Patay na Patay?

I don’t know what you did last Valentines Day but this one guy’s idea of a date was to take her girlfriend to the cemetery.
“Bakit mo ako dinala dito, sementeryo eto, ah!” the girl asked. “Para malaman mo kung paano ako ka patay-na-patay sa ‘yo,” he said.
On the surface, it is funny. Dig a little deeper and it’s bizarre if not macabre. At the bottom of it, it is real: both the fact that people do date in cemeteries and that death is real and could occur anywhere and could come at anytime; a proof that life has an end, and yet with death, love lives.
In Manila, people don’t only make out in the graveyards but some make open and empty tombs their homes. I can’t remember exactly the name of the cemetery but it is in the vicinity of Makati Avenue and Kalayaan Road where I saw kids using the same as their playground. That’s where the living cavorts with the dead. Life and death — two states that intertwine.
English author Somerset Maugham has retold the tale below, The Appointment in Samara. Of what probably is from the same source (A Thousand and One Nights) as Aladdin, Alibaba, and Sinbad, the following tale illustrates that death occurs at the time and place least expected, no escape:
There was a merchant in Bagdad who sent his servant to the market to buy provisions and in a little while the servant came back, white and trembling, and said, Master, just now when I was in the marketplace I was jostled by a woman in the crowd and when I turned I saw it was Death that jostled me.
She looked at me and made a threatening gesture. Now, lend me your horse, and I will ride away from this city and avoid my fate. I will go to Samarra and there Death will not find me.
The merchant lent him his horse, and the servant mounted it, and he dug his spurs in its flanks and as fast as the horse could gallop he went.
Then the merchant went down to the marketplace and he saw Death standing in the crowd and the merchant came to him and said “Why did you make a threatening gesture to my servant when you saw him this morning?”
“That was not a threatening gesture”, Death said. “It was only a start of surprise. I was astonished to see him in Bagdad, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”
Those who act as if they own the world should start thinking because no one is exempted from this eventuality. Remember that we are dust and to dust we will return. An appropriate reminder now that Lent has just started.
Let’s talk about something else – a recent news item in a Manila-based broadsheet lists Toronto as having 776 Overseas Absentee Voters. In total, the same article says that the Department of Foreign Affairs has directed the Philippines’s 67 embassies and 23 consulates to make vigorous their campaign to increase the number of registered voters.
In Toronto I am sure that Consul General Pedro Chan would only register those living and there over 200,000 of those in the GTA alone. Expect a call from the Consulate soon as registration will only be until October in preparation for the May 2013 elections.
This early the Philippine Independence Day Council, now headed by Norma Carpio, has rolled out its campaign for this year’s events. As expected there will be the Mabuhay Festival at the Metro Convention Centre on July 28. The organizers promise a much more exciting and productive exhibit of products and services to be capped by a spectacular program which for sure will bill top stars from Manila.
Norma Carpio, current PIDC president, invited me to her induction on February 25. I didn’t go but she knows she has my ‘vote’, so does outgoing president Minda Neri. In the past, part of PIDC’s array of events was a parade in the downtown area with sixteen-wheeler trucks carrying whatever hodgepodge Philippine depictions they decide to load on those flatbed trucks.
I for one howled and howled, until I got hoarse, to stop the madness. I reasoned that such display was not appropriate to the times to say the least. The crawling vehicles were not only wasting precious gas but were polluting the already polluted air.
The display was also a show for no one as there were more parade participants than viewers. It was an embarrassment for Filipinos in a city like Toronto, a city used to street festivals and parades on a grand scale like the Gay Parade, the then Caribbana, the Food at the Danforth, Curso Italia, Santa Claus Parade, to name some.
Thank God, the parade is caput, dead! That particular activity of the PIDC is now only memory that belongs to the cemetery where sweethearts go to celebrate Valentines Day and say, “patay na patay ako sa ‘yo!”