Summers of our lives

PINOY KASI


Summers of our lives
By Michael Tan
Inquirer

Last updated 00:47am (Mla time) 03/28/2007

“Strawberry ... it all started out that summer in Cebu when Mr. Cuna (a family friend) realized I had never taken a soda, so he ordered a strawberry soda for me. It tasted like heaven and that was it, strawberry has always been special for me,” my sister said.

She and I were having dessert and I was getting my high on vanilla ice cream, which I, too, traced back to one summer, when I had to have my tonsils removed. Before the operation, I was forbidden from taking any ice cream, on the notion (unscientific it turns out) that it would aggravate my frequent bouts with tonsillitis. So, after the tonsillectomy, I got as a kind of ultimate reward the forbidden food of the gods: ice cream, vanilla ice cream, and really, I believe somewhere in our brains there’s a place for imprinting food memories -- vanilla for me, strawberry for my sister.

Blooms

Maybe in our brains, Filipino brains, we have a special storage area for summer memories. Think back now and I’m sure you can come up with a long list of events, places, faces, scents and tastes that you associate with some summer.

In temperate countries, the four seasons become evocative metaphors for life: spring with the wonders of new life, summer with the zest of youth, autumn with mellowing midlife and winter with the solitude and peace of old age.

What happens then in the Philippines, where we are told we only have the wet and dry seasons or, as Westerners mutter, tongue-in-cheek, no, the two seasons are hot and very hot?

Actually, we have more than two seasons. With age, you learn to tell the seasons, as you feel subtle but discernable changes in the colors of leaves, in the way they fall (yes, like autumn!), in the way the breeze stands still, or wafts in, or turns into "habagat," the monsoon. Even the rains vary in intensity, even in their smell, with the different seasons.

But yes, there is this distinct hot season we label tag-init. It’s not just a time of heat but of flowers and fiestas and, every few years, elections. Lush bougainvillea colors ambush us now at every corner, providing relief from our cities’ bleak and gray landscape. Over at University of the Philippines, Diliman, the gardeners have planted sunflowers and we expect them right in time for graduation in April. In the meantime, there’s enough of a spectacle with many of the trees on campus coming into bloom. The best, of course, is yet to come, perhaps in May, when the campus turns crimson with the fire trees.

Check your gardens and you’ll find wild lilies that have been lying dormant much of the year to store energy in underground bulbs until the summer heat convinces them to shoot out and unfurl their flowers.

And let’s not forget the orchids. My favorite is the "sanggumay," with the way its vines just hang there through most of the year – "simple lang" [it's simple], as we say in Filipino -- patiently waiting till summer comes along and then suddenly it’s like someone painted your garden while you were asleep.

Firsts

But the flowers of May (and April and March) only provide a backdrop to a highlight of summer: graduation exercises or, for preschool, moving up ceremonies. The preferred term is, of course, commencement exercises, with every other graduation speaker reminding the students this is not a time when we end school but commence, begin, life.

And our summers? Perhaps they don’t really end or begin anything. Summers connect, provide continuity for life. It’s a break before new graduates go to work. It’s a break, too, for those in schools, with summer workshops and camps offering an amazing variety of activities: dancing, painting, writing, swimming, drama -- why, one Buddhist temple in San Juan even offers meditation for children.

Summer’s an opportunity for travel, one of the most educational experiences one can have, whether learning about nature ... or strawberry sodas.

Summer’s a time for firsts. Maybe because more people are around at home, we think we’ve caught the baby’s first words, first steps.

Summer’s a time of adventure, of new experiences, of daring. Summer’s when boys become men, and I mean circumcision although in times past, there may have been other more risqué rites of passage.

Summer’s a time for first love (OK, and second and third) or of reviving first love. Oh, but don’t we ever learn? For some, summer, too, can be a time for heartbreak, an end to innocence, but never mind, all that, too, is part of life.

Intersecting

In midlife, summers become all the more important for reunions, for lives to intersect. My sister was here visiting from Canada. It was a time for her to look up relatives and friends and classmates, although I did notice that she didn’t have that many people her own age to meet up with because so many people of our generation have joined the Filipino diaspora.

“This is my sister,” I told other parents at my daughter Yna’s moving-up ceremony, “and she just flew in from Canada,” making it sound like she did just for Yna. But she was here for more. Although my sister’s younger, she’s now coping with an empty nest, her two children now living away from home because of school. So here she was to look into my own rather late parenting. We’d talk while I changed diapers, prepared milk, put away the toys, and she’d intervene from time to time, remembering how she handled her own children, including quick lessons on using sign language with children (the people who developed this program really should get a Nobel Peace Prize, considering how it has bridged the communication gap we have with babies).

This morning she came into my room to say goodbye. The baby was feeding but raised one hand to sign “bye-bye.” When she came in to kiss him, he feigned resistance, clearly wanting to use it as an excuse to cuddle up more closely to me.

Our family is not good with goodbyes, so we don’t usually tag along to the airport. I waved back at her, pretending to sign like the baby: “Go, go ... see you next summer.”

After she left, I suddenly remembered a poem she wrote years ago, about her son who never seemed content with all the hugging and snuggling from his mother. I, too, have to plead at times with my son when he wants to be carried: “You’re a big boy now.” But I anticipate, as my sister described in her poem, that someday, I’ll want to hug him and he’ll pull away, maybe even mildly protesting, “I’m a big boy now.”

I’d like to think that when the time comes, I’ll find comfort remembering our summers together, of his furious signing for more ice cream, of lullabies and lizards on the ceiling, of dogs romping in the garden, of the cat coming in at midnight. Actually, we don’t really remember things that happen when we’re very young, but we like to think we do because the best summer stories are those from our parents about what we did as babies and toddlers.

That’s how we all piece together our childhood -- and more. In the end, it isn’t so much whose summer it was, or the accuracy of the details, than the way we recall those many summers together, the summers of our lives.