold turkey.  I stepped back away from him and noticed the slight weight he had put on since I had last seen him.

“You didn’t have to do that.”   I was speechless, but managed to ask, “How was your flight? Are you tired?”

It had taken him eighteen hours to get to the Philippines—from Tirana to Milan, east to Hong Kong and finally down to Manila.  “It was fine.  I couldn’t sleep.  I was too excited.”

“Mine went well …  but I almost missed seeing you, though.”

“Why?”

“I fell asleep at Osaka Airport and woke up just as the gate for my flight was closing.”

He shook his head at the thought and gave me another hug.  We dragged our luggages towards the bottom of the arrivals ramp, where a good friend had been waiting to pick us up.  She brought us to our hotel by Manila Bay.  She would be our guide as we toured the capital and nearby sites.

We stayed at the Ambassador Hotel on the 18^th floor.  In our room, we threw the curtains wide open and watched the lights of the city below.  The bay was an inky wall of water.  Skerdi turned to face me, raised my right hand to his lips, and then pulled out a small box from his pocket.  Inside was a gold chain bracelet that he fit around my wrist.  Giving up smoking, traveling to the Philippines—these were already symbols of his commitment.  The bracelet—inscribed with words of his devotion—was a surprise, but somehow completely expected from him.

The next morning, we walked along the quai.  Manila had come to life in the hours we had been asleep.  At a nearby café, I ordered pan de sal and hot chocolate.  Skerdi stared at the 3-inch buns on his plate.  This was our bread, I explained.  He looked around the bakery at the wrapped ensaymadas, mamons, and other various sweet buns—no thick, crusty loaves of bread. He watched me dip a pan de sal in the chocolate.

“Do you think I could have an espresso?”  He asked sheepishly, then said, “It’s the first morning; let me get used to how things are.”

I told him not to worry, but that he had to eat for we had a long day ahead of us.  We were still young in our careers, and Manila was expensive.  Breakfast, dinner and a merienda, or snack, was what we had budgeted.

He looked at the Lilliputian buns with a worried look on his face.  I reassured him, “Don’t worry.  We’ll have a snack somewhere, and then a nice dinner in Old Manila, ok?  Surigao is much cheaper.  We’ll eat lots there!”

Outside the hotel, the bustle of the metropolis shocked Skerdi.  Neither Tirana, nor Vlora, where he worked, nor Korce, where he grew up, were ever this overwhelming.  Even when he lived in Leuven, Belgium, where he did his graduate studies, he had never experienced the frenzy that was in front of him.  Manila was not just sprawling, it was crowded with noise and people.  Back in 2000, the population of the city was more than 3 times that of Albania.  In  Manila, the crowds amplified the heat, and the suffocating humidity felt like an elephant had been sitting on his chest.

The scene consumed him just as much as he consumed it:  the rickety stands that sold peeled mangoes with rock salt in plastic bags, the rickshaws that hauled vats of taho (soft tofu in a ginger caramel syrup), the street sweepers, and the child peddlers, who wove in and out of congested traffic to tap on tinted car windows hoping someone would buy a garland of sampaguita (night jasmine).  Kiosks sold fruits he had never seen in Europe.  There were santols that looked like apples, lanzones that looked like grapes, and spiny rambutans that looked like sea urchins.  Across from us another vendor sold more fruits.  I pointed to yellow, ripe mangoes on his table.

Skerdi’s eyes widened.  “Will I get to eat those soon?”

“Yes, but let’s wait until we get to Surigao.” I thought of my great-uncle and the mangoes he had brought with him on his trips.  ”The fruits will be sweeter there.”

As we walked along the bay, Skerdi watched men hanging from crowded buses and teenagers in school uniforms inside multicolored jeepneys.  Everyone, it seemed, covered their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs.  The smog and humidity threatened immune systems.   Skerdi watched other foreigners.  A great Dane towered over a petite Filipina with whom he held hands.  The blond Scandinavian wore cutoff shorts and thong slippers while his girlfriend wore a pair of 3-inch stilettos and form-fitting sheath.  At one palm tree, three businessmen–a French, a Chinese and a Filipino–exchanged current events.  Nearby, an American woman in a blue suit gave directions to her housekeeper, who walked beside her taking note of what to buy from the market.  No one stared at Skerdi at all, he realized.  It was unlike my first visit to Albania; so many had pointed to me repeatedly, to the kinesa, the Chinese, they called out.

A jeepney bound for Cubao pulled up in front of us to offload passengers before taking on more.

“I used to ride one of those, the ikot, to and from grade school,”  I said, thinking back to my years at Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines.  The university ran both the elementary and high schools.

“How old were you?”

“I was 7 when I first rode one alone.  You pay by passing a peso over to the driver.  ‘Bayad po ma-ma!’ is what I used to shout out across the length of the jeepney.  ’Para‘ I would say if I wanted to get off.  Sometimes, my voice could not be heard, and I would have to bang on the roof.  By the time the jeepney stopped, I was several blocks from home.”

“Kawawa!“

“You remember that word!”  I had taught it to him back in March, when he told me about walking across a mountain at night in bare feet–a story for another day.

“Of course.  And you were kawawa!  You were so young.  No one went with you?”

“Nope,” I said proudly, “the ikot jeepney was easy.  It just went around and around the UP campus.”  We held hands as we walked towards my waiting friend at the end of the quai.  ”Many kids commuted.  Sometimes one didn’t have a choice.”

“Will we get to ride one?”  He eyed the pennants and streamers from the blue jeepney just as another red, similarly decorated, one passed by.

I shook my head.  “We need to be careful.  You’re a foreigner, which means you’re immediately a target.”

“C’mon?  Look at the ones we just passed by.  They don’t look scared.”

“I’m serious.  We even have to be careful when choosing the right taxi.  Those guys we just passed have probably lived here for a long time, and know this city better than me.”

“You worry so much about so many different things.  Stop worrying!”

I was indeed hypervigilant about what we ate, what cab we took, and if Skerdi was having a good time.  One night, I even made us ride a cab from the hotel to an Italian restaurant one block down.

“I just want everything to be perfect.”

“It won’t be.  But that’s ok.”  He gripped my hand and looped my arm through the crook in his elbow.  ”And I’m tough, besides nothing could be scarier than Albania in ’97–our country’s darkest hour.”

That was when most Albanians had lost their savings after having invested in pyramid schemes that had then imploded.  There had been widespread looting and riots all across the country.  Back then, Skerdi had been living in the seaside city of Vlora, the epicenter of violence.  For six months, lawlessness reigned in the city.  Men carried kalashnikovs, Russian-made assault rifles, for protection and to scare others into submission.  Skerdi, had escaped for a few weeks to Piluri, his friend’s hometown, where it rested far above—800 meters above sea level—from the chaos below.  In March of 2000, Skerdi took me to Piluri, and I met the extraordinary family that sheltered my husband.

He added, “Everyday I had wondered if it was my day to die.”

“Well it won’t be today or every day we’re here in the Philippines.  I’m keeping a close watch over us.  Please, just trust me, ok?”

Skerdi kissed my forehead, but said nothing.

For the next three days, we toured the capital and Quezon City, where I had grown up.  As much as possible, we avoided public transportation; my friend took time off to take us around the sights.  On the first day, we visited Intramuros, the 16^th century walled city built by the Spanish–the oldest district in Manila.  We toured the bulwarks, the gates, Manila Cathedral and San Agustin Church.  Later we visited Fort Santiago, where Jose Rizal, the national hero, had been imprisoned, and then walked around Luneta Park.  Walking around the historic center, I regretted paying so little attention to my Filipino classes when I was younger; it was difficult to tell the full story of many of the churches, forts and battlements.  More importantly, I wanted but was unable to relate the fight of the Filipinos against the Spaniards.

After Intramuror, we headed afterwards to Quezon City, where my personal history came to light.  Skerdi saw where I had lived in Diliman and the school I attended.  I showed him the manzanitas tree that grew in the front yard of our home and which I climbed routinely to get to the tiny “apples” at the top branches.  He saw the rice fields where I had often seen the lone water buffalo at the fence between its home and mine.  From there, we toured the campus–the main boulevard lined with acacia trees, the statue of the Oblation, and the school of economics, where my father taught.

The next day, we went to Makati—considered to be the financial center of Manila.  We stood for several minutes in front of the grand Shangri-la hotel and craned our necks to see the tops of skyscrapers. Skerdi was in awe.

“This is how I imagine America to be,”  Skerdi observed.  “I never thought the Philippines would be so…so…”

“Developed,” I offered.

He looked at me apologetically.  “Yes.  I never imagined all this, ” he paused and then spoke again, “But, Liza, don’t you think it is sad that on the way here, we passed by…how do you call it…shanghai towns…”

“Shanty towns?”

