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Sunday, April 02, 2006
Gil: Bump hugs, bruises and porn
By Sandy Gil
Sunday Dunes
I RECENTLY arrived from a weeklong stay in Manila. My youngest, Toni, was graduating -- top seven in her grade school batch! Sigh. So much like her Mom... I also had to attend to a couple of meetings with the bank I had commissioned work with. More important though was this trip gave me the opportunity to bond with my three children whom I had not seen since January. Needless to say, it was a hectic and exhausting six-day sojourn in a city filled with smoke, traffic and smog.
Toni's cell phone was recently stolen from her backpack while her class was rehearsing for their graduation ceremony. It was an old Nokia model, so Toni was not too upset. What really got her was that her SIM, which of course, contained the numbers of all her friends, had likewise been stolen with the cell phone unit. And therefore, she was more or less incommunicado with the rest of her world.
Naturally, it was an opportune time to ask her parents for a new cell phone. Her father had promised to pay for half the price of a new cell phone. Toni had to seek donation and beg alms for the other half. It would have been too much for her to ask the other half from me since I had given her an MP3 player before her cell phone was stolen. Thus, Toni had a big problem to address: how to get the other half.
-o0o-
Being the crazy kid that she has always been, Toni suggested that I ask my Mom (her Lola) for the other half. Really now? This daughter of mine seemed to have thought about it thoroughly. She even had a scripted dialogue prepared for my possible talk with my Mom.
"Mom, guess what!" I was supposed to exclaim, full of excitement and pride. "Toni is graduating TOP SEVEN in her class! Galing, no?"
Then I was supposed to shift moods from excitement and pride to sadness and grief, and continue. "But then... SHE HAS NO CELL PHONE!" That last part was supposed to be said with great emphasis.
-o0o-
Toni eventually got a new cell phone -- at my expense, of course. What a sucker I am for my daughter's humor! And guess what I got in return? A bump hug. Do you know what a bump hug is? Toni bumped me with her tummy, and as I was about to topple over, she caught me in her arms and hugged me. A bump hug.
-o0o-
Remember when I wrote in this column about the bruise that I got on my left leg a couple of weeks ago? Well, there was still a slight trace of it when I went to Manila, and I was totally eager to give my children a blow-by-blow account of what had happened. My eldest, Ella, and Toni were around over dinner when I so animatedly told them how I got the bruise. However, Diego, my second, joined us only during the latter part of my narration -- and of course, missed the point of the whole story.
Wanting to include him in our update, I proudly showed Diego the healing bruise on my leg, hoping to earn his sympathy. And as I was about to repeat the story to him, he said, "Caused by another one of your craziness?"
Sigh. I never got to tell Diego the story.
-o0o-
Among my children, it is Ella who seems to be growing up with more distinct changes in personality. As a teenager, I had always been fascinated and amused with her gregariousness and talkativeness, albeit the fact that she has always been passionately serious about her ambitions to be a recognized writer. As a young career woman nowadays, I have noticed that she seems to be a bit more reserved and reticent. Perhaps it is because she has a boyfriend whose effect on her is to balance her youthful zeal for life with mature stability.
A year has passed since Ella graduated from college. For her graduation then, her father had promised her a laptop -- a necessary but expensive tool for her trade. The laptop never came... until recently, when I was in Manila. For some unknown reason, her father finally bought her a brand new Apple Powerbook! Good for Ella!
And was she floored! Ella gave her new laptop a name. Yes, she gave it a name, as if it were a stuffed toy. She named it Leandro... after a porn star.
So much for mature stability...
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (April 2, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
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