The Story of the Creation

Bilaan (Mindanao)

In the very beginning there lived a being so large that he cannot be compared with any
known thing. His name was Melu, and when he sat on the clouds, which were his
home, he occupied all the space above. His teeth were pure gold, and because he was
very cleanly and continually rubbed himself with his hands, his skin became pure
white. The dead skin which he rubbed off his body was placed on one side in a pile,
and by and by this pile became so large that he was annoyed and set himself to
consider what he could do with it.

Finally Melu decided to make the earth; so he worked very hard in putting the dead
skin into shape, and when it was finished he was so pleased with it that he determined
to make two beings like himself, though smaller, to live on it.

Taking the remnants of the material left after making the earth he fashioned two men,
but just as they were all finished except their noses, Tau Tana from below the earth
appeared and wanted to help him.

Melu did not wish any assistance, and a great argument ensued. Tau Tana finally won
his point and made the noses which he placed on the people upside down. When all
was finished, Melu and Tau Tana whipped the forms until they moved. Then Melu
went to his home above the clouds, and Tau Tana returned to his place below the
earth.

All went well until one day a great rain came, and the people on the earth nearly
drowned from the water which ran off their heads into their noses. Melu, from his
place on the clouds, saw their danger, and he came quickly to earth and saved their
lives by turning their noses the other side up.

The people were very grateful to him, and promised to do anything he should ask of
them. Before he left for the sky, they told him that they were very unhappy living on
the great earth all alone, so he told them to save all the hair from their heads and the
dry skin from their bodies and the next time he came he would make them some
companions. And in this way there came to be a great many people on the earth.

Source: https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/creation-phil.html#story
The Creation Story
Tagalog

When the world first began there was no land, but only the sea and the sky, and
between them was a kite (a bird something like a hawk). One day the bird which had
nowhere to light grew tired of flying about, so she stirred up the sea until it threw its
waters against the sky. The sky, in order to restrain the sea, showered upon it many
islands until it could no longer rise, but ran back and forth. Then the sky ordered the
kite to light on one of the islands to build her nest, and to leave the sea and the sky in
peace.

Now at this time the land breeze and the sea breeze were married, and they had a child
which was a bamboo. One day when this bamboo was floating about on the water, it
struck the feet of the kite which was on the beach. The bird, angry that anything
should strike it, pecked at the bamboo, and out of one section came a man and from
the other a woman.

Then the earthquake called on all the birds and fish to see what should be done with
these two, and it was decided that they should marry. Many children were born to the
couple, and from them came all the different races of people.

After a while the parents grew very tired of having so many idle and useless children
around, and they wished to be rid of them, but they knew of no place to send them to.
Time went on and the children became so numerous that the parents enjoyed no
peace. One day, in desperation, the father seized a stick and began beating them on all
sides.

This so frightened the children that they fled in different directions, seeking hidden
rooms in the house -- some concealed themselves in the walls, some ran outside, while
others hid in the fireplace, and several fled to the sea.

Now it happened that those who went into the hidden rooms of the house later became
the chiefs of the islands; and those who concealed themselves in the walls became
slaves. Those who ran outside were free men; and those who hid in the fireplace
became negroes; while those who fled to the sea were gone many years, and when
their children came back they were the white people.
The First Visayan Man and Woman

In the olden days, there lived in the heavens two gods, Kaptan and Maguayan.
Kaptan fell in love with Maguayan, and they were married. One day, Kaptan and
Maguayan had a quarrel as many couples do after the honeymoon. In a fit of anger,
Kaptan told his wife to go away. With a heavy heart, Maguayan left.

When the goddess was gone, the god Kaptan felt very lonely. He knew that he had
done his wife wrong; he had made an unjustifiably hasty decision, and this thought
bothered him. However, it was too late for him to ask to be forgiven. He scoured the
heavens, but his efforts were in vain; Maguayan was nowhere to be found. She had
vanished like smoke into thin air.

So, to while away his sorrows, the repentant god created the earth and planted
bamboo in a garden called Kahilwayan. He also planted other plants like rice, corn, and
sugarcane. Among these plants, the bamboo sprouted first. It grew to be a beautiful
tree with pliant branches and feathery leaves dancing to the rhythmic wafting of the
breeze.

Beholding the splendor of his creation, the great Kaptan was filled with happiness.
"Ah," he sighed, "were Maguayan here, she would enjoy this beautiful sight amid the
sighs of the breeze and the rustle of the leaves!"

The bamboo continued to grow. The garden became more beautiful each day. Then
one late afternoon, while Kaptan was watching the bamboo leaves play in the breeze, a
thought came to him, and, before he realized what it was all about, he was murmuring
to himself, "I will make creatures to take care of these plants for me."

No sooner had he spoken these words than the bamboo split into two halves. From
one stepped out the first man. To the man, Kaptan gave the name Sikalak, meaning
"the sturdy one." And from that time on, men have been called si lalak or lalaki for short.
From the other half stepped out a woman. The god called her Sikabay, meaning
"partner of the sturdy one." Thenceforth, women have been
called sibabaye or babaye for short.