“Yes! Shanty towns.  There is a huge gap between the poor and the very wealthy, it seems”

We discussed the issue of poverty and class over halo halo, inside Shangri-la.  Skerdi followed my lead as I mixed the crushed ice, milk, ice cream and fruits together.  He explained that in Albania there were no glaring differences of wealth among the people.  Communism had leveled the playing field.  It had also taken away the spirit of entrepreneurialism, and so when the pyramid schemes fell, what remained was a society that had a hard time bouncing back.  Almost everyone had to regain its financial footing.  In the meantime, a kleptocratic culture developed.

He continued to mix the ice cream into the ice and fruit concoction. “This is delicious.   It has everything: bananas, gelatin, coconut.   I never imagined sweet fasoule, or beans, in a dessert.  But this is excellent.”

“I’m glad you like it. Your culinary adventure is just starting, honey.  Soon you’ll leave here wanting rice and mangoes everyday.”

“That won’t happen.  I will still need my bread and feta cheese. My taste buds are simply on vacation.”

We dove back into the halo-halo and then ordered another round.  It was a luxury we would never revisit again, we thought, to eat under opulence of Shangri-la.  So we indulged in the cool dessert, as we talked about poverty and the Philippines and why my parents used to wear yellow shirts.

On our third day together, we traveled outside of Manila to the lush regions of Batangas and Tagaytay.  We stopped at the overlook across from Taal, a volcano inside a lake formed within a larger caldera.  I bought us cones of ice cream, which we ate while we beheld the vista.

“What is this?”  He took a couple of tentative licks from the top scoop, which was bright purple.

“It’s ube or purple yam—a type of tuber, like a potato.”

“A potato?  An ice cream made of potato?  And the color…”

“It’s all natural.  You should see an ube cake – it’s also all purple!  We, Filipinos, like unusual flavors.”  I grinned, “Do you like it?”

“Hmmm. I actually do.  I can eat that again.” He kept licking away.  “What’s the flavor of this bottom scoop?”

“Yours is macapuno, similar to coconut, but better; mine is avocado,” I explained.  He took a swipe at mine and then another.

“Avocado, what is that?  Is that like a melon?”

I shook my head and described the fruit.  “Americans prefer their avocado dishes savory; Filipinos prefer them sweeter.  In Surigao, we mix avocado with mango and coconut jam, called latik. It’s like condensed milk.”

Skerdi chewed on a strand of macapuno.  ”You know, my mother used to toast bread and spread a thin layer of condensed milk on top.  [My brother] Maltin and I would eat it for breakfast.  She made one can last over 2 weeks.”

I nodded at a similar memory.  ”I drizzled condensed milk inside hot pan de sal.  And then with my hand I’d flatten and smush the sandwich down.”

“Would you dunk it in the hot chocolate?”

“No,” I said, “hot chocolate was for special occasions. If we were lucky, Mom would buy us Ovaltine.  But every morning–and at night–Paolo and I would drink powdered milk.  Sometimes the milk wouldn’t dissolve completely, and I’d end up swallowing a large chunk at the end.”

“Kawawa.”

“No, just stupid.  I wanted to get drinking milk over and done with.”

I guess I’m lucky I had access to fresh milk.”

“I’ve tasted your milk.  No thanks.”  I shuddered at the memory of drinking fresh, warm sheep’s milk that had been offered to me the morning before Skerdi and I had departed from our overnight visit to Piluri.

“Try it again sometimes.  You’ll like it.  Besides, Filipinos like unusual flavors, right?  Maybe sheep’s milk ice cream?”

“How about one made of feta?”  I giggled.

The three of us roared heartily.  My friend, still giggling, was enjoying the last of her scoop of yellow ice cream.  Skerdi asked her what the flavor was, “Mango?”

“Nope, cheese.”

Before dawn the next day, we headed for the aiport.  We were traveling to Surigao, via Butuan, an hour south of our destination.  I preferred this lengthier itinerary.  Currents and counter currents make flights into Surigao turbulent, oftentimes terrifying, especially as planes try to evade the crests of hills and the sudden dips from the competing forces of winds in order to land safely.

We sat at the terminal, my head on Skerdi’s shoulder, waiting for the announcement of our gate assignment.

“Are you nervous?”  I asked him about the prospect of meeting my relatives and friends.

“On the contrary, I’m very excited.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know what meeting everyone will be like, but I am dying to see the islands and beaches.  Do you know what I really, really want to do?”

I sat up.  “Hmm?”

“To eat fish just caught from the sea.  To ride on a boat against the waves.  Watch palm trees.  To go home and tell people I was in paradise”

“Is that all?”  I wiped the beads of sweat trickling down from his forehead.

“No, I also want to drink from a coconut.  And to lay on sand in the middle of the ocean.”

“We can do that.”  It was easy.  The islands off of Surigao are untouched edens—emeralds spilled across the sea.

“It’s been a dream since I was a boy—to be like Robinson Crusoe, for just a day.”

I smiled, “You’d be the first Albanian in Surigao, probably.”

“I know.  I should have brought a flag to plant in the sand.”   I remembered my last trip to see Skerdi.  The Albanian flag flew from the tops of every new construction.  Every household had one or more miniature pennants.  And Skerdi wanted one flag to plant the dream he’s had into the very real sands of the Philippines.

“Liza, one last thing.”

“Yes? Anything.”

“I want to eat a mango.”

Daddy, I hear bam-boom.

Sebastian jack-knifed out of my arms.  His head shook, as sleep still anchored his eyelids shut.

“Bam-boom, mommy, Bam-boom!”  He shouted and then burrowed under my left shoulder, so he was entrenched in the safety of my weight and the duvet.  I strained to hear any signs of rain, but the only sounds were scuffles and shuffles on the branches outside our window.

I gently tugged at the blanket.  Sebastian’s long lashes swept up.

“Sebastian, there’s no bam-boom,”  I said.

He pulled the blanket back over his head and wormed his way towards his dad.  An arm peeked from under the covers and crept up Skerdi’s shoulder.  Sebastian shook him gently.

“Daddy,” came the muffled voice.

With his right arm, Skerdi felt behind him, attempting to ruffle his son’s hair.  He found a plump leg instead.  He squeezed it, forcing a giggle from beneath the comforter.   “Yes, Sebi?”

“Daddy, I hear bam-boom.”

Skerdi sighed, raised his head to look at the clock and then at his 28 month old son.  “No, little boy, go look out the window.  Just sun, no rain.”

“Sun?  Oh, sun.  Yay, sun!”  Sebastian clambered up from under his billowy bunker.   With a foot against my chin, he hoisted himself up.  My head squeezed against the headboard as his foot slipped and fell against my nose.  Then, he swung the rest of himself over my chest and landed with both feet on the ground.  Sebastian gave me a smug smile.   He opened the door behind him; he snuck a look back at me.

Then, he bolted out.  “Nena!  Nena, ohhhh, Nennnnna!” His glee bounced around the apartment.

“Biri!  Mire mengjes!” I heard my mother-in-law’s equally boisterous voice.  She wished him a good morning, her heavier footsteps plodding across the carpet, chasing after him.

My head plopped back down on the pillow.  In the bedroom, semi-darkness was still a temptation to sleep anew.  I threw my arm over my eyes and groaned.  It was 6:30 am.

My husband grabbed my hand under the blanket.  I peeked at his stubbled face, swollen with a few hours of rest.  We looked at each other and then at Sebastian’s pillow—a crescent bolster in the shape of a curled up bunny.  We both sighed.

“Do you think there really was thunder,” he asked.

I shrugged.  “Weatherbug announced thunderstorms in the early evening.”   I kicked the covers off.   “I guess I’m up.”

I’m always up; it comes with being a parent.

How much does an airplane cost these days?

When I walked out into the living room, Sebastian was on his grandfather’s shoulders looking out of the window to the balcony.  My son’s dimpled chin moved back and forth across his Gjyshi’s bald head.

“Hi mommy! I massage Gjyshi.”

“Sebastian, time for school.”

“No, mommy, I go with Nena and Gjyshi.”  He hugged his grandfather’s head tighter, as I tried to yank him down into my arms.

“Sebastian, Nena and Gjyshi are going on an airplane.”

“To see xhaxhi Malti? And teta Sonila?”  He had relaxed his grip and allowed himself to fall into my embrace.  I nuzzled his neck, loving the smell in the nooks and crannies of his baby folds.

“Yes, to visit your uncle and auntie.  And you, you have to go to school, right?”

“No, mommy, I go to Albania!”

“Nope, it’s off to school, ok?”

“And daddy,” he looked up at me, “he go work?”

“Yup.”

“To make money?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“To buy Sebi airplane to go Nena and Gjyshi?”

Oh boy.  Someday we would have to tell him that we could not afford to buy neither an airplane nor the motori he wanted a month ago.

