The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
A kind of inaccuracy in how we respond to “where do you live?” strikes me just now—an address limits the sense of life we carry, which defines us, yet may never be known even to us.
An astrophysicist I caught recently on CBC Radio-Canada’s Television channel in a short documentary proffered a truer address, with his arms raised as if spanning it, first, the universe, which he then funneled down past the spheres, the Milky Way and, finally, Earth, further diminishing into a dot that locates his home in Kitsilano, deeper southwest from us.
Yet, while home somehow hints at permanence, in its core lies its antonym. Ruled by time and seasons, growth and movement, like every Filipino I have met here in Vancouver, it seems most of us have been born to leave home literally, and later pine to return.
Are we somehow reflections of homing birds, like the swallows of Capistrano, or the terns and geese of North America? Or closer to home, do we return where we come from, like the salmon of British Columbia that, when matured, swims back to the river where it had been spawned?
But unlike birds and fishes, home, for me, has ceased to be a place. This sense of being alien, which in a way has become a reality, could have started to deepen like a whorl in my heart since nine years ago, when I unloaded six decades of my life to live in Canada; I couldn’t imagine going back to the Philippines then.
Yet, I did, unplanned. My first homecoming in December 2012 proved ideal, though deeply sad. Like a tide surge, my cousin’s death, Ceferino “Nonoy” M. Acosta III, left no space for me to waver about a flight and waffle about pasalubong.
Wrapped up in my emotions, the smog that swarmed the path of United Airlines on its descent to the Naia, failed to daunt me. Nor did the snarl in Baclaran, being a Wednesday, through Roxas Boulevard, unnerve me.
The landscape felt shrunken and tighter with buildings now unfamiliar to me, and a crowd seemingly thrice multiplied. Yet, as the SUV that fetched me coughed through clogged streets, it had seemed normal.
I couldn’t guess how I would feel arriving at Paz Memorial Homes; but with my first step into the chapel where Nonoy lay, I felt like I’ve been in it the day before— how many times have I bristled in the arctic air conditioning during the wake of relatives and friends?
My uncle and aunt soon swept me in their grieving arms and we wept, sobbing words for the smiling Nonoy, a scene I have watched with other relatives countless of times.
When I turned to the faces riveted on us, there were my other uncles, aunts, cousins, nieces, nephews, relatives, and former neighbors sniveling with us. While most like me bore marks of time’s subtle scratches, each one who I knew through the eyes— that space impermeable to time—locked in glee, theirs and my unchanged self.
So, like a homing bird and the salmon, I had managed, indeed, with a tracker—so precise scientists remain baffled by it— to land in or swim back to the exact spot called home. Yet, unlike them, it’s not a spot I arrived at, but only akin to it that I carry around unseen. Could we be actually cousins of the turtle then?
But really more than the turtle, though we do feel we carry it, the true home for which we pine, as the astrophysicist stated, must be the universe—or why do we endlessly reshape, change, or leave our physical home?
Still, not even the universe proves to be our true address, for me, but beyond it, as our Catholic faith assures us—a home that permeates and bears, instead, our invisible and restless selves.