Christmas Eve 2009
Today 17 more seconds of daylight are added to the day. We are inching our way towards summer!Many would-be pundits declare New Year's Resolutions futile wish-fullfillment while as many others vouchsafe their effectiveness in guiding the changes we make to our lives. Some of us try to live day to day, neither in the past nor in the future, feeling grateful just for the miracle of being alive to enjoy nowness. Human nature is incontrovertible so I try to dodge its inevitableness by making a deposit of wishes and dreams in my journal or blog. When I shut down my computer, maybe the fiery forces of envy and greed might stay there in digital space, mollified by my confession of hope.
At lunch today I fell into the spell of Central Asia and its history of linking Asia and Europe through the Middle Ages. I've visited my favorite countries in Western Europe and even edged into the former East and Central Europe. I've been thinking I've satisfied my wanderlust until this new curiosity rears its head. Many days I am content to view the many faces of the unvisited earth in the people I see right here in my own backyard. If Central Asia harbored then (and still does today to a lesser extent, maybe) many peoples from different cultures, North America today is such a meeting place. At lunch I watched a Chinese family, the girls dressed in bright red silk blouses, the boys in Western gear speaking flawless American English. At another table a French couple doted on their young daughter. Over by the window a large Mexican family chatted away in mellifluous Spanish. And the food is, I imagine, as good as any you would find on a road trip through China. After all the cooks come from that once-upon-a-time unknowable Middle Kingdom, bringing to me here in Middle America their heady, exotic tastes in chicken feet and pork ears and onion rolls and chive rice-flour pillows.
There is one place and time I think no one yet has brought effectively into the fecund Western imagination. I grew up in the Philippines at the cusp between its colonial past and the technological everywhere present. I grew up when the Spanish heritage of 300 years still clung to our foods and traditions and only an idealized Americanism peppered our lives from parents who unlike the generations before them had fallen thrall to the fifty odd years of benighted American tutelage.
The next generation, my sister's children, knew a different childhood. Their mother cooked for them without the aid of a bevy of helpers so they grew up on spaghetti and inasal nga manok from the neighborhood carinderia, not the rich cuisine at my grandmother's house. Christmas Eve has remained the same but they celebrate it now with different foods. My sister plays Pastoril at dawn masses from memory because the owner of the original music sheets is dead and took the music with her. She transposes the music two notes down so it is accessible to singers of moderate skills. As homage to the past she buys a few ounces of ham for media noche but says it is not as good as the Chinese ham of yore. She and my cousin, Daisy, split the cost of a special-ordered suckling pig lechon.
Cultures fascinate me. How people in different places and times live, how they celebrate life and make meaningful what is ultimately without meaning, the art, music, cuisines, religious rituals and family traditions that result, these have always fascinated me. Maybe I can do something with this interest, a book, a documentary?
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