The Sky Wept Because We Couldn’t

Later that afternoon, a couple of hours before departure, a couple of miles from the airport, the clouds overhead had changed from dove-gray to charcoal within a couple of minutes.  A single spear of lightning touched the ground, as a plane flew sharply at an angle into the thick clouds.   One…two…three…the sky detonated.  Bam-boom!  Liquid shards fell, droplet by droplet.  And then the world wept in tormented cascades.

Immediately I had three thoughts:

1)   Will Mami and Babi be able to leave?

2)   What was Skerdi thinking?

3)   Who hugged my baby when the thunder cracked?

I could not see a few feet in front me.  If it had not been for the extra weight of the luggage in the trunk, my car would have slid right into the back of Skerdi’s small SUV.  He was most likely thinking the same thing.  That, and that his parents only had a two-hour window at the airport in Vienna, Austria, until their next flight for Albania.

Oblivious to the weather, Mami, who rode in my car with me, was less nervous about her flight.

“Take care of djali,” she said in Albanian. “Feed him always.  He’s too skinny.”

“Po, Mami.”  I nodded.

“He loves soup with noodles. Put a little olive oil in it.”

She sniffled behind me.  I gripped the steering wheel tighter.  The world was drowning.

Mami continued, “Take him on long walks in the afternoon.”

“Mos ki merak, mami,” I told her not to worry.

“But I do.  I do.  He’s the son of our son—more precious than anything.”

She sat in the backseat, by Sebastian’s empty car seat.  Babi was with Skerdi in his car.  They had a similar conversation.  Thunder exploded again.  In the rearview mirror, Mami shook her head and took a deep breath, “The bam-boom, Liza, Sebastian will be afraid of the bam-boom.”

A Crack in the Wall

For the past ten months, my parents-in-law helped us raise Sebastian.  This was their third visit to the United States.  Last Thursday, they left for Albania, to spend time with their other son and his wife for the next six months.  They have become indispensable to our home and to Sebastian’s upbringing.

The first time they had ever flown on an airplane was to attend my wedding five years ago.  Skerdi’s parents had applied for a tourist visa at the US embassy in Tirana.  We had little expectation that they would be approved.  But Mami and Babi—armed with hope and a couple of manila envelopes—had crossed the steel gates and walked behind the concrete walls of the embassy.

Me fat, they had told Skerdi on the phone.

An interpreter waited behind the glass kiosk, beside a stern-faced woman in her fifties with a steely gaze and a concrete expression.  Mami walked up, with Babi trailing behind her, pensive.

“Good morning!”  She smiled at the consular officer.

Dourly, the other woman replied, “Good morning.  Do you have your papers with you?  Do you have your fees?  Is everything in order?”

My mother-in-law smiled, “No English.”

The woman rolled her eyes and looked over at the interpreter, who translated.  Babi had stepped forward with a thick manila envelope.  He delicately laid out each form, each photo, and the exorbitant fee, which cost more than their monthly pensions combined.

“Have you ever been to the United States before?”

My parents-in-law shook their heads.

“You need to say your response,” she commanded, emphasizing each word.

“No.”  They replied.

“Why do you want to go to the United States?”

Mami  smiled at the human “wall”—in a blue suit with an American flag lapel pin—in front of her and tried her English again,  “My son. Marry.”

The wall remained stiff. “Ok.  And will you be part of the wedding?”

She nodded.

“Say your response.”

“Yes.”

“And how long has your son know his fiancée?”

Neither of my parents-in-law understood the implication of the question.  Mami had nudged her eyeglasses further up the bridge of her nose.  Meanwhile, Babi had pulled out the other envelope, burgeoning with photographs, letters, souvenirs from trips and other evidence of a longstanding love between Skerdi and me.  He slid it towards the woman on the other side of the glass.

“Ma’am, what is all this?”

Mami grouped the pictures in small piles.  In Albanian, she explained, “My son and his fiancee met in the United States in 1999.  For two years, they were apart.  She lived in Washington, DC, and my son lived here.  We had no internet, no phones, in the beginning.  The two of them wrote letters after letters to each other,” she had explained.

Mami pushed some letters and cards  towards the “wall”, who read through my private thoughts and declarations of love.  She then pointed to pictures of Skerdi and me on a stretch of beach, coconut trees and blue water behind us.

“Where is this?”

Mami replied, “In the Philippines, they were there in the summer of 2000. And…”

“The two of them went to the Philippines?”

My mother-in-law nodded.  Distracted, the “wall” did not ask her to reply out loud again.  Instead, she pointed to another set of photos.  “This is here in Tirana?”

“Yes.”

Babi then chimed in proudly,  “Liza has been to Albania six times.”

For an hour, the “wall” and the interpreter listened attentively as Mami and Babi spoke of our trip to the northwest city of Shkodra.  They described our travels to the coast—to Durres, Vlora and Himara—and to the mountains, to the village of Piluri.  They even spoke of my visit to Butrint, a national park, in Saranda and to the ancient hillside city of Gjirokastra.  Mami pushed another set of photos and souvenirs forward—from our travels to Turkey and Montenegro.  One photo had captured our excitement at having sailed off the coast of Bodrum in Turkey.  Another had highlighted the reverence with which we toured Ulqin, where Miguel de Cerventes had been imprisoned.

The “wall” began to crack.

Although her face remained impassive, her voice showed interest in a love story that overcame distance and cultural differences.  Her tone lowered to a near whisper, “And now, after all that, they are finally getting married?”

Babi had slipped a red, linen envelope, tied by a thin, red silk ribbon—our wedding invitation–through the slot in the glass.

“Thank you,” the woman said, without a trace of steel, “I will keep this and return it all back to you by courier.”

Mami and Babi both nodded.  A week later, a large envelope was delivered.  The photos, letters and souvenirs were returned in a neat stack.  Also inside were two passports stamped with multiple entry visas.

Gezuar!

There were thunderstorms the day that Mami and Babi had first arrived in the United States.  An hour after their plane had arrived, they still had not emerged from behind the double doors of customs and immigration. When they finally had exited, Mami and Babi each dragged 2 large suitcases.  They had kissed us three times: right cheek, left cheek, right cheek.

We had taken them back to our one-bedroom apartment on the 18^th floor.  Falls Church, Virginia, where we lived was an international hub—where El Salvadoreans and Ethiopians resided by each other, where Sudanese hang out at the Starbucks across the street, where Filipinos and Vietnamese shopped from the local Asian markets nearby, and where the most popular restaurant in our block was the Peruvian rotisserie.

When we arrived at the apartment from the airport, Mami immediately opened the largest suitcase.  Only one half of one suitcase contained their clothes.  Gifts were crammed into the rest of the baggage.  A white, king-sized quilt filled up one entire suitcase.  They also brought for us a large satchel of fasoule, extra large navy beans, jars of dried herbs, hand-made doilies, Skerdi’s baby clothes, a sterling silver Turkish coffee set, boxes of chocolates, and a kilim, or handwoven area rug in reds and greens.  Then, Mami pulled out 2 one-liter plastic bottles, with labels torn off. One contained olive oil—liquid gold—while the other held raki mani, grappa made from Albanian blackberries.

Moonshine.

Every Albanian home has at least four things in common.  There is always a loaf of crusty bread.  Somewhere in the living room, one can find one or more miniature Albanian flags.  In the pantry, you will always find olive oil and sweets.  And every home has raki.  When guests drop in for a visit, sweets are passed around and raki is poured.  Gezuar! Cheers and a long round of toasts to health and success are expressed.

Like olive oil, raki is also lauded for its curative properties as well as its potency.  When one has the flu, raki is applied topically, like rubbing alcohol, to the body before being swaddled in layers of sheets.  When one is congested, one must sip raki, that has been boiled with sugar and a squeeze of lemon.  Even a sprained ankle or pulled muscle earns a douse of raki over the affected area.

Out in the balcony, close to the stars, the four of us toasted the long journey ahead of us. Gezuar!

Chicken Adobo, Chipotle and Children

Before leaving for the United States, my parents-in-law had never tried cuisines from other cultures—except those from Greece and Italy, whose dishes were similar and, therefore, more acceptable to their palate.  There were Chinese merchants and tradesmen in Tirana, but Chinese restaurants were few and not frequented by those who lived outside the kines neighborhood.

Their first foray into Asian cuisine was my chicken adobo, served with a heap of jasmine rice and a salad of tomatoes and salted, red duck eggs. My in-laws were not effusive in their praise. As the meal progressed, Mami took a second and then a third spoonful of gently, braised chicken.  Then, Babi pushed his plate forward and looked straight across at me.

“Te lum shin duar, Liza!”

I looked to my husband.  He translated, “Your hands, he said, are gifted.  He loved your chicken.”

I smiled down at my plate.

Over the course of the month surrounding the wedding, Skerdi and I introduced his parents to Washington DC, to my family and to a wide array of cuisine.  Since work prevented Skerdi from spending more time with them, I, alone and with limited Albanian, toured Mami and Babi around to see the sights.  Bam-boom became a staple of my still-growing lexicon.

