JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

When You Are Old
By Jessica Zafra
(published in Philstar, 27 Oct 2019)

One day I woke up and I was old. Age had come upon me like a stealth drone. The first warning was the documents: whenever I had to fill out a form that asked for my age, I would do the math and be shocked that the number was so high. It was a mistake! Some time displacement had sent me into the future! Then I would put it out of my mind.

I was unnaturally attached to being young. I had dropped out of nursery school and skipped kindergarten and seventh grade. I honestly thought I would die at age eight, like Marcelino Pan Y Vino. If you are too young or too old for that reference, Marcelino was a little Italian orphan who was raised by priests. He was always getting scolded for stealing bread and wine from the church kitchen. Finally a priest followed him to find out who he was giving the stolen food to. And it turns out he was giving the pan y vino to the life-size crucified Christ, who would come to life and come down from the cross to talk to Marcelino. Marcelino missed his dead mother, and wished he could be with her again. So Jesus granted his wish: little Marcelino died and was reunited with his late mother. When I was a child this struck me as a good outcome. Because children are weirdos.

I wasn’t an orphan—my mother, who was still very much alive, had taken me to see Marcelino Pan Y Vino at the movies. At the time, Italian and other foreign movies dubbed in English were regularly screened in Manila theatres. I remember the 70s, which tells you I am old.

Why I thought Jesus would reward me with an early death, I had no idea. I was not particularly religious, and I exercised my imagination early on by inventing excuses not to attend Sunday mass with the parents. Wait, I did have one religious phase in grade school. It was after I’d seen a TV documentary called The Events At Garabandal. Apparently the Blessed Virgin Mary had appeared to some children in Garabandal, Spain, and told them that if people did not change their ways, the world would end. One of the instructions handed out by the BVM was for people to go to church regularly. So when I was nine years old, I would go to the chapel at St. Theresa’s College every day at lunchtime and pray the apocalypse would be cancelled. I enjoyed these daily visits because the chapel would be empty and I’ve never been a sociable person.

After a week it occurred to me that if I was the only person who was obeying divine instructions, then the planet was irrevocably doomed. I remembered how in Exodus, Lot had bargained with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah from destruction. Lot had a lot of chutzpah, that’s for sure, but the bargaining didn’t work because those cities were obliterated. So I went back to spending lunchtime reading a book.

(Yes, I read the Old Testament one long weekend when I was stuck at home with nothing to read. The story of Lot bothered the hell out of me. First some angels go to Lot’s house to warn him. The neighbors hear about the guests, then they surround Lot’s house and demand that he give them his guests so they could rape them. I am not making this up, look in the Old Testament. So Lot tells them to leave his guests alone and take his daughters instead. What!!! So Lot’s family flees Sodom and Gomorrah, and God warns them not to look back. And Lot’s wife looks back at her house, because don’t we all look back to check if we locked the door properly, and whoosh, she’s turned into a pillar of salt. This struck me as unfair. And then later they have to repopulate the area and there are no other women, so incest, gross, and centuries before Game of Thrones. The Old Testament is a wonderful collection of stories, even better than the Odyssey, T.H. White, or J.R.R. Tolkien. I haven’t read much of the New Testament, not enough smiting.)

That was a long sidebar, now back to the story. The second warning of impending decrepitude was the graying. New growths of white hair were sticking out of my head. I was afraid of hair color, I thought the chemicals would seep into my brain and I am very fond of my brain, which won’t shut up. So every quarter or so I had my hair colored with black henna, which I figured was natural and organic, ergo safe. But denial and henna could not ward off the inevitable, and neither could softening the blow by describing myself as “middle-aged”.

I was born when the world was analog. I used a typewriter to produce my first book. I can recognize when new songs are remakes or sample older songs. I remember black and white TV, cassettes, and videotape. I still use iPods and headphones with wires. I prefer stuff that I can hold and throw across the room to virtual things. I send emails and make telephone calls! I am old!

There is no point in hiding my age, because my first book was published in 1992 and people can do basic subtraction. I stopped having my hair colored black: the advantage of white hair is that you can have it colored purple without bleaching it. Somehow I had reached an advanced age without having written a novel or more short stories, so I dropped everything and returned to writing fiction.

Now that the world has woken up to the reality of climate change and soon there may not be a world, I’m actually relieved to be my age. Which is old. Any day now, maturity should kick in.

How can a music icon and jillion-selling artist still be underrated? Well George Michael was, because he only released new music when he wanted to, he didn’t think every moment of his life was for public consumption, and he expected no praise for his kindness and generosity. Thank you, George Michael.

Let’s start the playlist with Outside, which responds to a very public shaming with defiance and strength.

And the Year of Obituaries continues with the death of Carrie Fisher, who as Princess Leia taught the women of my generation how to fight, resist tyranny, and be the equal of any man, and as a writer showed us that no one has to be perfect, our flaws are what make us strong. The Force is with you, General Leia.

Brooklyn Flea and Smorgasburg is on weekends at the old Williamsburg Savings Bank Clocktower in Fort Greene. I want to live there.

It’s like entering a bank vault and emerging in your childhood. It was perfect flea market weather: one degree Celsius, and the wind could take your face off.

