Isolde Amante

October 13, 2004
Missing Sting, and other things

SEATTLE-How's this for a cliché? Here I am, sleepless in Seattle, my bittersweet homecoming merely hours away. On my last day of a month spent living out of a suitcase, I learn that Sting is in town, for a concert with Annie Lennox.

The two musicians I enjoy most are a mere 40 minutes and a $35 ticket away, but the gig is sold out. They are completely beyond my reach. It takes an hour-long walk in Seattle's rain-soaked streets for my disappointment to ebb away.

Kind reader, my apologies. I've been remiss. It seems that whatever faculty allows me to write likes to take extended days off when I'm on the road, and the only words I can spare are far too private for the public opinion pages. They pour out for postcards and journal entries, but flee at the mere suggestion of deadlines and long-suffering editors back home.

Travel does things to me, you see. I barely sleep, miss my meals and tend to stray from guided tours whenever something more interesting than the usual tourist traps comes my way. On my two stops in Seattle, for instance, St. Helens erupted and Ichiro Suzuki broke an 84-year-old baseball record. But all I wanted was to wander about and try to verify the claim that Seattle has more bookstores per capita than anywhere else in the United States. (It helps to have an internal compass that can spot, without fail, every bookstore within a five-block radius.)

Book lust and tourist greed fill my days. And so, instead of mapping out long, chatty columns for you, I spend my limited downtime searching for pockets of silence and space: a sunlit rock in Central Park, a sculpture garden in Washington D.C., a grassy knoll with a breathtaking view of Chicago.

In these sanctuaries, I go over the events of each day, play back the conversations with friends newly made or found again, and plan the evening or the day ahead.

The political notes I've saved for news dispatches and features. As an outsider's view of the American election process, they are limited, but I hope you find some use for them nevertheless. Americans are dismayed by the increasing hostility that marks the debates of their campaign season. But for someone frustrated by the circus that passes for a Philippine campaign, the discussions (albeit limited) of the issues American voters care most about can be fascinating.

For now, though, all I can offer you is this snippet. (The essayist Pico Iyer was right: the hard part of the journey takes place at the desk.)

It was a Saturday morning, warm by the season's standards, and I was out in the streets of downtown Chicago, looking for Alexander Calder's Flamingo. I had no idea a story was waiting.

There, at the foot of Calder's massive steel sculpture, stood a crowd of rallyists, nearly all of them immigrants. They called for better wages and work, for immigration reforms and better access to schools. Most of all, they called on fellow immigrants to go out and vote on Nov. 2, if they were to have any hope of fitting into this large, diverse heartland they had elected to make their home.

Amid the banners, a lone Philippine flag flew. And it occurred to me then that, while they struggled to put down roots, these faces in the crowd were travelers like I was: grateful for everything a new land had afforded, but also aching for something-a habitation, or a hope-that for now eluded their grasp.

(e-mail: ida@sunstar.com.ph)