“Bam-boom!” I yelled to describe the bombing of Hiroshima at the World War II memorial.

“Bam-boom.” I described the Stock Market crash of 1929 at the Era of Depression vignettes at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial.

“Bam-bam-boom-boom.” I mimicked the march of the Tyrannosaurus Rex at the Natural History Museum.

When I should have been focusing on my wedding, I took them to restaurants instead. They tried tofu at a Vietnamese restaurant and green curry chicken at a Thai one.  They crunched hungrily on the crispy skin of Peking duck and that of lechon, the whole roasted pig, a tradition in the Philippines.  They even tried the American “classic”, the Big Mac.

“Is it really made of beef,” Mami asked, eyeing the meat suspiciously.

What they loved best of all in their culinary expedition was the made-to-order burrito from Chipotle.  In one month, they ate at Chipotle eight times.

On the eve of their departure, after our wedding, we introduced them to our local Indian restaurant.  I was spooning the rich chicken tikka masala onto my basmati rice, when Babi clinked on his glass of Kingfisher beer.

“Your mami and I want to talk to both of you,” he said.

Skerdi chewed on his naan noisily. “What is it, Babi?”

“You, two, must have children soon.”  He threw the advice out there without warning.

Mami added, “You are not young.  You are both 31 years old—you, Liza, are getting older.”

Calmly, Skerdi asked his parents to leave the topic alone.

The ever pensive Babi could not be silenced.  “We are getting old—your Mami and me—and a home needs children.”

“A boy first, preferably,” Mami chimed in with a smile.

I could not find the words to respond, so I slurped my mango lassi instead.

Clove of garlic or cloven foot?

Three years after their first visit, Mami and Babi came back to Washington, DC.  This time, they were staying for six months to spend time with their new grandson, Sebastian.

A week before their arrival, I decided to bring Sebastian to the office.   Born five weeks early, Sebastian fit along the length of my forearm; he was a mere 8 pounds—twice his weight at birth.  He was a survivor, a tough little fighter.  Yet, everyone felt he needed a little extra hand—especially against the “eye.”

“The eye?”  I asked my husband.

“You know, the eye.”  He said while I changed Sebastian into blue cotton overalls.

“You mean, like, the eye.”  I pointed to my own.

Exasperated, he said, “Yes, the eye.  The evil eye.”

“Ah, the evil eye.  Not to be confused with the…good eye, right?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.  Listen, it’s not going to hurt anyone, and if there is an evil eye, then Sebastian is that much safer.”

“Where is this coming from?”  I already knew the answer.  He had just called his parents that morning.

“Yes, yes…it’s an Albanian thing…but, just put one clove in his pocket.  In fact, all of us should have garlic with us at all times.”

“Where’s yours?”

“In my car, in the glove compartment.”

I looked at the baby, who smelled of powder and milk.  “He doesn’t have a pocket on this outfit.  So he’s to smell like garlic, when people pass him around?”

“Yes, just wrap it in tissue paper and tuck it away from his face and neck, then.”  He saw that my mouth was agape.  “Honey, just do it.  The evil eye exists especially among those who are jealous.”

I threw my hands up and conceded to the odd request.

I brought Sebastian to work, showing off my son, who had just started social smiling and laughing.  My colleagues were welcoming in their affection, but were hesitant to ask me something.

Finally, a close friend asked what many had been wondering, “Liza, is Sebastian all right?”

I nodded, but ran a hand across my son’s forehead.  “Yes, it would seem.  Why?”

“I mean…well…does he…”

“What is it?”  My heart started thumping.  Was is the evil eye?

“Does he have a cloven foot,” he blurted out.

“A what?!”

My co-worker pointed to his left foot, and the thick bulge on his ankle.

I chuckled and pulled down Sebastian’s sock. “No, it’s a clove of garlic.”

Later that evening, I noticed how newborns seemed to generate a lot of laundry.  Skerdi ran another load, while I bathed Sebastian before starting dinner.  A sweet scent floated across the kitchen.  Hmmm, I thought, what a delicious smell.

Skerdi, then, yelled out.  “What is that nasty odor?”

“Probably our neighbor cooking,” I said dreamily.

“They haven’t moved in next door, yet.”  Like a bloodhound, he sniffed the air and followed the scent.  My mouth was watering, while Skerdi made retching noises.

I left the kitchen with Sebastian in my arms, smelling of baby shampoo.  We waddled over to the bedroom, but stopped by the laundry area.

“Honey!  The smell is coming from here.”

He came out from the other side of the apartment and looked at me.  I looked at him.  Bam-boom!

The garlic!

We opened the dryer door, and the smell of roasted garlic slapped us in the face.

Vampires and bloodsuckers

A week after the garlic incident–and after running the dryer a few more times to “air” it out–Skerdi picked his parents up from the airport.  Sebastian and I waited at home.  I opened the front door, and watched them walk briskly down the corridor.  Sebastian lay quietly in the crook of my arm.

“Mami, miresevini!”  Welcome, I said.

Without paying me any attention, she grabbed her grandson and started screaming, “Te keqen nena!  Te keqen nena!”

Sebastian screamed.  Mami hugged him in fierce delight. I looked at Skerdi and mouthed, “What was that all about?”

He whispered in my ear, “That’s to curse the evil spirits and drive them away from Sebastian.”

“The evil spirits?!”

“You know, like vampires and ghosts.”

“So this is different from the eye.”

“Honey, stop.  Don’t go there.”

Raising my son in an Albanian and Filipino household means accepting all aspects of one’s culture, including beliefs and superstitions.  Whatever I thought about evil eyes and spirits, I could not discount the diligent care my in-laws gave to my son—both in the six months of their second visit, or during their more recent stay.  They never missed a single detail; they were vigilant in their attention to him.

Over the past ten months, Sebastian’s days were divided between his daycare and his grandparents, who doted on him like a little prince, an Ali Pasha.

Nowhere was it more evident than when summer broke out this year. As the heat and humidity descended over the Washington, DC area, so did the mosquitoes and their fondness for my son’s sweet skin.  No matter what bug spray or lotion we used, the little boy was not spared.

One afternoon, a couple weeks ago, while watering my potted herbs on my balcony, I saw a familiar stroller pass underneath.  Sebastian and his grandparents were on their daily afternoon outing.

My mother-in-law was pushing the stroller leisurely.  Sebastian, in repose, was sipping water from his cup.  Occasionally, she would lean over to feed him a grape.  My father-in-law walked sideways in front of the stroller, fanning away the heat and the mosquitoes with a large leafy branch, he had pulled down from a nearby tree.

On that balcony, I thought about the void Mami and Babi would soon leave behind, even if it were for a mere six months.

Daddy, I hear bam-boom

On the afternoon of their departure last Thursday , the storm grew in intensity. The thunder boomed loudly once again, as our cars pulled up by the departure area.  I opened the car door, and it took ten seconds for the rain to drench my clothes.  The plane could not leave in this weather, I thought.

Skerdi and I parked the cars, and ran into the airport, soaked and shivering.  We checked Mami and Babi in at the counter and walked them to the security gate.

“See you in January,” I said, “Please take care of yourselves.  Thank you for everything.”

“Play with Sebastian,” my mother-in-law cried as she kissed my cheek and left me her last instruction.

Babi took my hand and kissed it,  “Don’t work too much.  Play with him.”

We parted ways. I picked up Sebastian from daycare.  From the back seat, he asked, “Mommy, Nena and Gjyshi in airplane?”

“Yes, Sebi.”

We pulled into the parking lot. The rain abated slightly, and I ran, with Sebastian in my arms, into the elevator of my building.  When the doors opened on the fourth floor, Sebastian ran for home.

“Nena! Oh, Nena!  Gjyshi!”  He yelled across the puddled corridor.

The door opened.  Sebastian stopped, “Oh, hi daddy!  Make money?”

Skerdi swung his son up.  “Yes, I did.”

The sky exploded into another roar.  “Daddy, I hear bam-boom!”  Sebastian gripped his dad’s neck.

“It’s ok, Sebi.”

The weatherman on the television announced that flights were delayed by a couple of hours.  Sebastian ran to the window overlooking the balcony.  He railed at the storm, “No, bam-boom!  Go away, rain!  No hit plane!  My Nena, my Gjysh!”  His little fists pummeled against the pane of the glass.

The next morning, the sun shone through the bamboo slits.  A text message came through on Skerdi’s cell phone.  It was his brother.

“They are here.  They have arrived.”

Mommy, help you me.

Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied. Even the interpretation and use of words involves a process of free creation.

