A Night with the Team

Their day was set aside for shoots of some swell sites and places in the city and nearby towns that can be featured in lifestyleBohol. Come along, Sonya (my chosen nickname with the Russian spelling for Sonieta L., the editor) offered. I imagined the team’s energy and my backache and how the twain shall never meet. So I said no.  If it were a group race I would only cause the team’s defeat. We agreed to meet at a snack bar in a local mall at 4 p.m. instead.

Warning me ahead that they’ll make use of the sun for as long as it’s out, they came at 7 p.m. with the sun on their faces. By then there were already five of us, the husband, my kid brother and his wife, oneself, and Michael Ligalig of Bohol Chronicle who was already in deep discussion with the husband about literature and the end of an era of Visayan writing with the up-and-coming demise of Bisaya magazine.

Serendipity had artist Glenn Lumantao join us when I caught him at the mall’s entrance on his way out. Michael had been trying to contact him at our request, to no avail. I was standing near the mall entrance with my kid brother when Glenn suddenly appeared.

Well, it’s not everyday that the husband and I can be in Bohol. If we have to make space now and then between routines in our lives, Bohol is one place to be, and the time was as good as any to personally meet lifestyleBohol’s creative team and their friends.

What a motley group we were, with ages in-between one to 92 whose only common thing was some level of literacy and a not-so-secret affair with the written word. Mitzi I. is in Manila for her bar review while Christopher R. is on leave, Sonya volunteers. Thus did we meet her, Jasper C., Ryan M. and their latest member, Vida T.

What does one talk about with a young group, admittedly a generation away? Fortunately much, from answering their questions to asking our own questions, and jokes a-plenty. Hopefully there wasn’t the been-there-done-that look in our eyes. It wasn’t for us to take the stance of teachers, much less of Shaolin masters. We just wanted to meet them, get in touch with relatively youthful minds molding careers who like what they’re doing, which matters most.

Was it fun. Jasper said I left Bohol when he wasn’t born yet! Who knows I may have been a baby by then, and demonstrated with my hands the approximate size of a tarsier. Jasper, bless him, is a talker as Ryan is the opposite. I surmised there was much more to the two girls apart from the benevolent leader that is Sonya and the social moderation that is Vida. Oh, to be young and foolish, as the husband and I are, ahem, not-so-young and just as foolish.

They call me A.M.B., as in ‘We all went for a shoot as a group and prayed that we won’t be hit by lightning or there will only be A.M.B. left for lifestyleBohol.’ The husband is called, well, ‘the husband’ or ‘Sir Butch,’ depending on who’s saying it.

The way things were, the night was worth extending. We transferred to a coffeehouse to talk some more.  By midnight the Team called it a day, or rather, a night.  They still have to do some layout work, they said. That left Michael, Glenn and us to see the coffeehouse close in the wee hours of the morning.

The hours of coffee and beer must have wrought their own kind of magic.  Having become a seemingly embarrassed listener by then, I noted that the three males’ talk had turned to love. This time the husband was the Shaolin master. I could not even deign to be half The Bride in the league of Uma Thurman. It was plain male talk.

The enemy of love is friendship, the husband declared. Do not wait for friendship to develop or wait to know the girl thoroughly. The true lover does not allow the magic of passion to dissipate. When you see someone shimmering by the light of a lamppost… The two bachelors listened intently while I imagined, ugh, a hooker? The swains right there and then swore to rectify their errors. Ahhh, on top of being a Shaolin master, the husband can be a real drunken master too.

By 3 a.m. I was no longer up to going home to my sister’s who has 12 dogs ready to bark in chorus to awaken the neighborhood. Michael, who was going to Bohol Chronicle anyway to write the day’s news, graciously offered his apartment to us, which thrilled Glenn. That was the funny part. We felt like a young couple with nowhere to go until a friend puts us up for the night.

When sleep has passed its demand and one gets lightheaded, its mirror is tiredness. Age, indeed, is inevitable, perhaps not in attitude but in the aching bones.  And when bones ache, so does one’s head.  And one’s psyche. Now it can be told. I’m sad, I said to the husband. Why, he asked. I shimmer no more. I caught his sigh of exasperation.  Because there is no lamppost! I said. The sigh turned into laughter.  Our sense of humor, at least, is still intact.

(2005)