• By ebotpandayan
• Posted in Uncategorized
• On October 15, 2021
• 2 Comments.

Shoot! My eggs are burning! I know the smell!

The pot boiled dry, and eggs burned.

It happened while I was chatting away on Messenger with classmates from high school. The foul smell of something like sulfur suddenly filled the air that one morning in my apartment. I sat bolt upright in a panic. The eggs! I was boiling eggs and forgot all about them. I ran to the kitchen to find that the stainless steel pot boiled dry, the eggs charred, stuck to the bottom of the stainless cooking pot.

Dejavu. The same happened back in my old apartment. While entertaining friends in the living room, someone commented about a peculiar smell coming from the kitchen one evening. It must be my Chinese neighbor cooking something exotic again, I presumed. Funny, but exotic should not stink, another friend said. What he said startled me, realizing that I was boiling eggs and the water must have dried up. Poor Chinese neighbor getting blamed for my bout of dementia.

Graduation photo. Class of ’65, St. James Institute, Plaridel, Bulacan

To blame this time was the live-in partner of Valentino (not his real name).  Or maybe I was partly to blame. You see, I created a chat group on Messenger called Klasmeyts ’65, hoping to find members of my High School graduating class of 1965. But, unfortunately, I haven’t seen many of them since we sang Auld Lang Syne on graduation day, and that was over half a century ago. My, my, my! It seems like it was only yesterday when we were just sweet sixteen, and “the taste of life was sweet as rain upon our tongue. “It is sad to hear that many of our classmates are no longer with us, gone forever. We miss them.

Class picture, Second Year HS, 1962-63

Valentino was a classmate in HS who joined our Chat Group only recently. Like many of my classmates, I found his whereabouts on Facebook. I sent him a message but never got a reply. It turned out that it was an old account he has since stopped using. So no one among our classmates who have joined our Chat Group knows where to find Valentino or other classmates. I am glad there are social media like FB, although I do not expect everyone from my HS batch to be subscribers.

Now I have a friend who lives in the same village where I know Valentino lives as well. She said that she knew someone with the same family name and might know Valentino. This someone happens to be Valentino’s daughter. And that was how we found him. He told Klasmeyts ’65 that his wife died a couple of years ago but failed to mention, or didn’t want to say, that he has a live-in partner. Now, this live-in partner I will call Dusa hacked into Valentino’s FB and Messenger account, he claims, while he was inebriated. A nightmare ensued! Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned. Dusa read the chat exchange between Valentino and another classmate, Alindog, and she didn’t like it when she saw the emojis representing a heart or a take care at the end of every message. I don’t think there were kiss emojis—at least not from Alindog (not her real name either), another classmate and friend who’s so particular about her unblemished reputation. She was Sugar and spice, and everything nice, you know. The Good Girl! She got married and may even have immaculately conceived had it not happened three times—the conception!

Dusa wrote a message on our chatroom, breaking the news that she is Valentino’s wife, a revelation that confused us. Wife? Didn’t Valentino say he is a widower? In a follow-up message, Dusa wrote in Tagalog that whether she’s a wife or a girlfriend does not make a difference. They have been together for over a year now, she said. Thus asawa na rin (can be considered as a wife). Oh, never mind! One is quick to say kabit, but I think kabit is a demeaning word you apply to a woman or man cohabiting with a person married to someone else. But Valentino is a widower; his partner is a widow, so you cannot say they are magkabit. A live-in partner in Tagalog is kinakasama, an accurate description, maybe, but when you say it in Tagalog, you come up with the same meaning. So what’s in a name? Ask Shakespeare.

In her message, Dusa singled out Alindog and was vocal with her dislike for her. The notes reached me at midnight, Vienna time. They made no sense. They were from Valentino, alright, and yet it was evident he did not write them. It was late, so I went to sleep only to wake up the next day to find in our chatroom a chain of messages from classmates trying to console Alindog, who felt slighted, scandalized, by the insinuation—that she was out to snap Valentino away from Dusa. “Pa love, love pa sya!” Dusa wrote. Now, that’s a Taglish phrase I don’t know how to say in proper English. “Pa love, love pa sya!” Oh, forget it. Let’s say she was furious with what she thought was Alindog’s scheme with Valentino.