– Noam Chomsky

Salad Days, Albanian Sayings

Cucumber was the first “real” word I learned in Albanian.  Kastravec, my now mother-in-law, mami Natasha, taught. With a sharp thike, she sliced the domate, djath, and qepe. The cubed, crimson tomatoes, the feta cheese and raw yellow onions tumbled into the bowl with the cucumber.  I–who didn’t speak Albanian–watched her–who knew no English–as she gently trickled in the uthull. The acrid pungency splashed back into the air; the glands on the underside of my jaw constricted, releasing saliva.  She pointed to the bottle of vinegar, she held, and wagged her finger.  Not too much, she gestured.  With the other bottle–the plastic one that had once been filled with orange soda–she was reverent.  Inside was liquid gold, not sold in local markets, but collected from vats of first pressed olives from the western coast of Albania.  Be generous with this vaj ulliri, she made it known with few words and grand gestures.  I dipped my finger into the oil as it streamed into the bowl.  The taste was evocative of a past in which the currencies and measures of wealth were salt, olive oil and spices.

“Mami, I help you?”  I pointed to myself first and then to the cutting board, offering assistance.

Mami walked over to the sideboard, where she removed a printed dishcloth from atop a crudely woven basket.  Inside was a hefty-sized, crusty buke. She directed me to slice the bread just thick enough to withstand the weight of the dressing, into which we would all soon be dipping.  Meanwhile, she fried slices of salcice, in the tigan, until the spicy sausage halves were browned.  She placed the meats onto each plate and spooned the drippings from the frying pan on top.

Then we watched the ora, the clock. My now father-in-law, Babi Viktor, Mami and I sat together on the divan waiting for Skerdi to come home for dreke. At half past noon, he walked in with gusts of wind following him into the apartment.   I met him at the door, where he shrugged off his dusty, black jacket.   His lips were cold as they met mine; his fingers frozen as they cupped my cheeks; his forehead stiff as he leaned against my brow.

“Lunch?”

I nodded in reply, then recounted what I had done that morning.  We walked hand in hand to the dining table, beside which the electric heater thrummed.

With dry, chaffed hands, Skerdi broke his slice of bread in half and swirled the white soft flesh around the red pan drippings.  I did the same.  Mami heaped the vegetables onto our plates.  The floral acidity of the salad cut through the salty, unctuous taste of the sausages.  Skerdi sprinkled more salt onto his plate.

“Kripe,” Mami said and then pointed to his son with a smile.  She, then, said something rapidly in Albanian.  I looked over to Skerdi, confused.

Squeezing my hand, he translated, “There is an Albanian saying that a man who likes a lot of salt in his food is very much in love with his wife.”

“Well, if I had known you were already married, I wouldn’t have started anything with you,” I laughed.

He stared at me; his thick eyebrows puckered.  “I’m not married.”

“I know.”  I giggled.

Still perplexed by my comment, he continued solemnly, “but you just said…”

“Sarcasm,” I interrupted.

“Oh. Hm. Ok.”  He went back to dipping the bread in the dressing—the joke lost on him.

Can you say cow brain soup?

I learned to make a salate that first morning back in Albania.

It was November 2000–my second visit to the country.  Several months earlier, Skerdi had moved Mami and Babi from the warmer coastal city of Vlora to the capital, Tirana, where he worked.  He lived with and helped to take care of his retired parents.  The first time I had ever been to Albania was in March earlier that year.  Back then, I had stayed with Skerdi, who was fluent in English.  There had never been an opportunity in that first visit to learn more than the usual array of terms one gleans when traveling to a foreign country–good morning (mire mengjes), thank you (falimenderit), gezuar (cheers!) and where is the … (ku eshte…).

During the second visit, however, I spent entire days over the course of three weeks with my future in-laws.  Still new at his job, Skerdi could not take any time off to be with me. Everyday, he left while I was still asleep and came home twice, once at lunch and then again at the end of the day.  Bonding with his parents presented an opportunity to learn their language.

I underestimated Albanian.  It is a difficult language to master.  I–who won national awards in French throughout high school, was President of the French of Honor Society, spoke two Philippine dialects and could sing an entire song (just a song) in Arabic—was humbled.  I was felled by Albanian.  That’s what I get, I thought, for falling in love with one.

Nevertheless, I was determined to conquer this Sisyphean feat.  Like a toddler, I started learning Albanian with baby steps—one word at a time.  And the arsenal of words I first built reflected one of my main interests: food!

For three weeks, Mami and I cooked lunches and dinners.  She patiently named each step in making the regional dishes and also the ingredients for each recipe.  Bizelle me mish vici (peas with beef), tave kosi me mish qengji (lamb baked in yogurt), and clitharaq me pule (orzo with chicken).  Outside, when Skerdi and I dined at restaurants, we studied the menus, the best of which was from Juvenilja, our favorite pizzeria in the center of the city.  All the ingredients for each pizza were listed within the menu.  Vez (egg), spec picante (spicy pepper),  majdanoz (parsley).  By the end of that visit, I had memorized a long list of cooking terms–from roasted (pjekur) to stuffed (mbushur), from grilled lamb chops (paidhaqe) to cow brain soup (paqe).

ABC’s are not building blocks.

I visited the country four more times over the ensuing few years.  With each visit, I learned to count–yes, to a million and beyond—and to name the colors of the rainbow.  I memorized slogans from the sides of buildings and on banners that hung over the main boulevard.  Gervisht dhe fito–scratch and win–posters peppered the outside walls of kiosks and advertized lottery-style scratch tickets.  Ramazani mes nesh, gezimit e perheshem heralded the start of Ramadan, also observed in this once Ottoman-held nation.  I watched Albanian news hours in furious concentration.

Amused by my increasing vocabulary, they would show me off to friends and family, who came to meet the kinesa–the Chinese (a term they used for all Asians)–girlfriend.

“Liza,” Skerdi would say, pointing to the spoon, “what is this?”

“Luge.”

“And this?”

“Pirune.” Fork, I barked out like a seal.

They would ask me to read from the daily revista, or newspaper, and listen to me correctly pronounce many of the words.  Only a few syllables evaded me–the double ll, the difference between the q, ch, c, sh, gj, and xh (which all sounded alike at first), and the soft d.  Nevertheless, my reading earned me rounds of applause.  I was a child; I lapped up the praise.

“But can she recite the alphabet,” a friend had asked one afternoon over strong Turkish coffee.

Skerdi translated.  I shook my head.  Unlike the English alphabet, there was neither an easy mnemonic nor a catchy song to help memorize the 36 letters of the Albanian one.

Today, I still don’t know it.

There once was a neighbor from Tirana…

During one visit to Albania, one of Skerdi’s cousins taught me a few songs, one of which, he said,  would help me memorize a set of pronouns.  At dinner, the cousin (named L)  who had been invited to stay clinked his glass with a fork.

“Auntie, Uncle, Liza has a song to sing for you,” L said in Albanian.

Skerdi shifted his gaze from me to his cousin and back again to me.  He was suspicious, and a tad afraid.  Oblivious, his parents smiled encouragement.

I cleared my throat.

“Une, ti, ayi, ayo, me, ne ata, ato…”

“Bravo!” They cheered in unison.

I sang the innocuous children’s song, without a hitch.   Skerdi sighed, then took a swig of his beer. He clapped his cousin on the back and thanked him.  Mami and babi clapped in pride.  Happily, I ate my peas.

“Ok, Liza,” the cousin started, “sing the other song!”

“Po! Po!” Yes, yes–everyone chanted.

“Ok, here it goes…”  I took a deep breath.  ”Pune m*ti, ka hajduti, pes mille lek…”

“NO!”  Skerdi shouted, coughing out his drink.  He glared at his cousin. Thankfully, Skerdi’s parents weren’t familiar with the bawdy limerick about a lusty neighbor, 5,000 leks and a request for a good time.

Squeal like a piglet!

Courtesy of Skerdi’s cousin, I learned my first bad words in Albanian and wished I could have unlearned them.  Many people studying a new language think it’s funny, and, for some, imperative, to build a cache of vulgar words.  It’s not.  It’s disrespectful to build this verbal ammunition to lob at rather than bridge ties with other people.  Words are powerful.  Nations have been razed on the premise of a few traded barbs.  Violence can ensue from just one word.  Fights can break out from a simple curse.

During one visit, Skerdi and I quarreled.  Like most arguments between couples, it started over something silly and escalated rapidly.   I had eaten too much over the time I spent in Albania and he pinched the fat under my arms.

He thought it was cute. “You’re a little derkuci.”

“What’s that?”  I asked, sitting up from the couch where we were snuggled watching football.

“Little piglet,” he offered easily.

“Piglet?”

“Yes, you’re cute like a little pink piglet.”  He followed that with a pinch of my cheeks.

“Piglet,” I screeched.

He nodded, sweat breaking across his upper lip.  He hesitated before reaffirming, “Um, yes, piglet?”

“Piglet!  As in baby pig?!”

I stood up, hands on hips, foot tapping.  If he wanted a size 2 then I could leave for the US soon.

