Wearing a Sundress Was a Bad Idea

The blister on the inside of my right calf was the size of a small chicken egg when it first puffed up. All the skin around it was red and angry looking, and when I poked the sac-like pillowy protuberence it squished firmly, full of clear blister fluid. "That's not good," I thought, the proceeded to deal with it the way I deal with most of the cutaneous injuries that I regularly incur as a skateboarder and cyclist - I rolled down my jeans and went on my merry way. Being a child of a doctor and nurse makes you laugh at pain and non-life threatening injuries. Besides, I've found that most of my sports injuries like strained muscles, sprained joints, cuts and scrapes - the ones that aren't deep anyways - benefit most from just a few basic things: epsom salt baths, lots of sleep and being left alone. I also take care to eat better when I am healing up.

A couple of days later I noticed a screaming pain when I woke up, and a wet spot on the sheets. Are you grossed yet? This wet spot wasn't of the ordinary variety of bodily fluids you might encounter on a bed sheet, but even worse because it was from the blister on my leg which had by then swollen even more. Fearing an impending scarrage that would render future skirt wearing or shorts wearing unsightly - and make those activities an actual disservice to the world around me - I decided to finally treat my wound like the third degree burn that it was.

I had always wanted to try the moist burn pads that are in the pharmacy next to the band aids anyways. I ran to get some bacitracin and said burn pads, as well as a bunch of adhesive gauze that would let the wound breathe and not stick to it.

A few years ago I used to get injured like this all the time, mostly on my elbows and knees, the sides of my ankles and even my hips. I took a lot of thrashing in the skatebowls before I could ride them, and before I learned how to fall. Now I use my whole body to slide down the side of the wall and go limp. Or if I am not on a transition and on flat ground, I run out of the fall.

Once, an 11 year old kid collided with me going pretty fast at the skatepark and I saved us from certain doom by grabbing him under the ribs, picking him up, and running some paces until our momentum was spent. He was devastated, but I didn't feel bad that he looked like a baby in front of his friends because I had to do what I had to do.

So I carefully cleaned the blister with soapy warm water and betadine. I could kind of see under the top skin of the blister where it was slightly torn and could tell that it was a pretty bad wound. Yowza! That motorcycle exhaust pipe is probably hundreds of degrees hot. Wearing a sundress had been a bad idea. "Just think," I thought, "just beyond that are all the nerve endings and fatty tissue of my calf!" I wonder where the muscle starts?

By now my whole calf was throbbing and so I put a second skin blister pad on top of the whole mess and called it a day. For the past 10 days I've been monitoring its progess. The blister pad worked pretty well at keeping it hydrated during the crucial first few days when the white blood cells are trying to patch up the open.

Time.

I rode my bike four miles today, the whole time thinking about time and how I often seem to be racing it. I do so many little things to save time, but there always seems to be a conflict in partitioning and distributing it... then there are hours that go by when it seems that I am not using time well, which balances out those days that I am so busy and experiencing so many things that every moment seems alive with endless significance.

I assume it to be a relative thing. In other cultures that I have experienced, time is viewed much differently than my life here. When I was in the Philippines with my family, the people we met up with seemed a bit confused and almost inconvenienced by the fact that we would meet at the exact time that we said we would. "They really are American!" they would say when we would call to make sure that they were clear on our version of time, and hustle a bit faster to get there. For a good laugh, ask your nearest filipino friend on their outlook regarding time. Family parties that say 4PM on the invite really mean "Start thinking about getting ready to go a 4PM" and everyone knows that the party really starts around 6-ish.

When Christophe and Didier were in Chicago, I found that the frenchies were just as laid back in their interpretation of time. Planning to leave the house at 8AM kind of meant being really ready to go by 10:30. That is just how they rolled, and no amount of throat clearing and glazed over looks could move the process along. In the mean time, they would be drinking coffee, making grilled cheese and ham sandwiches, listening to music, talking and smoking.

Somehow we managed to get everything that they needed to get done, done. We missed a couple of beginnings to soccer games, but otherwise they would make up for their late starts with late night - most evenings we would wind up sitting down for dinner close to midnight. They insisted on having a cocktail hour and sitting in the yard for no other reason than to relax. In a filipino household, things are communal like this as well. We might be singing a song on the karaoke machine, playing piano, poking fun at our moms and grandmas or just enjoying a quiet moment of peace or conversation.

There is an opposite extreme to this end - 120 hour work weeks, meetings, deadlines. I'd like time to go a little more slowly sometimes, but in this kind of life it always needs to go faster. This is where time becomes like money, a quickly slipping away commodity that there is no subsitute for. I worked in one job that bridged an island culture with a western business model that took over the laid back effects of equatorial life. Our office made sure that shipments got delivered, emails got answered, bills got paid in time and generally made sure that the business ran smoothly. That's how things get done in this world, but I always wondered if I might be on the wrong side of that equation.

The Garden

A work in progress for almost 30 years, every tree and every plant was thought out carefully. The slopes of the hills are run with an underground irrigation system, and he probably never had more fun than when he was building the stone walls. In some shots you can see our dog Quasimodo's old doghouse, which he never used. He didn't have to, with this magical wonderland in which he spent his life prancing about chasing squirrels and skunks. But he's a story for another time.

