Christmas Letter

Dear Friends:

Jolico

As you may know old friend Jolico and wife Chiqui are currently boarding with Nene at her house in Mariposa. He has more hospital tests, and needs a base at the inn until the doctors are done with him, sometime near the New Year. It has been a full year since he was first stricken. I imagine Chiqui is straining to produce a child at this time, a miraculous child, that may tide them – and us – through the trying season.

I wish I could read Jolico’s young poems again, in a well edited, annotated volume, if only to justify my enduring admiration and affection, and the lingering awe I feel for the sorry son-of-a bitch. I have no idea if anyone alive remembers the good work he did while he was able. The poems of course, but also how he stationed himself a sentry, snarling and snapping his teeth at the phoney and pretentious, when they did not happen to be friends or donors.  There is a culture commissar  here, someone paid public money to administer our “culture”, who cynically reissued NJ’s thesis “The Heritage of Smallness” as his own. This is the sort of person Jolico of old would have merrily urinated on.


Yes, sometimes find myself quite willing to finance the printing of  Jolico’s book, even if illness and age have not made him less irascible and difficult. I have not talked to him about this of course,  but I’m sure he will say Ibigay mo na lang sa akin atik.

Men-At-Arms

 

Myself I continue with rigorous exercises recommended to prolong health and sanity. Son Diego gave me an unregistered motorcycle in need of repairs for a Christmas gift. I ride slowly and tentatively, but may grow in confidence again: I still have my motorcycle driver’s license. Meanwhile I am planning to outfit one of my Toyota 4-wheelers with a Thule carrier to transport my mountain bikes to the boondocks, though I am not much of a bicycle rider anymore either.

  I won the Super Senior Championship at the Benefactor’s Cup in Camp Crame last November. And I did rather well at the annual Bagong Diwa LRU Xmas Fellowship Shoot last Saturday. Aside from individual matches there was a CQB (Close Quarter Battle) event,  a 3-gun – pistol, rifle, shotgun- eight-member team assault exercise among the top SWAT teams in NCR. I specify “member” instead of “man” as I was pleasantly surprised by the presence of so many  young policewomen there, some of them absolute beauties, earnest in their fighting skills. Some of them were even designated team snipers!

We were allowed to field our own special team, though only six men strong: myself, old friend Joe Modequillo, Mark Enriquez, Rico Benitez, Aleman and Item, the last four being policemen in active duty. It was Item, nicknamed Black, who had that Luneta hostage-taker in his cross-hairs, but was ordered to stand down.

I used my Para-Ordnance 18-rounder in .40 S&W caliber in tactical gear,  and my Colt M4 rifle given to me by friend Sam Tucay, but extensively modified and accessorized, including the addition of the superb EO Tech optics, another gift from Diego, currently US Army issue in Afghanistan. In the enclosed photo we are wearing the Light Reaction Unit (LRU) commemorative cap, with its Servare Vitas logo.

The CQB began with the long-distance rifle sniper stage, then a 50-meter uphill run carrying all equipment, down into barricade positions firing from prone, kneeling and standing, then a pistol charge, a transition to shotguns, and finished with a wounded man rescue.  I had cuts, bruises, bleeding wounds that needed medical attention, a predicament for an old diabetic. Our team came in a close third in a field of 10 teams. I was High Individual Rifle for the second year consecutive year, and No. 6 individual pistol. Not bad for a person going on 67 competing against the Killer Elite in their 20s and 30s! As friend Sonny Yniguez could not attend, we did not have video coverage, just a few snapshots.

Range talk was about the day’s news: that the confessed plunderer Gen. Garcia was free, and that the Army was court-martialing our friend, town-and province-mate Admiral Felix Angue, who counted so many admirers among the shocked officers and men of  the Special Operations fraternity there gathered. After all, Felix founded and trained the Navy SWOG, personally led them against smugglers, Abu Sayaffs, and the Chinese naval intel camouflaged as fishermen in the Palawan Sea. Felix is one of the armed forces most decorated combat officers. He is from Maragondon, Cavite and continues to live poorly and decently in Project 4, in half-a-house as we did when we were young. Now, the military establishment with no accomplishments threatens him with musketry!  As friend King Nocom advises, send your children abroad.  I wish I could.