“I don’t understand.  What is a size 2?”  Oh, I clenched my teeth, the nuances of language!

“Size 2!  You know….size 2!”

Skerdi rolled his eyes, and said I was overreacting. “Piglets are cuddly.  We call chubby little babies piglets all the time.”

“B*thq*ra!” I spat out, immediately regretting it after seeing his face pale.

He blinked.  He blinked again, in disbelief that I knew the worst of the curse words.  He blinked rapidly, in fury.  And in a blink, he left the apartment.  He was gone for several hours.

When he came back, the silence was devastating.  I sat beside him, took his hands, and said, “Me fal.  Te dua shume.” I’m sorry, I love you, I said.

“Me too,” he apologized, “By the way, I don’t want a size 2.  Whatever that means.  Just you, ok?”

When parallel tracks cross

It’s been ten years since my first visit to Albania.  And I am still far from being fluent.   My in-laws now live with Skerdi, me and Sebastian.  They help us raise our son in an Albanian-Filipino home.  He’s learning both Albanian and English at exponential rates.

Like me, Sebastian has slowly developed a little lexicon.  He can count to five in Albanian, to fifteen in English.  He orders his grandparents about like a miniature Ali Pasha.

“Hajdee, gjuysh!”  Come here grandpa, he’ll cry out.

“Hape televisore.”  Turn on the tv.

“Ikim!”  Let’s go.

Learning two languages at the same time can often confuse Sebastian.  The parallel tracks often cross-talk.  Sometimes he’ll use words from both languages to form a single sentence, leaving many, like the teachers at his daycare, confused.

One day last week, Buddy, Sebastian’s teacher, asked, “What happened to the butterflies you had [raised for three weeks]?”

My son looked up at the sky and said, “Iku. ‘Pafshim! In the sky now!”

Buddy’s eyes widened and glanced quickly at me in question.  “They left.  He waved goodbye,” I translated.

Lost in translation

Like Sebastian, I often string words in Albanian together without conjugating verbs or worrying about tenses.  One evening, several months ago, at dinner with just my in-laws, Mami asked how Sebastian had slept the night before.

I replied in stilted Albanian, “Yesterday, he not sleep good because he wake at 3 in morning for drink water. One minute after, he sleep again. No wake up. This morning, wake up ok but he not want go school.”

Across from me, Babi strained forward, slowly raised his chin and then lowered his head while twisting to his right to look at his wife.  He had not understood a word I had said.  So Mami put her fork down and then translated my Albanian—back into Albanian.

“Mire, mire,” my father, finally comprehending, addressed me again.  Good, good.  Next, he launched into a discussion on Sebastian and sleep.  Babi is a fast talker; his words slide into each other.  He keeps his hands motionless when he talks.

It was my turn to crane my neck forward, attentively listen to each word, and then attempt to make sense of everything.  I understood nothing.  I shrugged my shoulders, turned back to my mother-in-law, who then translated his Albanian into mine—a simplified, elementary school version accompanied by numerous hand gestures, onomatopoeic sounds, and body spasms.

“He said,” she translated, but in Albanian, “Sebastian is probably not sleeping in school.”  She pantomimed Sebastian running around and playing.

“Aaaaaggghh!”  She then shouted.

My son, who was sitting with us at the table, trying to spoon more rice into his mouth, let the grains fall out as he, too, shouted, “Aaaaaggghh!  Nena funny! Mire mire!”

My eyes narrowed as I tried to understand what she was still trying to say.  So she raised her voice even louder to get her point across—which at any decibel level was still hard to decipher.  Finally, after several tries, she asked, “do you understand me?”

“Yes!”  Finally, I got it.  Sebastian, she surmised, had been too excited at school by the new, older kids, with whom he had wanted to play.  Hence, he had probably not taken a nap the previous afternoon, leaving him drowsy earlier that morning.

The tower of babble

Before 1990’s, Albania was in the clutches of an extreme form of isolationism and communism.  Only state-approved broadcasts were allowed on television and in radios.  The singing group, ABBA, was one of the few bands, whose music was permitted to be transmitted over the airwaves.  Football was also shown on television.  Skerdi, like many of his countrymen, often secretly listened to pirated programs from other countries.  The punishment for being caught was a long jail sentence and ignominy for one’s family.  Nevertheless, he found ways to listen to the sounds of the world outside his nation’s hermit-crab existence.  Although he did not speak English at the time, he fell in love with heavy metal music, especially Bon Jovi, Metallica and Iron Maiden. When communism fell, the way was paved not just for a democratic Albania but also for more open media.

During this transition time, Skerdi opted to learn English from a private tutor after school.  Learning a language academically does not teach one about nuances, idioms and irony.  When I met Skerdi in 1999, he was conversant in English, but he failed to pick up on jokes heavily based on sarcasm.    Moreover, there were cultural and linguistic idiosyncracies one can only glean outside textbooks, simply by living the language.

In 2002, Skerdi came to the United States to be with me.  We lived in a 500 sq. ft. apartment four blocks behind the Capitol in Washington, DC.  He had enrolled as a graduate student at American University and worked as a part-time waiter at a nearby Greek restaurant.  When he wasn’t studying or working, we were curled up on the couch watching comedies, like Friends.  During the thirty minute show, he would laugh once, maybe twice.

“Do you want to change the channel,” I’d ask.

“No why?”

“You don’t think it’s funny,” I stated.

“I do, but I don’t get the jokes.  Everyone sounds like they are babbling. Blah. Blah. Blah.  And that’s only because I don’t understand them.  Everyone speaks so fast.”

The American Accent

Day in and out, Skerdi learned, and sometimes struggled with, the intricacies of the English language while I put aside learning Albanian.  One evening, he came home from worked, flushed in the face.

“Honey,” I asked, “is everything all right?”

He closed the door, took off his apron and walked up to me. “What does char-broiled mean?”

“What? Why?”

“Well, I had some German tourists as customers tonight,” he described, “and they pointed to the menu and asked what charbroiled chicken was.”

I waited.  He continued, “And I didn’t know what it was myself!  So I said..”

He paused.

“Yes?”

“I said, ‘Well, you see, we have this machine…it’s called a char…and that’s where we put the chicken to bake.”

I tried not to laugh.  “Oh. Ok. Your boss didn’t explain the dish to you?”

“No,why would he? He’s Greek; I’m Albanian. We stay out of each other’s way.  I’m lucky I even have a job there.  He says I make the place feel authentic.”

Shaking my head, I explained what a char was, and he turned a deeper red.

“How am I ever going to be good at English?  Tell me, Liza, what can I do to be better?”

“You’re already good, and time will make you great.  Just wait.”  I hugged him tightly.

“Ok, tell me, how can I get rid of my accent?”

“What?!” Surprised, I pulled back.

“People don’t understand me. Some customers say ‘hola’ to me.  Others say, ‘El salaymu alaykum.’  And even some have said, ‘dasvedanya!’ I want to sound American.”  He was clearly agitated.

“What does that sound like?”

“No accent.  Neutral.”

I took a deep breath, “Sorry, honey, that will never happen.  Your accent is a part of you.”

He grunted.  I kissed him on the cheek, “Besides, I think it’s sexy.”

To market, to market

Dejected, he went to bed. The next day after the charbroiled discussion, we both went to Whole Foods.  He had never accompanied me grocery shopping.  He was mesmerized by the size of the American “supermarket.”  Back in Albania, markets were smaller and specialized.  You bought meats at the  butcher, produce at the grocer, and bread at the stand outside a bakery.  And you always brought enough leks, the Albanian currency.

At Whole Foods, he walked up and down the aisles for nearly an hour.  The sticker prices shocked him.  Kos, or plain yogurt, was over $2, four times more expensive and four times smaller in quantity than in Albanian.  He went to look for feta cheese–$5 for a 3-inch cube!

I waited outside as he finished shopping.  When he emerged, he had the same perplexed look on his face.

“Honey,” he said.

“Yes?”

“What does paper or plastic mean?”

“Well, the cashier wanted to know if you’d like your items in a plastic bag or a paper bag,” I replied.

He closed his eyes and then started chuckling.  “No wonder she looked at me funny and had nothing to say.”

“Oh?  What did you tell her?”

“I said I would pay in cash.”

Finally, we’ve arrived.

These days, Skerdi works with clients at a financial planning firm.  The fact that he still has an accent still bothers him.  Clients will call asking for the Jamaican guy to whom they just talked or for the Pakistani who had helped them.  They never ask for his name, which many find difficult to pronounce. Nevertheless, he is finally fluent in English.  He catches nuances and sarcasm.  He guffaws endlessly at jokes—the funny ones—and puts me in my place if I’m overly sarcastic.

Ten months ago, my in-laws became permanent residents of the United States.  They moved here to be with us for part of the year.  Sebastian and I have learned even more Albanian from being with them.