“Don’t mess up with me” was how I liked to interpret Alindog’s reply to the unfounded accusation. In her message to Dusa but addressed to our Group, she swore (my bitchy interpretation) that she would never in her life imagine having an affair with Valentino. I gasped and felt sorry for Valentino. Such stinging remarks, I thought, but which I applaud. It was short of saying,” ‘cuse me! Valentino may be the last man standing, but no woman in her right mind, but you, will take him. Bitch! “

In another message addressed to me, Alindog wanted me to come to her rescue, asking me to comment on the issue. She knows she can count on me any time.

We were best friends in High School—Alindog and I—and have retained and nurtured the friendship through college, but disrupted when she married a colleague from my work she met through me. I was not particularly fond of him, and I did not hide it from Alindog. So I felt like a jilted boyfriend when she married him. I attended her wedding, but that was the day I lost her. We drifted apart until I left the country. We have not heard from each other for as long as I can remember. But thanks to Facebook, we found each other again. She, a widow; I, a confirmed bachelor. Oh, stop pretending you don’t know why, so please, take that look off your face.

I didn’t want Alindog to dwell on the issue. I’d like her to be able to laugh about it. Take it with a grain of salt, I said. Valentino finally gathered the courage to send his thoughts to our chatroom and apologized for the bad behavior of the person he described as his “hadlang sa buhay” (the hindrance to my life). I replied in jest that he should start evaluating his “hadlang sa buhay” and concentrate on Alindog instead. I punctuated the message with a laugh-out-loud emoji lest I get misunderstood. That I am serious, like when I mentioned to Valentino that many of our female classmates are now widows, and one of them may have been the recipient of numerous love notes he wrote in High School. He was only a teenager then, but he was already keen on having a girl he could call his own, so he composed letters. I should know because he would ask me to write for him; he thought my handwriting was impressive. Weird, though, that I don’t remember any of his unrequited puppy-loves. And not one girl from Klasmeyts ’69 claimed to be one. Come on, girls, give the poor boy some credit—for his effort, at least.

“Take it as a compliment, girl! “I wanted to tell Alindog in my attempt to calm her down; She felt so scandalized and demeaned by Dusa’s written accusation, and we, her classmates, could even read it. “The nerves!”

“When around them, you can make people, women especially, lose confidence in themselves. You make them insecure,” I have told her many times in the past. “Even nuns get intimated by you.”

I remember that one time in HS when my classmates Alindog, Catalina, Conchita, Joseph, Mauro, and I were in the school hallway, laughing animatedly, amused by what the two boys must be telling when a nun came to us. Her face stern,  she ordered the girls to kneel, heads down. We, boys, were spared.  I saw tears rolling down Alindog’s cheeks.

There was this rumor in the classroom that this nun was Joseph’s lover, which Joseph neither admitted nor denied. So we surmised that the nun probably knew that Joseph was attracted to Alindog. But, again, Hell hath no fury like a nun, err, a woman scorned!

Fast forward. Dusa found me on Facebook. She wrote a message telling me how sorry she was for what she had done—stirring a situation. She said Valentino made her feel unwanted and believed he was embarrassed to admit they were a pair. It was not easy to live with Valentino, so she thought of leaving him several times but felt sorry for him every time. It was awa (pity) that made her stay with him.

“Do not equate pity with love.” That was Father Bob Garon in me talking. (Does anyone from Klasmeyts ’69 remember him? He was a Manila-based Canadian priest (or American? I wasn’t sure now) who ran a drug rehabilitation program in the ’70s.  If I remember correctly, he also had a  newspaper column where he wrote inspiring messages, like guidance and counseling. Unfortunately, I know he left his ministry and got married. I wonder what has become of him after leaving the Philippines.

“Tell Valentino how you feel. Then, you discuss your problem with him and don’t go to bed without resolving the issue. “Boy, I may sound sincere with my advice, but it gives me goosies playing Father Bob.

I saw Dusa’s profile photo on FB, and I found her very attractive, tall at 5 feet seven. “You are beautiful, and Valentino should be lucky that you accepted him, despite everything,” my soothing words to her. But, at 61, she may sound too young for Valentino, who is pushing 75. He may have retained his charming ways when he was younger, but he is not the best catch, as many of us now.

“You don’t make sense, “I told Dusa. “Seconds ago, you said you pity him, and seconds later, you professed you genuinely love him? Make up your mind! Either you drop him or keep him. “

“Remember, you are an attractive woman; you can still find true happiness.” I felt so like Father Bob talking to her, boosting her morale, making her believe in herself, and recovering her shattered confidence.

“And I am telling you, you can still make eggs burn and water boil dry!”