Retreat

 

We are having our place in Calatagan, photo enclosed, slightly fixed;  it has become quite shabby that only lawyer son Bubu and his golfing buddies and clients, who play at the country club, go there regularly. Pang lalaki na laang! as Batangueños say. Sonny Yniguez and I drive down every few months, and were joined there by friend Dennis Filart a few weeks ago. These two painters and art directors suggested the improvements. 

We are having the picture window enlarged and the woods below the window slightly trimmed for a grand view of the far mountains where in times past we had taken venison for feasting. The repair work is being done by friend Nalding Caunan, raconteur and former chief-of-police of Calatagan, who owns a nice, rough seaside restaurant stocked with exotic seafood and, while it lasted, free wine. The woods are full of monkeys and birds. My firing range is in nearby Tuy town, where Andy Afable’s father hailed from – rundown, where the range boys start smoke fires to drive away the clouds of mosquitoes in the daytime.

Sonny and Dennis are enthusiastic about having a reunion of old friends and office mates in Calatagan when the place is done.  The Ford Group. The Elvins and The Pasta Prontos. The San Miguel Beer Group. The Chin Wu. The Enrile Splendidos. Ireland Bros and the Colet-Orbos Group. We will try to bag deer, but have already contracted my caretaker for goat for caldereta. We three are driven delirious by the names and the memories of all those lovely, lovely girls we used to know!  When we were young we had nothing, but those lovely girls did not seem to care.

 Now we have hideouts, retreats, secret places, wine cellars, professional musicians on command, swimming pools, seasides, trucks and boats. But the girls are not there anymore! Dennis and Sonny are on Facebook and assure me it is happier to remember them as they were than to see them again in person, or even in photographs posted in the social networks. In revenge Dennis posted a photo of us tree old fellows buck naked by the Calatagan pool and I am enclosing the photo, in case you missed it. This in memory of another picture taken many decades ago in the sea off Corregidor where dear friends Lorrie and Chuchi, who did not notice us remove our trunks, beam sweetly at the camera amidst our naked butts!     

Indo-European

I just finished Martin L. West’s Indo-European Poetry and Myth from Oxford Press, a long read but quite enjoyable. His effort to credibly speculate on the nature of a dead culture and language with no physical artifacts seems to me somewhat like reconstituting unseen grandparents by watching children at play in the nursery.

Here is a more technical, specialized treatment of certain elements of  The Golden Bough and perhaps even The White Goddess. But where Frazier was obsessively inclusive, glad to be in league with the “universals” as Miss Dadufalza called them, West’s thesis is exclusive, and made me conscious of the sizeable distance between us and the Indo-European cultures of my poor education.

I imagine an English person of some training can actually dimly understand spoken Homeric Greek, the language of the Viking sagas, the Mahabharata, the Mabinogion, the whole kit-and-caboodle. In the same way that a beer salesman can understand, and more, our languages across the archipelago. I have not read Pardo de Tavera’s  article on Sanskrit and Tagalog and would appreciate to be enlightened, but if he actually believed, as Paterno did, that we were somehow related to the royal Aryans, that would be another absurdity to merit a salute from Jolico’s young bladder.

To compliment the book, I am re-reading Graves The Anger of Achilles with its splendid introduction that anticipated (inspired?) West. As a companion piece I am reading Zachary Mason’s  first novel The Lost Books of the Odyssey, and will soon form an opinion.

Merry Christmas

I also wish I could listen to friend WillyBog read To Juan at the Winter’s Solstice as he did for that Channel 13 TV Christmas show, maybe half-a-century ago. I imagine Pito Bosch nodding as he listened, and Jolico and his friend Tariq.

                   Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,

                   Do not forget what flowers

                  The great boar trampled down in ivy time,

                  Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,

                  Her sea-grey eyes were wild

                  But nothing promised that is not performed.

                                                                                                                           Sincerely, Erwin