Last week, I had a chance to practice my adopted language.  One of the participants at a conference my office organized was from Tirana.  He (named S) and I exchanged a few words in between sessions.  During the final lunch, catered by a local Thai restaurant, we sat beside each other.

“This morning you mentioned that you know my husband is from Korce [in eastern Albania],” I remarked.

“It’s no mystery,” he said, smiling.  S swirled the green curry sauce with his fork, while pushing the chicken and tofu off to the side.

“Did someone tell you?”

He then twirled the rice noodles coated in peanut sauce around his fork, but never put the strands in his mouth.

“No.”

S placed a napkin over his plate of half-eaten food.

“You want bread, don’t you?”

He nodded.

“Me fal. I’m sorry.  We only have rice.”

S turned to face me.  ”Ska probleme.  It’s ok. I will be home soon.”

“So how did you know my husband is from Korce?  Did I tell you accidentally yesterday?”

“No.  Actually, it’s your accent.”

“My accent?  My American accent?”

“No,” S said, “you speak Albanian with a Korcan accent.”

I had arrived.

Mommy, help you me.

Over the past year, Sebastian has thrived.  I credit both the school and the attention his grandparents have lavished on him.  As a result, he is developing into a dynamic little boy eager to learn.  His language abilities have also skyrocketed.  Just a few weeks ago, he was stringing sentences together—often lacking in grammatical correctness—but a far cry from the days when he would just say a few nouns.

The other night, Sebastian climbed onto the bar stool and looked into the kitchen where I was preparing dinner.

“Mommy,” he asked, “help you me.”  Was he asking for help or offering it?

“What did you say, Sebastian?”

“I said, help you me.”

I stood there looking at him.  And he sighed, frustrated with his mother.  So he pointed at himself and then at the vegetables on the cutting board, and he said, “Sebi help mommy cooking, ok?”

“Oh, of course pumpkin, you can help me!”

While he’s too young to wield a knife or a peeler, he stood on the bar stool and helped me identify all the ingredients.  I let him smell the garlic, the onions and the vinegar.  I placed a diced tomato in his mouth–he promptly spit it back out.  We made a salad together.

A few hours later, we walked hand in hand to the bedroom, where he tried to climbed into my bed.  ”Mommy,” he yelped, “help you me.”

This time I knew what he meant.  I bumped him on his bum, so he tumbled onto the pillows.  He let out a big giggle.  Together we read his alphabet book.

Bread and Rice: Staples of a Blended Family

My brother Paolo deserves an apology.

In my first blog (Volt, age and currants: Part 1), I poked fun at his chicken adobo–the national dish of the Philippines.  As a purist, I had commented that one should never blend in cumin and coriander with the rest of the ingredients.  All that was needed was to slow cook the meat in equal parts soy sauce and vinegar, a handful of garlic, a crush of peppercorns and bay leaf.  Nothing else, I had written.  However, I was wrong.

Oddly enough, it tastes great with feta cheese.

Mama Ching’s marvelous chicken

It was widely known in Surigao City–at least on our block of Amat Street–that my maternal grandmother, Mama Ching, made the best adobo.  Whether it was made with chicken, pork, the rich combination of chicken and pork, the daring mix of gizzards and chicken liver, beef liver, squid or kang-kong (Philippine watercress), hers was incomparable.  Her chicken adobo was indubitably the most lauded.  The perfection of her version was evidenced in the unmistakable odor of vinegar and garlic that permeated across the kitchen into the living room and then inisinuated itself in nooks, crannies and under closed doors of bedrooms and closets.  Mothballs and closet fresheners were helpless against the scent.  And so were our senses.  Bedroom doors opened;  cold air from air-conditioners struggled against the dulling humidity of Surigao.  Closer to the equator, Surigao is located on the northernmost tip of Mindanao, the largest island in the Philippines.

“Kaon na!”  my mother’s voice was a muezzin call to eat.

My brothers and I, smelling the adobo, would elbow each other down short flight of steps and glide across gleaming tiles, burnished to a shine by several turns of our housekeeper and her floor scrub, an inverted husk of half a coconut.  We slid; we raced; we vied to get the best parts of the chicken.  Niccolo, younger than me by 12 years, never won, but then he loved all parts of the poultry.  He ate chicken everyday for years.  My grandmother even secretly made him adobo or her special fried chicken, when everyone else ate whatever blessing was placed at the table.

I gave Mama Ching extra kisses when we had chicken adobo, atsara (or sweet and sour pickled green papaya) and steamed rice.  Heaven was spooning the tangy saltiness of the sauce and fork tenderness of the meat onto the plain, unadorned rice.  One bite of the dish was a journey home.

Slaying Dragons in Princeton

Many people have asked me where I grew up.  I always respond with, “at home.”  Home is the tight coccoon of family, extended relatives, and close friends who have helped raised me throughout the years.  Wherever my parents moved us, there was always a community from which I drew strength and guidance.

We first left Quezon City, Philippines, when I was five.  It was just my parents, Paolo and me at that time.  Together, we survived the savage land of Princeton University, where my dad was finishing up his post-doc.  For a five-year old, it was a world of stone bricks covered with ivy, a dark, tree-lined river behind the on-campus housing where we stayed, and a sinister new language, English.  Paolo was two and looked often to his older sister to slay dragons–at least those in the schoolyard–in this new world.  Autumn afternoons, he would tremble as shouts echoed like skipping stones across the river.  ”Row! Row!  Row!”  came from the longboats that passed by.  Paolo would toddle over to me to hide behind my legs.  Everything was foreign–from dad’s nigerian friend, Moses, who carried me  often on his shoulders to the first blanket of snow.  I missed home.

Nothing seemed right.  I wanted the narrow passage of Mapagkumbaba Street in UP village, just outside the university where my parents went to school.  I longed for the din of tricycles ferrying passengers at 4 am that often made me leap from my bed to burrow between my parents.  I wanted to sit on the floor by mom, whenever she was making me a new dress on the old clunker of her Singer sewing machine.  I wanted my yaya, especially during bath time, when she would take a gallon plastic container, dip into a pail, and douse me with a large splash of water.  I missed the constant  motion–the influx of relatives, of people I thought were relatives because everyone was either a tita or tito (aunt or uncle)–the laughter from gossip being exchanged over mahjongg tiles being shuffled and money being lost or won at 4 am.  I even missed sitting at the dining table at 10pm, sulking and sleepy because my parents had said I couldn’t leave until I finished my meal.   I was a picky eater and bony then–though it doesn’t show at all now.  But what I missed most of all living in the haunted wilds of Princeton as a five-year old dragon slayer was Mama Ching and her chicken adobo and a big bowl of rice.

Rice, rice, baby

We spent a year in Princeton, and then moved to Washington DC for another year.  Like any child, I was resilient to change.  I developed a taste for a bowl of cereal, rather than fried rice, egg and fried Spam, for breakfast.  I drank fresh milk, rather than the powdered version, three times a day.  Apples and oranges replaced mangoes, rambutans, lanzones and other tropical fruits.  English flowed fluently from my tongue, as Tagalog vanished.

While we eased into living in America, there were certain things that would not be replaced or edged out.  These were the  fundamentals: family, hard work, education and rice.  At dinner, the four of us would gather at the table.  We would pass around a steaming bowl of rice–the staple of any Filipino household.  Whatever dish was served–from steaming soups of beef with oregano to dried, salty fish–one always ate it with rice.   Plain and simple.  Unsalted and unadorned.

Like rice, family would always be at my very core.  It is the common thread throughout my life, through every decision I have ever made and every challenge I have faced with strength–from the family that raised me to the family my husband and I are raising.

The water buffalo at the window

We moved back to the Philippines when I was in the second grade.  We moved to Purok Aguinaldo, a housing community on the outskirts of the University of the Philippines, back in Quezon City.  It was a newer development with only a dozen or so houses.  Banyan trees, bougainvillas, and bushes of suntan flowers were ubiquitous.  Our home–a ranch-style duplex–was situated by a wide expanse of rice fields.  Only a thin fence separated the two.  My bedroom, which I shared with Paolo, the nanny and any visiting relative, faced the rice fields.  I often sat on my bed watching the world outside only to lock eyes with those of water buffalo chewing grass by the chain-link fence.

I would think of that buffalo by my window through the next four years that we lived in the Philippines and well into the decades back in the United States.  Sometimes I wondered if he ever escaped or did he spend the remainder of his life, enslaved by the yoke and the needs of the masses for whom rice is a basic need.  And then sometimes my thoughts would enter the weird or the macabre–even as a young girl–and ponder if the milk that became the white cheese I loved to eat with the hot pan de sal (morning bun) was from my buffalo or if my buffalo became part of some roadstand bulalo (bone marrow soup).  I would shudder at the course my thoughts took.

As I grew older, the buffalo became a symbol–creature that worked hard to put rice in bowls.  It became the symbol for how I wanted to live my life.  My parents and the people that surrounded me and my brothers had set examples.  And now I, and my husband, am setting one for my child, my 28 month old Sebastian.

