REMEMBRANCE OF: THINGS, PASTA
(with apologies to Marcel Proust)

1. The great John Cheever said that the parturition of a writer, unlike that of a painter, does not display interesting alliances to his masters. Parturition. From parturient. The only other time I heard of the word parturient was 4 years ago when Angela asked me to edit her short story containing this line by a young girl to her mother, "I am parturient". Upon consultation with the one who knew words, I learned that parturient meant pregnant. The girl was telling her mother, I am pregnant. And so by way of editing I let parturient go, replaced by pregnant, even if I continued to be perplexed as to why a girl will tell her mother, Mommy, mommy I am parturient - unless she wanted to accomplish both of two things: to confess the truth, and to make sure the confession won't be understood. Still and all I have to thank Angela; now I knew what John Cheever meant.
Parturition. Birthing.

2. I am fastidious when it comes to my spaghetti. Time was when I only ate Tropical Hut's, and on occasions, my mother's. There is no more TH within sight and my mom is above my gastronomic well-being, and so I am forced to specially request and instruct for the food I love most: the noodles have to be perfectly al dente, the ground beef should only be sirloin, the sauce must have a hint of sweetness, and, sliced fresh plum tomatoes on top, please.

3. At Borders the other day I was reading The 42nd Parallel (the first part of USA Trilogy) by John Dos Passos and was impressed by the weight and tautness of his preface: "USA is the world's greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, USA is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. USA is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. USA is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly USA is the speech of the people." With those words I was ready to follow his march, ready to sing his anthem, ready to articulate with his clenched fist. But the bookstore's piped in-music butted in and my rigid fist softened like marshmallow. With an invisible baton and an attack of epilepsy I conducted the symphony, leading them to the loftiness of Claude Debussy's Reverie. I had the old lady seated next to me as sole audience, amused, if not totally amazed.

4. Reading at Borders reminded me of reading at NBS while still in the Philippines. There, under the strict eyes of management, you can only go as far as the first page before security pounded in for the freeze, this is the police, or short of that if only to tell you to please, no reading prior to buying, which then gave a full life and meaning to the words of feminist Helene Cixous, "Reading is clandestine, furtive". You may be insistent, persistent, and protest to the obnoxious security you were only checking the copyright, but he won't budge, and with his fiery eyes and dragon breath you are further reminded of Cixous, "Reading is a provocation, a rebellion".

5. An old friend with a Russian name, Luba, once gave me a plateful of teeny-weenie pasta pastita known in this Hemisphere and beyond as "couscous". Couscous really look funny, like enameled rice but each grain is only as big as 1/100th of rice grain, and if my dad, a rice farmer in his younger days at the hinterlands of the Ilocos, were to describe this pasta, he would have uttered no doubt: couscous-balungos.

6. The August edition of the Sojourner Magazine published a most beautiful poem on faith, Baptismo Sum by K. Berkey-Abbott. Read it and applaud, establish faith if you must.