Photos from my dad's secret garden.

It's been a year of epic rainfall.

Sige na

Saw my dad off to the airport. It was the post-modern equivalent of riding the horse to the city gates in farewell, only our horse was an funky taxi with an ornery Bangladeshi driver. I jumped in at the last minute when the cab pulled into the driveway, decided to catch a train home at the airport. I had a question to ask, and I kept him company up to the security gate. My dad and the driver had a tense standoff in the car when the driver answered one of his questions with a snappy attitude, which resulted in a confusing exchange of money when he tried to return my dad's tip but got the total wrong anyways.

Another lonely trek home from O'Hare.

I Hear the Gentle Voices Calling

This morning I hung out with my dad in his office while he prepared for another trip back to Cebu. Tomorrow will be the fourth time in 2 years that I'll be saying goodbye to him - my dad has become a solo wanderer now. He probably had always been one. The work that he is doing is the work of a lifetime, tying together the disparate ends of his life and reconciling things that were done by people who are already dead. He became the head of a divisive and contentious family upon the death of my aunt last year, and is returning there to resolve issues that were left in the wake of her passing away.

My dad had escaped the stifles of his family by studying hard and keeping his head down until he departed immediately upon finishing medical school. He lived on the other side of the world in Chicago for 30 years, until these obligations found him boarding the plane at O'Hare and reentering a world he chose to leave a long time ago. It appears to me that there seems to be some things that you just cannot escape, the biggest battles in life will find you and confront you until you've resolved them no matter how far you've gone to avoid them.

Between buzzing around mailing taxes, writing letters and organizing his paperwork, my dad dj'ed for us by playing his favorite music off of youtube. He was mostly just playing whatever he felt and would even change the song sometimes in the middle of the track. As I tried unsuccessfully to choke back the tears through each song, I realized that there is indeed a romantic and morbid streak that runs deep and wide through my family, a melancholic inclination that can only be soothed with hours long bouts of listening to haunting lilting melodies.

Some of these songs had been played for him on the piano by my grandmother. She was one of a few people in her town who owned a record player (in the Philippines, just after WWII) with which she bestowed this passion for music from all over the world and from every era onto my dad. Did she know she'd be unleashing a million dreams throughout many decades through the power of music? How could she not?

My Dad's Youtube Playlist:

Beautiful Dreamer - Roy Orbison
The Great Pretender - The Platters
Old Man River - Paul Robeson
Ave Maria- Hayley Westnora
Micaela's Aria - Gordana Jevtovic-Minov
Those Were The Days - Mary Hopkin
One More Walk Around the Garden - Sarah Brightman
Vincent - Josh Groban (my dad dedicated this to my brother Ramon)
Old Black Joe - Trapp Family
I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair - Don Ameche
Beautiful Dreamer - Marilyn Horne
Once Upon A Time - Frank Sinatra
Malaguena - Lecuona
Damisela Encantadora - Lecuona

Here's where we'll part ways

Traveling Shoes Are Worn Through

Dinant Ensemble

Au Revoir

Today is the last night that the French guys will be sprawling out on my living room floor, passed out with a myriad of sights dancing in dreams inside their exhausted brains. I know how it is to be a stranger in a new place, to get around in a country in which you do not speak the language, when you listen very hard to catch just a fraction of what is said.

I feel that I was born to facilitated understanding between cultures. English was the second language of both of my parent's, and my life's work has been making connections between their country and mine. Travelers are my kindred spirits, because all journeys bring about the same sort of self-awareness and knowledge. It comes from leaving your home and all traces of what had been familiar to discover what you are capable of in entirely different situations and environments, how you fare and roll with the punches as things come up. 

Tonight I plan to send them off with a Chicago style house music dance party. It will be a celebration of everything that they picked up in the last month in the city of big shoulders. I will make sure that the soul and vibe of my hometown is not lost on them.

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward

as if the river shores were opening out

It seems that things are more like me now,

That I can see farther into paintings.

I feel closer to what language can't reach.

With my senses, as with birds, I climb

Into the windy heaven, out of the oak

In the ponds broken off from the sky

my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Frenchies En Force!

Corinne, Cristophe and Didier have been covering some ground during the four weeks that the french guys are in Chicago. I've spent the past week hanging out with them, rising in the morning with croque monsieurs and cycling around town. They live at a good pace, taking time to converse and unwind at the end of each day. Sharing meals is a great pleasure with this crew. I met up with them when I came back from Wisconsin - turns out, they had been there on a road trip also to Prairie du Chien where they saw the Mississippi river. They had also visited Milwaukee Indiananapolis, Detroit, Toronto (where their aunt lives), and Niagara Falls. They'd been to three of the Great Lakes, five states and thousands of road miles. 

They are super excited to celebrate the national holiday while they are here. It is a lot of fun for me to share their perspective and see my home city through their eyes. The past few days have been a rolling party, from the skatepark to barbecues, parties and fireworks on beautiful summer days. When they return to Paris, they will be arriving home in time to celebrate the French national holiday with a renewed sense of appreciation for their country.