I resisted the mind-boggling array of vintage eyeglasses, concert T-shirts and other clothes, vinyl records, magazines and games.

But not the necklace with a plastic dragon pendant.

The vendors sell all the stuff you’ve thrown out over the years and now want to get back. It’s not really the stuff you want, you know, it’s the past. When you look back you realize those were the good times, but you were too busy waiting for the future to arrive.

You can buy back your childhood. An attractive proposition, since the future circa 2016 has been a whopping disappointment. Sure, there are new toys, but you want the things that were around when you were a kid.

Did anybody save their pins, T-shirts and stuff from the street parliament years, 1983-1986? Show us.

Consisting of three identical stacked trays, this aesthetically pleasing litter box just needs you to lift the top tray to separate the waste from the clean, useable litter, which would fall into the tray beneath and be ready to use again. After throwing the waste away, simply turn the top tray around and place it at the bottom of the stack and you are done.

Not only is this an incredibly easy and quick way to clean out a litter box, it is also a method that ensures zero wastage as you would never have to throw away clean cat litter again.

Read about it at DesignTaxi.

Thanks to Noel for the alert. At dinner the other night he reminded us of that soap ad where the model takes a leaf and slathers half of it with lotion. Then she crushes the dry half and says, “See how it crumbles?” The slathered half doesn’t, ergo buy the soap. (Somebody send us that ad.)

That commercial used to drive our Physics teacher nuts. “What kind of experiment is that! It has no control group!”

In our section freshman year there was this guy who used to move his head from side to side constantly, like an Indian dancer, and our Physics teacher said, “What’s wrong with you? You look like the dog at the back of the car!”

In a repurposed garage in a city not very far away (Cebu), Johanna Velasco Deutsch, Mark Deutsch and their team make stuff.

Such as their rendition of a certain seat of power. Instead of swords melted by dragonfire and surfaces so sharp they caused the derrieres of kings to bleed, they fashioned a comfy chair from old action figures, toy cars, Lego bricks, Viewmasters, and plastic animals.

They do animation, design, illustration, painting, sculpture, toys and photography. Coming up: an alphabet book in Bisaya.

Under the glass are 364 pictures they took, one a day, for a year.

They pay tribute to our feline overlords and encourage people to drink better coffee. Their work is delightful without being self-consciously cute.

Visit them at Happy Garaje.com. You can also check out their work for the Four Seasons Marrakesh and Raffles Seychelles.

We’re a little confused as to when school starts exactly, but this is as good a time as any to think about the teaching profession. If life were fair, teachers would be the highest-paid professionals in the world. Their job isn’t to cram young people’s minds with information they can regurgitate on command, it’s to teach these young people how to use their minds. They deserve our highest admiration, an admiration which society chooses to lavish on celebrity dimwits.

As in any profession there are good teachers and there are bad teachers. There are teachers who inspire you to reach your aspirations, and there are teachers who try to mock you because you’re smarter than they are. There are teachers who forego lucrative careers in other fields in order to guide ungrateful jerks like ourselves, and there are teachers whose families traded the family carabao to buy them a teaching position because they’re too inept to get a job. And there are teachers who imprint themselves on our minds, whose influence on our lives goes beyond classrooms and report cards.

To mark the start of another schoolyear, we’re paying tribute to our favorite teachers. We invite you to tell us about the teachers who made a real impact on your lives. Post your tributes in Comments. We’ll start.

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“Misery” does not begin to describe our four years in high school: we were so unhappy that we hid in the least-used girls’ bathroom in order to avoid all human contact and read books in peace. The horror began to ease only in our fourth year, when we became editor-in-chief of the school paper for a second term. As the school was focused on science and math, literature and the humanities were almost an afterthought in the curriculum. We recommend that anyone who intends to go into literature and the arts attend a science high school: if you can survive having your ego crushed on a daily basis, if you can maintain your resolve despite constant reminders that what you want is not allowed by the system, then you are prepared for the writing life.

In senior year, our Literature teacher was Mrs. Helen Ladera. She was elegant, straightforward, and formidable. The passing grade for Literature may have been lower than that of Chemistry and Calculus, but her teaching standards were consistently high. She demanded the best of her students, and for this she was considered a terror by some. She welcomed and enjoyed unorthodox interpretations of class assignments as long as these interpretations were well-argued.

At the beginning of the schoolyear, she gave us a list of novels from which we could choose four to write papers about. It was this list that introduced us to Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Augie March. For some reason she thought we might be interested in a book about Babi Yar, and now that we think about it, this kicked off our interest in Russian literature. She praised us when we did good work, and called us out when we were being jerks, like the time we wrote a wall news editorial asking why we had to take the national college entrance exams when they were so easy.

The word we used was “chickens**t” and she was not amused; we argued, unsuccessfully, that we meant chickensuit, chickenspot, chickenslut, etc. Excessive pride must be punctured early lest the student become an insufferable adult, but the response should be calibrated so that the student’s confidence is not damaged permanently. Even when she was reprimanding us, she never talked down to us. She explained that the issue was not fact, but respect and humility. She did not spew threats as lazy teachers might; she treated us as intelligent humans.

Thank you, Mrs. Helen Ladera. You were badass, and we mean that most respectfully.