My Lola Nena passed away when I was 16. She was survived by 11 of 12 children, only one of whom had stayed behind at the ancestral home — the Big House, it was called, and one of the oldest in town — although Lola had never lacked for company while alive, especially at the mahjongg table. It sat near the wide capiz window overlooking the front terrace and was the most heavily used non-essential furniture in the house, if the only one that we kids were not allowed near to when a quorum was in session. Come to think of it, I don’t know of any cousin who plays mahjongg.
However, what I associate most with Lola’s house isn’t the clink of playing tiles, but the scent of binukbok (corn) coffee. There was always a giant pot of it simmering over one of the kitchen’s five wood-fired stove grates, and everyone was welcome to it, by which I mean the youngsters were, too. In fact, I grew up drinking coffee (or what I thought was real coffee, anyway). Then Lola died and from then on it was Blend 45 or Nescafe, which I found I didn’t fancy, and that was the last I tasted corn coffee for a long time.
Binukbok is made by grinding corn and dry-roasting the powder until it is dark brown (some would say black). Of course, if by “coffee” you refer to that which has caffeine in it, corn doesn’t qualify, which was probably why we were allowed access to it (not that anyone worried about the downside of caffeine back then). As for the aroma, my coffee-drinking friends say it’s close enough: just add Nescafe and the effect is complete.
Other than that, corn coffee is ten times cheaper than a Starbucks grande. My grandmother would have been scandalized, she who wasted (or threw away) nothing. She left behind a closet containing not just clothes but also broken china. I wonder what memories lay behind them.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Lola was a wonderful cook. It doesn’t reflect kindly upon her kitchen prowess that the thing I remember most of her kusina was the coffee — which was prepared by the help — but there you have it. Sometimes it bothers me that the my memories of her are too diffuse, the more detailed anecdotes second-hand, as if I should have paid more attention. What can I say? Like Lola, I hold on to what I can.
By all accounts, Lola was strict. Someone had to, bringing up a large, often contentious brood. The rifts in her family were never more apparent than when after she died. Not that I intend to air our dirty linen here — I’m just saying we’re normal — or at least near normal as the standards of the day allow. Lola’s mother was born outside of the proverbial mosquito net (my great-great-grandfather arguably sired eight other kids aside from the 15 with his wife), and despite the original family being comfortably well-off, her own was almost certainly less so — poor, even. In her youth, my lola was taken under the wing of one of her rich relatives, which was how she came to meet her first husband (whose first wife, Lola’s first cousin, died early). She was 18, not so young for the era (this was the 1930s). They had three kids, and he died when the youngest was five. She married my grandfather less than two years later, and that, in a nutshell, was how I came to be.
I will admit this much: Lolo Tering was more fun. He loved music, played the piano (his older sister was a concert pianist and music teacher), and took me and my my sister to the family farm in his lemon of a car. He was also something of a practical joker, although his idea of a joke didn’t always strike others as funny. Ma: “He once said something to a farmhand as the man passed with his carabao, and so they got to talking. Next day, the poor peon was surprised to find himself out of a job. ‘Eh,’ Papa Tering had said, ‘you spend more time talking than working.’” And then there was the time he shaved off a cousin’s hair. Half of it, anyway. Needless to say, my aunt — his stepdaughter — was not amused.
Lola was too busy running the household, and since nobody went hungry, or the coffee pot unfilled, we took her presence for granted. Quiet time for her was spent on a rocking chair by the living-room window with the latest issue of Bisaya magazine. She outlived Lolo by six years. The last time I saw her was before I left for college. She handed me ₱50, or what 250 grams of corn coffee cost these days. I bent down and kissed her perfumed cheek, a bit too perfunctorily perhaps, little suspecting that moment would have to last me a lifetime.
Memories are made of these. Keep tightly to yours.
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