It was very much a party.

For the past few weeks, I've been quoting this trailer, a lovely video put together for PASU's third annual Pilipino Cultural Night. It's got great lines delivered in the most hilarious ways, such as "Oh, harana." Or, "What is love? And how do we find it? How do we find it... if we don't know what it looks like?" (This I transmogrified into, "What is a skyscraper? And how do we find it?" Which sounds utterly ridiculous now, but was hilarious at 3 in the morning.)

Anyway, one of the main themes of the PCN skit this year was of a quaint tradition from the Philippines - that of the harana. This describes a culture of song, where "the best singers and guitaristas in town would join [a] suitor in his endeavor" to serenade a woman in a complex set of courtship rituals. This is relevant because after the show, as I basked in the post-PCN high, my mom revealed to me that my very own grandfather had practiced this very same harana when courting my grandmother. 

To learn that the harana actually runs my in blood - to discover that I have a connection to the nebulous years of my grandparents' youth - all thanks to a tradition I had written off as obsolete - this revelation unleashed a flood... of a tiny stream of memories.

The reason that I found it so difficult at first to come up with a story to develop as Matt Bondurant has in The Wettest County in the World is that I hardly know anything about my parents' lives, much less those of my grandparents. My parents are reluctant to speak of their pasts, my dad especially so, as a man who grew up in the Philippine slums and lived through the Marcos regime. As for my grandparents - my dad's parents have already died, and my mom's parents speak only broken English. The only stories I hear of them are of stories of stories, watered down from the original telling so much that they can be told within a single sentence. I only hear these in the most spontaneous of times, when they occur to my mom. Or, when I go looking where I'm not supposed to. That's how I found the letter that mentioned the uncle I would have had, had my mother's brother survived past infancy.

I suppose that's why I was so excited to read in Bondurant's note that he, too, had very little of the family lore to build on. That means that I can pick my grandparents' story, and write what my grandfather must have felt, working up the nerve to court my grandmother with songs such as "Maalaala Mo Kaya" -- or, "Will you remember my love?". I would follow his story, throughout World War II and how he fled from the Japanese, and write about how he would smoke and drink until that fateful day that he found himself in the hospital with a doctor telling him he had six months to live - and how he promptly gave up both drink and cigarettes the very next day. I would write about life in Ilocosur, and how he grew tobacco, and loved to fish. (Of course, that would require research. Not something this girl from the suburbs is ready for.)

Based off of this alone, my grandfather's life probably sounds more "vanilla" compared to that of the fictional-yet-based-on-a-true-story Bondurants. But although the last of his days are spent bedridden, and, I imagine, in loneliness, his story must still be one from which a lesson can be derived. His is a life fully lived, after all.