A CHRONICLE OF CHANCE FORETOLD

1. It all began with hope. The day before our trip to San Diego, Borders Bookstore emailed me with a 20% coupon which I took as an excuse to snub my library of unread books. I scoured and scanned tens and tens of books - a necessary act for my one of two requirements in flying, a good book - and stopped only when I got my hands on Don DeLillo's Underworld that was packed with fantastic capsule reviews. I have no idea what the novel is about except that, from the liner notes, it is a weave of stories happening in Cold War America. But the bigger reason why I picked it over the others was the opening line that strangely got to me: "He speaks in your voice, American, and there's a shine in his eye that's halfway hopeful".

2. When Alexander Pope said "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" he was probably referring to a future being that was the most hopeful person I know, my Mother. Which means Pope should have really said Hope springs eternal in "a" human breast - portraying the same grammatical faux pas as when Neil Armstrong made the most famous line in the history of the Outer Space Program. The story goes that when he made those memorable first steps on the moon, the broadcast audio did not capture his sentence correctly. "A small step for man, a giant step for mankind" was, according to reports, supposed to have been really said thus: "A small step for a man, a giant step for mankind.

3. Two hours before our 8:00 am flight to Southern Cal, Moms and I were already seated on chairs closest to the tube. Punctuality has its own way of making things connect. She started reading The Herald while I was finishing my muffin to begin on DeLillo.

4. "Look!", she said, pointing to the Sports Section's baseball schedules. "The (Florida) Marlins are playing in San Francisco. I hope (Marlin's rookie pitcher) VandenHurk does not give a homerun to Barry Bonds". (Short note: a Bond homerun in that game was to give him 755 career homeruns to tie Hank Aaron for one of baseball's most revered records; two homeruns were going to be more historical, and my Mom, while acknowledging the beauty of the prospective feat, could not understand the monetary value attached to a future record-tying, or record-breaking, homerun ball.)

5. Before I got to start with my own reading, Moms told me of another article she read in The New York Times about the bitter rivalry between the LA Dodgers and San Franscisco Giants which goes back when these franchises were based in different burroughs of New York City. She only stopped her 2nd-hand baseball reportage when she sensed I was having too much baseball info for the day and that I must start reading DeLillo. Already.

6. I learned that day that on the context of time, deja vu is never biased. I opened DeLillo's book and started reading the Prologue entitled The Triumph of Death and slowly, surely, there was this tingling sensation creeping up and down the back of my neck like a disconcerted bug whose sole intention in life was to disturb my reading composure. The Prologue is set against the factual backdrop of the World Series' final game in Polo Grounds, NY, on October 3, 1951, between - hold your breath now - the Brooklyn Dodgers and the NY Giants - and it tells the little lives and big lives of some historical guys who watched that game, and all the ramifications that went with the catching of the home-run-championship-deciding ball by a fictional character named Cotter. (In the book's ensuing chapters are a complex web of events that include the attachment of financial value on that home run ball.)

7. Breathe now. Miami to San Diego was a journey of five hours, but it could have been four, it could have been six, and I would not have noticed the difference. I lived by my flight requirements, and as my wish was the airline's command, nothing else mattered that moment as my other requirement for flying: a window seat.

8. There is something about seeing a city from atop while the plane maneuvers to an angle like a roller-coaster's, must be parallax or seeing things differently from different vantage points, and that very moment when the seat-belt light is so "On", the plane galloping like a horse, that a window seat assumes the full value of plane fare. Nothing compares to the literal high of seeing a city's downtown magically get smaller, from the air, unless of course - and I always fantasize this image everytime I fly - you were on a balloon, in which case the high transforms into something absolutely figurative.

9. Baseball people are generally superstitious. And probably so are writers writing about baseball fiction. On the matter of winning/losing the October 3, 1951 pennant, the writer's number 13 kept on cropping up, like the number of letters comprising the names of the pitcher who gave the winning home-run. And on the last page of Chapter 6 of Part I, the narrator Nick Shay (he was the guy who bought the home-run ball for $34,500) says, while referring to the matter of splitting atoms: "The isotope has the mass number two three eight. Add the digits and you get thirteen."

10. I am not superstitious. I was seating on Row 13, Seat F, during that flight but somehow I know that the force upon me, if ever there was one, was of chance that is not synonymous with superstition. I continued with Chapter 7, the last chapter of Part I, and read about the engagingly affluent lifestyle of Nick Shay as he gives his wife a unique gift for her birthday.