Borne to the USA

The second time we moved back to the United States–to the Washington DC area–was heartbreaking.  It was 1985, and I was in the sixth grade.  Politically, things were getting worse in the Philippines.  Teachers went on several strikes, leaving students to meander through empty classrooms and play patintero (Filipino hopscotch) in the hallways.  These were the days, I would take a horde of friends back to my home for lunch, often surprising my mother, who without flinching would run to get us buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken…luxury for those that drink powdered milk and eat Spam.  And then sometimes, I would go home alone, only to find everyone working.  It would be in between meals, when everything had been eaten and nothing was yet prepared for dinner.

I was 10 when I learned to cook rice.  I made enough just for me, since the caldera, or pot, was too heavy to carry from the sink to the burner.  While the rice boiled away, I beat a couple of eggs for a quick omelette, I fried on the stove top, which was too high for me to reach.  I made a meal standing on a stool.  When it was all done, I carried my plate of rice and eggs to the dining table.  At our home, we always had a small bowl of vinegar with soy sauce that we used to flavor the rice.  So I made myself the usual condiment and added a single sili, or chili pepper, which I crushed in the bowl.  No one ever knew I had made a meal for myself, sat by myself, ate by myself and the put everything away by myself.  And I had done so for nearly a year.

So although it was difficult to leave home, friends, and family a second time around, I was better prepared for life ahead of me.  I could take care of myself and help out my family.  In 1986, the year after we arrived in the United States, my youngest brother Niccolo was born, and then a few months later we owned a house, where we lived for nearly twenty years.  If it had not been for my family and for the fundamentals that they drilled in us, I think I would have suffered not only culture shock but also the angst that came with being an “American” teenager.  When I was sixteen, during one dinner, over a big bowl of rice and fish cooked in vinegar, ginger, and garlic, my parents decided against me going on a date with a friend from school.

“We really don’t want you dating until college, ok?”  my mom said.

I looked at my dad for confirmation.

“Yes, Li,” he said in between slurps.  ”Just concentrate first on school ok?”

I shrugged my shoulders and never debated the issue.  Ever.  My first boyfriend was in college.

Buffalo or Eagle?

I married the buffalo at the window.  My husband, Skerdi, would argue at the comparison.  He is Albanian, and there are no buffalos in his country, there on the rocky Adriatic coast.  He wishes he were likened to an eagle, the symbol of his country.  In many respects, he is an eagle.  He looks after his family while soaring far above the treelines on mountaintops.  But, I’ve known him for over 11 years, and in all that time, he has always been my buffalo watching me through the window.  He works hard–even with a 9-to-5 job during the week–he waits tables on the weekends.  Why?  To earn enough money to make life a little easier for his parents, to buy tickets to football, or soccer, matches without dipping into any savings, and to contribute more towards a better future for his son.

My husband is a quiet man.  I often catch him watching me.  Whether we’re at a party or at home watching movies, he sits in silence and watches.  His other self is a history of a man that has lived a life and in a culture so different from mine.  Like his people, he is serious, intense and extremely frank.  And because of the damages arisen from the economic and political failures of his country, he is calloused–roughened by the friction of time and hard work.  He has been to the Philippines only once, and he has seen me through my people.  We are different.  Filipinos embrace humor, gregariousness, and affection even while we suffer.

Breaking Bread

While rice is usually served at most Filipino meals, bread is the main staple for Albanians.  For less than a dollar, a large crusty loaf of bread is placed at the table for breakfast.  Large chunks are broken off and spread with creamy butter.  This is breakfast.  In the six times I’ve been to Albania, it is the best welcome from sleep.  I ate my fresh baked bread with several cups of mountain chamomile tea.  At lunch and at dinner, the same loaf is divided among the family members.  It is dipped in the stews and used to sop up every droplet of olive oil and jus.  When my in-laws are in Albania, they prefer to have a light supper.  The eat bread with a bowl of yogurt that my mother-in-law prepares at the beginning of the week.  Olive oil and salt are simple adornments to the thick creamy yogurt.

Like the condiment of soy sauce and vinegar, my husband must have feta cheese at every meal.  He will sit down before everyone else, before dishes are served, to break off a small chunk of bread and spear a cube of feta.  It is what grounds him.  Like my family, these staples of bread and feta represent the core values that are similar to mine–family, hard work, education.

Bread and Rice: Staples of a Blended Family

Skerdi and I have been together for over a decade, but we’ve been married for almost 5 years.  Our anniversary is on 10-10-10.  We have one son, Sebastian–the only grandson so far on both sides of the family.  My in-laws live with us in our small 2 bedroom condominium in Oakton, Virginia, for 10 months out of a year.  They spend 6 months back in Albania to be with their other son and his wife.

We are a blended family.

In the United States, the concept of blended family refers to marriages in which children from previous relationships are blended together.  Ours is a blending of cultures–the Albanian and the Filipino–and of expectations and values–traditional and modern.  How does one raise a son in this type of home, where the cultures are so different fundamentally but similar in fundamentals?

That is the question I wanted to ask initially when I started with this blogspot.  I wanted it to be a reflection of  two cultures.  As I started writing down ideas for future stories, my goal evolved.  Yes, I wanted to chronicle life and its mundaness–and all its idiosyncracies, challenges and hilarity–in our blended family.   But I also wanted to focus on our individual stories, our passion and personal challenges.

This past May, Skerdi and I drew up our wills.  It was a sobering moment–thinking judiciously about what will happen to Sebastian.  He is our heir–to our savings, our benefits and our home.  But he is also the heir to our collective consciousness and histories.  But he is too young to retain anything long-term.  We often wonder as we stare at his sleeping form in between us in bed:  Would he remember our mealtimes?  Would he remembers his precociousness?  Would he remember us?

This blogspot is dedicated to Sebastian.  It is a legacy of stories that will allow him to learn about his parents.

My first three posts were about me and my passion for food and rediscovery of my love for writing.  Two and a half years ago, before Sebastian was born, I took a series of creative writing courses.  It has been a lifelong dream to write a book.  At the end of those courses, I was unhappy with all that I had written–even if I had received positive reviews for most of them.  I did not have a voice.  I was merely emulating authors, like Tolstoy or Bronte or Twain.  I thought that if I wrote like them and shaped my words and forced my lines into some semblance of poetic prose, then I was ready to be a “writer.”  But as I read my pieces, I realized none of them reflected me.  They were hollow.

This summer, while watching the World Cup with my husband, in-laws and Sebastian, my voice emerged in the oddest of ways.  I helped organize a bracket for the Cup–a pool in which anyone could participate.  There were 32 members and $320 in the pot.  Either one of my two co-organizers or I wrote a daily email “blog” related to the day’s football matches.  The other two were leagues better at writing about football–its history, players, and statistics.  What could I write about?  My family and their obsession with the sport.

I’m not Kafka or Chaucer.  I’m just me; all I can do is write about what I know and what I love.  And I write how I love: unapologetic, unconditional, and unfettered–and sometimes troublesome.  My voice speaks of love.  So, I hope, will my writing.

I was wrong.

At every meal we have a bowl of rice at one end of the table and a large stack of toasted bread at the other.  A good loaf of bread is four times more expensive here than in Albania.  Instead, we toast sandwich bread–Pepperidge Farm’s Sourdough–still pretty good and not as expensive.  In the middle of the table, we place a bowl of soy sauce with rice vinegar and a small plate of cubes of feta cheese and sometimes olives.  One night, I made chicken adobo–Mama Ching’s recipe.  As I made it, I thought about my friend Tita Rica, who had told me once that her mom makes adobo without soy sauce.  I thought about Chef Romy Dorotan’s much-acclaimed chicken adobo from his previous restaurant Cendrillon in Soho–it had coconut milk.  Paolo’s addition of cumin and coriander still seemed too exotic for such a humble dish.

That evening, my husband ate his adobo and sopped up the sauce with his bread.  My father-in-law, on the other hand, prefered the plain, white jasmine rice.  In Albania, rice is either in the form of a stew or a pilaf.  But every night here at home, he spoons the rice onto his plate and then drizzles the soy  sauce mixture over top.  My mother in law had both a slice of bread and a small scoop of rice.  She ladled some meat and adobo sauce onto her plate.  She asked Skerdi to pass her the feta cheese, which she crumbled on top of the chicken.  She smiled at me; my face was scrunched in suspicion.

I thought back to Paolo and looked at Sebastian who was waiting to dig into his bowl.  The past, the present and future at one table–and in one dish.  II followed my mother-in-law’s example.  The blend of feta and chicken adobo was surprising: saltier, for sure, but also creamier and richer.  It was good.

I was wrong.

I owe my brother an apology.  He has taught me an important lesson in raising a child in a blended family: Consider all ideas, even the unexpected.