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Sunday, April 02, 2006
Covington: Hush
By Gary Covington
Looking In
HERE'S a scoop! Some time next week the ice-cream people will realize that one of their pedal-power stop-me-and-buy-one carts has failed to check in.
There'll be a search, a city-wide search, and not long after the missing cart will be found on a remote subdivision, its vendor laying alongside, cruelly bludgeoned with a gallon tub of strawberry ripple.
If the wind is blowing in the right direction I can hear this guy coming as far away as the next subdivision. Every other day, rain or shine, he follows the same route, gradually bing-bonging his way closer and closer to Casa Covington. From my deckchair on the verandah the jingle's chimes -- no way can it be called music -- move from left to right and then right to left, as he traverses the subdivision's parallel streets.
Eventually and without noticeable stops -- the accursed noise being battery powered and not pedal-driven -- the cart turns into my street and bongs along past the house and around the corner where, thanks to a short but steep hill, the cause of the cacophony is forced to dismount and push. Vulnerable.
Next week; the neighbor's karaoke and my quest for a used but serviceable flame-thrower.
Filipinos love noise. Cockerels, auto horns demanding gates to be opened, karaokes, bass boomboxes aboard jeepneys -- trisikads even -- and radios fitted to habal-habal motorcycles.
That's the latest craze. Not content with exhausts blathering and booming habal-habal's are now bolting on radios with custom built speakers playing long and loud. Or specialty air-horns. When I hear a hee-haw, hee-haw these days I don't even look round. It used to be a self-important official late for his luncheon; now it's a habal-habal.
And microphones. Have you noticed this Filipino love affair with the things? At seminars or meetings folks will be seated at a circular table maybe eight feet across and yet each is brandishing a mike; as if their voices are too feeble to make it across the woodwork.
My crowd is no better. Years ago, to treat our daughter Horror, we took up on the birthday party deal offered at Obrero's Garden Oasis resort. It was (maybe still is) a good package -- eats, use of the pool, grown-ups got to drink beer all afternoon -- and all went well until it was time to say a few words of congratulation to birthday girl.
That's not guy stuff and so I stood back only to watch, astonished, as Mrs. C switched on a sound system and plugged in a microphone to address a party of kids and parents, about 15 or 20, all standing within a few yards.
Had she lost her voice? Hardly. Carrying on a conversation with a neighbor two houses away on the other side of the road, over a wall and across the garden had been no problem that morning. It's the microphone thing, the karaoke complex, and the need for noise. Hush? Pigs might fly.
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (April 2, 2006 issue)
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