Year 2004-2005

Barrio Tale: Genaro
It was a beautiful day again today and I left work a little early to -- do nothing -- I promised myself to avoid running/exercise this week. So I played Big Fish DVD in my player and (no matter) 'how boring' my co-workers described the movie to be, I thought it was fantastic. In fact, I was crying at the end.

It's the perfect movie for me. It is relevant to me as I consider its theme, that is, the very essence of the 'storyteller' applicable to all of us. We tell stories. And we embellish our stories. Like a recipe of our own making, we add, subtract, accentuate, magnify, ignore and select ingredients for the stories we write to produce a perfect meal.

Now here I am, typing on this keyboard to make a new meal, wanting to copy the wisdom of Ed Bloom as he re-creates his Big Fish.

My Big Fish did not appear in the USA, it appeared long long time ago in my barrio down in Lubao. There, I knew I was going to be big because big was just the only way for me to go.

Now that I recall the barrio, I recall beautiful flowers and well manicured lawns, backyards of many a vegetable so fresh and mature, shiny and green. I see chickens and pigs and ducks roaming the backyards. There is an endless cacophony of sounds and voices. All these of course are gone now but I re-create them in my memory.

This memory is the reason why I'd never be lonely in my new country and nationality. Memory. combined with imagination, can, like a hemp rope, be tied around the metallic bar of the brain. With time it acquires the sharpness of chimes, so that, when the wind blows, whether wildly or gently, it creates a sound that triggers the past.

Yes, Big Fish and memory.

I am thinking about the barrio. I imagine myself at young age, walking, looking for a playmate. I am small and poor but clean, my mother never fails to do the family laundry. I'd pump the well for her as she paddles the clothes, twists and squeezes them piece by piece while she whines about how miserable life is in this part of the the world. A chicken would sometimes cross our paths, or sometimes, a pig would get carried away, its snout burrowing the ground toward us and I'd kick it to make it run away.

I am walking in the barrio and now my memory swirls like it has lost the concept of time. Because while I recall my mother doing laundry in the daylight, I also can see the gray night lighted by moon that is moving slowly. And now I lie on a wooden cart, detached from the carabao of Mang Boning, and I smell hay while I watch the stars ans sky and moon.

My friend Genaro is telling me something about the girl he will marry someday.

Oh let me tell you how funny I was when I was a boy of eight. I talked and acted like a matured man. I shook hands with those I met the first time beause I observed this among Mormon missionaries. So did Genaro whom I considered my best friend in school. We clicked because when we talked to each other, we talked like old men.

"I saw the woman of my dreams," he said to me, we were lying on the wooden cart; we were watching the stars and the moon and the movement of clouds.

Genaro descibed to me the woman: She was young and beautiful. She had the longest black hair, the most perfect teeth. She could sing. She could dance. She was sought after by many suitors. She would arrive in her house with much fanfare, with music and wine toasts. She would stare out her window with dreamy eyes, as if looking for the man of her dreams.

And Genaro of course fitted the man of her dreams.

But Genaro could not marry her yet. His mother was dying of cancer.

So he'd come to the house of the woman of his dreams at night. He would wait for her to come out --- from the Blue Moon Bar, the only bar in the barrio where prostitutes stick around.