"Then we were out over open earth, bone brown and deep in shadow, and we hung in the soft air, balanced in some unbodied lull, with a measure of creation spilling past."

Yes, Virginia tobacco, Nick and wife are riding a larger than life toy hovering above earth in that chapter: they are journeying on a candy-striped, hot-air balloon.

11. "Coffee?", the stewardess asked me in a fashion as boring as airline coffee. "No, thanks", I said and proceeded to ask my Moms if she wanted anything, juice, a bathroom trip, whatever. I could not remember what she said because my attention was being drawn towards the kid on the other end of my row, the window seat opposite mine, as he was videotaping with a digital camcorder whatever it was outside the airplane, if ever he was actually videotaping anything at all. Holding the camcorder, the boy was as stiff as a statue, seemingly awed by some interesting details being pronounced in the sea of clouds from where we were flying above. I went back to my fiction (the book I was reading) only to find this shocking fact (the fact of my discovery as to what the chapter is about) that is as hard as a rock, as hard as the canon that Underworld established in literature. Rock. Boulder huge. Granite hard. Fact.

12. In Chapter 1 of Part 2, a kid was riding in a car and videotaping the other cars randomly, and by stroke of fate, the driver of a car videotaped is shot.

13. A former co-worker once told me that there is a strong (though yet unknown) connectivity in human events and experiences that are happening in deja vu fashion, and that if there was no connection in these experiences, they're simply called deva-ju. All these factual chance encounters between my real life and my real literature, strongly juxtaposed by the essence of time (or timeliness), are all -to me a case of deva-ju. If there is one deja-vu, it is this: Chapter 1, Part 2, of Don DeLillo's Underworld is some narrative I have read before. And this one is driving me crazy because I have not read Underworld, and I have not read any of Don DeLillo's books before, yet I swear again, I have read this whole chapter before.

DIMENSION X

It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, time check 6:30 something, and I was having dinner in front of the tv watching Travel Channel's No Reservation and Tony Bourdain was enjoying his food and company in Sao Paolo, Brazil. They were drinking a vodka-based killer drink saying salud in this wise, Cheers! Life doesn't suck! Which, for the most hardened existentialist, it was easy for Tony to say. He travels, he writes, he eats, he sees Brazilian breasts - and get paid in the process - and so life doesn't suck for him because he is Tony and not some dude probably named, uh, Cody, who was having a salad of baby lettuce in a flood of yucky raspberry vinaigrette.

My salad was floating in raspberry vinaigrette and if life didn't suck, at least my salad did. I bought the bottle of vinaigrette in the neighborhood organic store for $6.75 thinking it was good because I didn't know if raspberry vinaigrette was good - and that was probably my own twisted standard of goodness: if I didn't know it, it must be good.

Turned out it wasn't. There was no hint of raspberry, just oil, and not even virgin olive oil, but more like facial oil in that bottle of squandered opportunity. I thought if I wasted my vinaigrette, I shouldn't be wasting my salad either, and so I drained all green and purple leaves of the last drop of facial oil and searched the ref for a worthier replacement, a worthier complement. I saw mint sauce, the one I use for lamb chops, and in my desperation to get my appetizer going I poured a good pouring on my hapless greens (and purples).

The first helping was kind of funny. I thought I had toothpaste on my salad. But when the sauce settled in, when the fusion of malt and vinegar and mint found their respective niches on my salad plate, I found salad heaven.

On tv, Tony was thinking of something while his host Claudia and her other guests were dancing and prancing about in samba music. But Claudia didn't mind if Tony couldn't dance. She said she likes it so much even if her guests, like Tony, only dream in her house.

Right now I'm dreaming in my apartment. With my great salad and forthcoming entree' of grilled mahi-mahi marinated in honey bourbon sauce, I dreamed that life didn't suck.

Salud!

BIRTHDAY BOUNTY

Sailing
by: Henrik Nordbrandt

After having loved we lie close together
and at the same time with distance between us
like two sailing ships that enjoy so intensely
their own lines in the dark water they divide
that their hulls
are almost splitting from sheer delight
while racing, out in the blue
under sails which the nightwind fills
with flowerscented air and moonlight
- without one of them ever trying
to outsail the other
and without the distance between them
lessening or growing at all.

