Turning around regrets

Or more like retrieving a limb or heart chamber we realize we’ve left behind, which soon metamorphoses into a bunch of regrets, long after we’ve settled into our seats on a flight to another country, where with bursts of Facebook happy-face emoticons, for millennial and youngish septuagenarians, that is, we would begin a new life. 

Amid balancing that life through the shifting seasons—the realities of which prove more tedious than romantic, as most have thought—these parts of ourselves, singly or all, in their varied mutations would creep in surreptitiously, to my mind, like a leak on the wall or ceiling after the storm, when such appear unbidden.

Quite ridiculous in simplicity, it’s a clay pot (“banga”) for Lolit, only which, to her, she could cook perfect “pinakbet” that rankled her with regret one morning at the bus stop; why didn’t she pack it instead of clothes, which because of their polyester thinness, hence, unfit for Vancouver weather, she ended up sending back home on a Balikbayan box, anyway?

She seemed so distraught, which had prompted me to ask why; I feared her answer would be worrisome news about her ward of decades, the sister of a former ambassador, who had hired her as caregiver. Apparently, her Ate Nena had of late craved for the Ilocano veggie eggplant with tomato stew, which on a Tefal pot she would spit out, “masama ang lasa,” not even after Lolit added more bits of her own “chicharon,” which her lady loved.

Swapping more woes, quite a binder among Filipinos ever pining for home, I veered a bit as we neared our stop—she, to Chinatown to get some “mustasa” leaves for “ginataang” tilapia, me, to the library—and turned back to her “banga” problem. This idea just then sparked in me: “Why not try steaming your ‘pakbet’ in one of those covered ceramic bowls that the Chinese use to serve hot soup?” Lolit thanked me with much cheer weeks later, even offering some, when Ate Nena would want it again.

What’s missed nearly often causes mild despair, indeed, like Min for her sewing machine. She would bemoan how meaningless her chores in her daughter’s house, which includes catering to her grandchildren’s needs, had been of late. Like most, who uproot and pack away a lifetime—as a “custorera” in Dasmariñas, Cavite, for her—and try to birth again in an alien, even cold, country, that is Canada, I had sensed a deepening vacuum that none of her prowling to find anything that might soon engage her, has filled.

On her last visit with us, Min gifted my sister and me with knitted toques and scarves—she had just left a knitting group that her daughter urged her to join. “Nakakasawa,” she had exclaimed, soon musing loudly about the many bridal and “zagala” gowns she had created, stories that, for me, grew more and more poignant while her eyes sparkled through mist, as I realized none of it could be retrieved, not even with a sewing machine.

At Fabricland in Cambie, a few months later, we bumped into each other in the drapes and upholstery section, where I, with a friend, shopped for a change of our drapes—Min had found work in a home-furnishing shop. She has been “dressing up” homes since, and getting orders on the side for her lacey valances, quite a change, she had said but at least “para akong nabuhay uli” with the whirr of sewing machines.

Neither Lolit nor Min associates her regrets with nightmares, which I do till now. In my rush, given only three months to clear out not really our apartment but a life lived, I couldn’t jam moments encased in every piece of furniture, glass and china, wall frames, stacks of books, frayed documents, old letters, and linens and, oh, so much—the seeming magnitude of which one realizes only at such end point, into a UPS box sent to myself and two suitcases.

In my early Vancouver years, like Min, a wailing dove would track my steps, as when my mother’s collection of our firsts as babies sparked to mind, and blanked out whether or not I packed it. But especially on early evenings when piano notes would waft through the settling-down sky, fill the courtyard and rise to our door, regret would wrap me, missing my mother’s piano, which I gave away to a friend, whose house the religious frequented; I had hoped, when inclined to play on it, their music would be prayers for her.

Sifting through one of the suitcases I arrived with as immigrant, one day, I found the piano book, my first, with my name in my mother’s handwriting and the date, my 12th birthday. It took me weeks before I knocked on Jean’s door, and offered my mother’s gift. She thanked me again much later, saying how helpful the pencil marks of my teacher for Naia.

Last summer, the first phrases of Bohm’s “The Fountain,” Mama’s favorite piece, which I never got to perfect, started tinkling from Naia’s keys.