Chatrooms Can Burn Your Eggs
The pot boiled dry, and the eggs burned.
Shoot! My eggs are burning! I know the smell!
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 cooking pot boiled dry, the eggs charred, stuck to the bottom of the stainless skillet.
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.
Class of ’69 Graduation Photo. St. James Institute, Plaridel, Bulacan
The live-in partner of a HS classmate Valentino (not his real name), was to blame this time. Or maybe I was partly to blame. 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 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. “Sadly, many of our classmates are no longer with us, gone forever. We miss them.
Second Year HS Class Picture. 1962-63
Valentino 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 had 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.
School Foundation Day
I thought I would give up on Valentino until Tessie, another HS classmate, told me she knew someone from her village with the same family name as Valentino’s. 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, Dusa. Valentino was inebriated one day when Dusa hacked into his FB and Messenger accounts and read about the chat exchange between him and Alindog—our senior class muse. A nightmare ensued! Dusa didn’t like it when she saw the emojis of a heart or a take care at the end of every message. I don’t think Alindog left kiss emojis; she was one girl who cared so much about her HS unblemished reputation. She was sugar, spice, and everything nice—the image of the ultimate good girl! She married later and may even have immaculately conceived had it not happened three times.
Dusa wrote a message in 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 was the wife or the girlfriend did not make a difference. They have been together for over a year now, she said. Thus asawa na rin (can pass for a wife). Oh, never mind! One is quick to say kabit (concubine, mistress), a Tagalog word almost exclusively applied to a woman cohabiting or having an illicit relationship with a man 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. Still, 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 about her dislike for her. The notes reached me at midnight, Vienna time. They made no sense. They were from Valentino, 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 our chatroom clogged with a chain of messages: from classmates consoling 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 translate into proper English. “Pa love, love pa sya!” Oh, forget it. 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. No way, Jose! I gasped and felt sorry for Valentino. Such stinging remarks, I thought. It was like saying, “‘cuse me! Valentino may be the last man standing, but no woman in her right mind, but you, will take him for a lover. 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 it was disrupted when she married a colleague from my work she met through me. I was not particularly fond of him and did not hide my contempt. 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. Make a wild guess why.
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. He 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. I am serious, like when I mentioned to Valentino that many of our female classmates are now widows. 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. Calm down. She felt so scandalized and demeaned by Dusa’s written accusation, and we, her classmates, could even read it. “The nerves!” she said.
“When around them, you can make people, women especially, lose confidence in themselves. You make them insecure,” I have told her many times. “Even nuns get intimated by you.”
I remember one particular incident that happened in the school hallway. I was with my classmates Alindog, Catalina, Conchita, Joseph, and Mauro. The boys told us a joke that made us laugh hysterically when a nun suddenly appeared before us. Her face stern, she ordered the girls to kneel, heads down; we, the 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 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). He 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, 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 found her attractive, tall at 5 feet seven.
“You are beautiful, and Valentino should be lucky that you accepted him, despite himself,” 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 like many of us are 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 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!”