But there are other nights, where we drift
like two brightly illuminnated luxury liners
lying side by side
with the engines shut off, under a strange constellation
and without a single passenger on board:
On each deck a violin orchestra is playing
in honor of the luminous waves.
And the sea is full of old tired ships
which we have sunk in our attempt to reach each other.

translated from the the Danish by
Henrik Nordbrandt and Alexander Taylor

BYAHENG IRIS

Naalala ko 'tong salita na 'to sa Pinas, byahe!, pag naglalaro ako ng basketbol at meron akong ka-koponan na imbes na si Shin Dong Pa e si Shin Dupang, ibig sabihin e ballhog na parang nadikitan ng glue yung bola pag hawak nya, o kaya e parang kabayong pangkarera na may tabing ang gilid ng mata para walang ibang nakikita kundi paderetso, patungong goal. Tingnan mo nga naman; ang talagang namumukadkad sa larangan ng pagbabyahe e ang mga katagang "pagbibigay" tsaka "masigasig na pagmasid sa kapaligiran", kaya nga siguro naging magkasalungat ang naging hantungan ko nung naglaro ako ng basketball sa Pinas, tsaka nung naging byahista ako sa ibang bansa.

Nitong nakaraang araw bumyahe ako sa Cali (hindi sa Colombia - marami pa akong kape; hindi sa bugan - meron na akong one and only; kundi sa fornia - meron lang pong reunion) para samahan si Mommy dearest sa pakikipag-kornihan sa mga co-teachers nya after 20 or so years of retiring from teaching and not seeing her former cohorts...

Sa San Diego ang reunion ng mga teachers, siguro dahil doon sila naimbak matapos itaas ang magkabilang kamay sa pagtuturo, isapanga e dahil andami sa kanila ang mga waswit o anak e nasa US Navy ng Hapon, kaya ayun, ang reunion e sa isang malaking bahay makalampas lang sa Escondido. Haynako, first time ko sa San Diego, first time ni Mommy sa California, at first time ko magmaneho sa east freakin coast kaya nga nung pinahaharurot ko na yung rented Mustang sa I-15 patungong Escondido, navigator ko si Mommy. Blind leading the blind, ika nga. Ang hawak naming mapa e sinlaki ng lesson plan nya, tas nangangatog nyang tanong nya nung naglalakbay na kami sa interstate, Iho, sigurado ka bang pa-north tayo, sabi ko, Wahaw, patay tayo jan po, malay ko po...

Naalala ko tuloy yung mga entries ni Batjay na kinukwento nya kung gano kasarap magpatakbo ng mabilis sa mga highways ng Cali tas e malakas yung ingg ingg ng stereo nya na tumutugtog ata yung Red Hot Chili Paminta, wahaw, naka-relate ako dun, kasi naman por jos po santo, me bundok sa kanan mo, me Pacific Ocean sa kaliwa mo, pano ka ba naman di gaganahang magpatakbo ng mabilis nyan e nararamdaman mong para kang si James Dean na tinatawag ng Hollywood, Come here boy, be a star, boy!

Masarap yung reunio, nakita ko yung mga guro ko nung grade school, kasama na yung mga kumag na naghagupit ng ruler sa pwet kong maalinsangan, konti lang naman sila, nung kinompronta ko nga sila e di nga nila matandaan na hinagupit nila ako, kaya nga I dropped the subject ikang kasi nga baka naman ako lang ang talagang di makatanda.

Pero yung experience ko sa San Diego ang beyond, di ko makakalmutan. Wento ko na lang sa inyo next.

Ngapala, babati lang ako ng belated hapi hapi kay Toni who turned thirty. Etong alay ko sa yo Mrs. Positivity, ang isa sa mga paborito kong tula mula kay Li-Young Lee na di kaanoano ni Bruce Lee.

IRISES

1.

In the night, in the wind, at the edge of the rain,
I find five irises, and call them lovely.
As if a woman, once, lay by them awhile,
then woke, rose, went, the memory of hair
lingers on their sweet tongues.

I'd like to tear those petals with my teeth.
I'd like to investigate these hairy selves,
their beauty and indifference. They hold
their breath all their lives
and open, open.

2.

We are not lovers, not brother and sister,
though we drift hand in hand through a hall
thrilling and burning as thought and desire
expire, and, over this dream of life,
this life of sleep, we waken dying -
violet becoming blue, growing
black, black - all that
an iris ever prays,
when it prays,
to be.