SABBATICAL NOTES. 25 JAN 2014 N1

SABBATICAL NOTES. 25 JAN 2014 N1

SABADO DAYS always are days of rest, tranquility, quiet. 

In the past, when I was living somewhere else, it was one of those midday fishing sortie by the Torrance harbor or buying fish heads at the San Pedro wharf. 

At times, hours of talk with the older Ilokano men whiling away their time at the parking area of Seafood City in Carson. 

Honolulu life offered something different.

The sea's breeze has an element of the sacred and the sacramental, and some Saturdays I would take a dip at Waikiki or at the Ala Moana's Magic Island.

Except that when one's family is left somewhere else and before you are celebrating families on a Saturday night furlough, you feel that pang in your gut, and you remember you are alone.

Aloneness gets the better of you and you wish to fly fast and hit the skies and go back once more some seven thousand miles away in different time zones.

You force yourself to be un-seeing of children frolicking in the sand, or running around in the mowed verdant grass that leads up to the main highway going to the tourists' haven farther to the east.

But today, this Saturday, you come to a standstill, to an equilibrium, to a homeostasis: a joint committee of well-meaning people had come up with its critical reflection of what is happening to the home of their soul, their Ilokano language.

You realize this struggle is a collective act of those that are committed to do things right.

It has been rest for you all, this Saturday.

But not so.

It has been one struggle after another, but that is the way it is in that part of the world where one can become a senator by one accidental fact: that you have name recall, which in capitalistic economics of politics, simply means you sport a last name that is associated to another name, perhaps another person, which makes it sure that people of the same name will get to run the country well, or ruin the premises of its hope.

I live in the midst of a family now, but one part of me recalls a homeland not based on a family, or family interest, but based on a common dream to make that homeland a better place to live in.

Which is now a cliche, but that sentiment still makes sense.

You think of all these plus some other work to advance of cause of setting things right and it is Saturday.

WPH, HI/
25 Jan 2014