Friday, February 22, 2008 Yap: Edith, 2 By Januar E. Yap Meanwhile
THE program ends, and around the national artist a growing throng forms into a queue of people either for book signing or photo opportunity. There was the writer Susan Lara, one of the panelists in that same workshop summers ago. I introduced myself, she remembered, and said, "That was a good batch."
It was, of course. The fellows' age differences didn't gape much. There was Lourd Ernest de Veyra, who would later churn out three poetry collections and form the famous Radioactive Sago Project, an irate band that dubs social diatribes. A few years after, we'd attend the Don Carlos Palanca awards night and then head for tapsilog, reminiscent of the Dumaguete days when we'd feast on instant noodles after stuffing our inebriated heads with "metaphors and poetic tension." Recognition for a piece of work doesn't change your appetite that much.
The batch also produced Lorenzo Paran III, Conchitina Cruz, Robert Basilio Jr., Melecio Turao, Lara Saguisag, Carla Pacis, Amado Bajarias. I'd be unfair to the others if I don't mention them, but I'm equally fond of them. Most of the fellows raked in awards and accolades the years that followed. Poetry readings and other workshops usually serve as occasions for reunion, but I was the lone cub from Cebu, and out of the loop.
It has often been said that the Dumaguete workshop scars the young writer for life. It's the scar that comes from the bonding, in which the young writer feels safe and most alive in a circle that talks nothing but poetry and stories. You wouldn't want to go home. It was home.
But Mommy it was and Doc Ed (interchanged with Dad Ed) who were at the center of it all. By tradition, the workshop ends on the day of their wedding anniversary. "I've been looking at the same face every morning, lunch, supper, and I never got tired of it for so many years. God, there must be something," said Mommy Edith in an anniversary speech.
In one of the casual afternoons, one of the former fellows who went loose in the head asks Mommy Edith, "Mommy, what's greener than grass?"
The sane, the sober would just as readily dismiss the poor fellow because he was crazy, outlandish. The rational will throw it off with a snicker. But not so with the poet. Mommy puts her hand on the young man's shoulder and says, in the gentlest way, "My son, a cat's eye."
How fragile the line is that parts madness and poetry. When The Beatles sang "Fool on a Hill", they might as well have alluded to the poet. Oh, but the young mind must be fed, with both madness and method, if only to nourish the future of national literature.
Fragile and juvenile, those were the faces of the workshop fellows in the old photographs. Mommy didn't have a problem with her hearing then. "Ok, Januar, what do you think of the poem," she'd always call me to launch the discussion. But I always gave the crazier thoughts, and she'd burst out with a hearty laugh.
Weeks ago, in that afternoon of her speech at the Marcelo Fernan Press Center, she said, "Can somebody whisper to me what I am supposed to hear?" It broke me into pieces. It might have been easy to take it as metaphor where the old writer wishes to hear it from the young, but that wasn't so. I only saw the old gesture of her passing me, the penniless dreamer years ago, the hundred bucks that assured me a good lunch. Misunderstood at home, I found a parent that one lonely summer.
