Riding airplanes gives me the willies. No, stronger — terrifies me is more like it, though I try not to show it.
Was I cheered when Annabelle Adriano told me Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, teller of strange tales, were extremely uneasy traveling by air if they ever did, and took the train or the car instead.
Quite understandably, therefore, I declined the Philippines Graphic award for ‘Poet of the Year’ when I was informed that my request — that someone receive it for me — could not be granted.
That was how I received my Graphic 2nd prize for a short story a decade ago — by proxy. But this time, it was go or no-go. I had to show myself or decline. Take it or leave it.
Call me Super Scaredy-cat — I declined!
Yet, I did go.
Never mind how it eventually turned out. To make a winding thing short and straight, I went. (How I wish I could sneak in I came, I saw, she conquered, but I’d be not only stealing from melancholy Soren K. but fictionalizing.)
The willies intensified as the stewardess’ voice came announcing the airplane was to land in five minutes. It occurred to me to write a poem then and there. I had five minutes, long enough for a quatrain.
Here it is:
BIG CITY SKY BLUES With five awesome minutes before touchdown/ I remember that it’s full moon tonight./ I can say I can’t wait till it’s sundown/ Though likely like you it won’t be in sight.
I had earlier decided to fly to Manila on the 9th of September, it being the date of the full moon, hoping to cast some sort of morale-boosting spell. If you undertake things when it’s full moon, ‘tis said, you will have luck on your side.
So I was, am, Philippines Graphic Poet of the Year. Year of the Horse, indeed!
For a sentimental reason — really more — Philippines Graphic will always be special, a fond thing, to me, and I hope it won’t go the way of all those Philippine weekly magazines that I read in my teens in Zamboanga in the 1950s.
Free Press popped out a couple of years ago or so, making Graphic the last man standing when it comes to outlet for literary writing, to wit, short-stories, and poems.
I mean, the weekend magazines of yesteryears — Sunday Times Magazine, Saturday Herald Magazine — and wasn’t there one from the Manila Chronicle?
It was to these dear newsprint fora of a bygone era that I submitted poems as a boy of 15/16, and alas! got invariably rejected.
It was in Graphic that I first read the new writer who amazed Philippine letters with his explosive prose — Wilfrido D. Nolledo.
Look for the Absent God, I remember that, the title of his story, so well. Also ‘The Wound, an equally weird short story by Jolico Cuadra who was later to become a close friend.
The Graphic literary editor then was Celso Carunungan, who always appended a brief note on each author that, I think, fanned the flame of literary enthusiasm among the magazine’s readers.
Then in 1962, I wrote a story called Noon and Summer — it wasn’t quite summer of my life then being only 18 — but Noon and Summer, the title of my story, heavily influenced by Nolledo and Cuadra, was.
The acceptance slip came from the magazine’s new literary editor, Vicente Rivera Jr.
The story caught the attention of Dr. E.K. Tiempo who was finishing the blueprint of the first National Writers Summer Workshop.
I got invited.
And that’s how I came, by boat, to Dumaguete.
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Author’s email: [email protected]