Together, the two creatures tended the garden and took care of the plants.
Meanwhile, Kaptan left for a faraway place to look for Maguayan. One day, when the
god had left, Sikalak asked Sikabay to marry him. The woman, however, refused.
"Don't you know that you are my brother?" she reproved the man sternly.

"I know. But there are no other people in this garden," Sikalak argued. "And we
need children to help us take care of this wide place for our lord and master."

The woman was unmoved. "I know," she replied, "but you are my brother. We were
born of the same bamboo stalk, with only one node binding us."
 Finally, after much argument, they sought the advice of the tuna fish of the sea and
the doves of the air. The fish and doves approved of their marriage. Still unconvinced,
Sikabay consulted the earthquake, who also approved of the marriage.

"It is necessary," the earthquake said, "so that the earth will be populated."

So Sikalak and Sikabay were married. Their first child was a boy whom they named
Sibu. Then a daughter came, and they named her Samar.
The Santo Niño of Cebu

One day a poor fisherman went out early to the sea as usual. But the day turned out
to be a very unlucky one for him because, every time he cast his net, all he would catch
was a piece of firewood. Thrice the fisherman threw the firewood back to the sea; each
time he pulled in his net, the same piece of firewood would turn up.

Disgusted yet fascinated by what had happened, the fisherman took the driftwood
home with him. When he got home, he saw his wife drying palay on a mat out on their
yard. The fisherman threw the firewood on top of the palayand muttered to himself, "If
you are indeed a thing of magic, let's see you keep the birds and the chickens away
from this drying palay." Astonishingly, no bird or fowl came near the drying palay.
When evening came, the fisherman brought the piece of wood inside the house and
forgot all about it.

But that very night, the fisherman had a strange dream. He dreamed that the firewood
which he "caught" that morning had turned into a statue of a beautiful child. True
enough, when he awoke in the morning, he saw a strange transformation happening
before his eyes. The firewood had somehow taken on a form that looked like that of a
little child. As the days went by, the child's features became clearer and clearer until at
last it became the image of the Santo Niño as we would see it today.
The Legend of Daragang Mayon
Long ago in a place called Ibalon, there lived a beautiful maiden. Her name was
Daragang Magayon (the lovely one). She was the daughter of Makusog (the strong
one), chief of the tribe.

One day, Daragang Magayon strolled near the river. While crossing the river, she
stumbled on a rock and fell quickly in the water. She was swiftly swept down stream by
the current.
“Help! Help me!” she cried. Fortunately, her cries were heard by Pangaronon (the proud
one) and his bodyguard Amihan (the cold one). Pangaronon jumped into the river and
saved Daragang Magayon.

“Thank you for risking your life to save me”, she cried. “How can I repay you? My father
is the chief of our tribe. Surely, he will reward your heroism whatever it may take.”

Her beauty immediately captivated Pangaronon. He realized that he had finally met the
perfect woman for him. At the same time, Daragang Mayon was instantly attracted to
him.

Panganoron asked Makusog’s permission to marry Daragang Magayon. But Makusog

could not permit them to marry. Tribal law forbade marriage outside of the clan. As tribe
leader he had to enforce the law. Yet, as a father, he wanted to make his daughter
happy.

Meanwhile, Patuga (the eruptive one) learned about Panganoron’s intention. Patuga
was the most ardent suitor of Daragang Magayon. For years, he had been convincing
her to marry him, but to no avail.

One night, Patuga and his cohorts kidnapped Makusog. Then, he sent word to
Daragang Magayon that her father would die if she did not marry him. Without a choice,
she acceded. Only then did Patuga release Makusog. Soon Patuga and Daragang
Magayon were wed. But in the midst of the merrymaking, pandemonium broke out when
Panganoron and his men arrived. Fighting ensued between teh two tribes. In a few
minutes, Panganoron fatally struck Patuga. However, during the skirmish, a poisoned
arrow shot from nowhere, fell on Daragang Magayon’s breast.

Panganoron rushed to her aid and as he kneeled over the dying Daragang Magayon, an
enemy hacked his head off.

After the battle, Daragang Magayon was buried and her death was mourned all over the
land. Where she was put to rest, a mountain mysteriously appeared.
This mountain is now known as Mayon. It is said that even in death and in another form,
she is still haunted by the men who loved her. When Mayon is said to erupt, this is
Patuga challenging Panganoron. But when Mayon is calm, Panganoron is embracing
her. The tears of Panganoron are shed as rain at times in his grief.

Source: https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/creation-phil.html#story
KASAYSAYAN NG PASYONG MAHAL NI
HESUKRISTONG PANGINOON NATIN
(COPYRIGHT 1949 BY IGNACIO LUNA &
SONS)
Panalangin sa Diyos
Oh Diyos sa kalangitan
Hari ng sangkalupaan
Diyos na walang kapantay,
mabait lubhang maalam
at puno ng karunungan.
Ikaw ang Amang tibobos
ng nangungulilang lubos
amang di matapus-tapos,
maawi't mapagkupkop
sa taong lupa't alabok.
Iyong itulot sa amin
Diyos Amang maawain
mangyaring aming dalitin,
hirap, sakit at hilahil
ng Anak mong ginigiliw.
Panalangin sa Mahal na Birhen
At ikaw Birheng Maria
Ina't hari ng awa ka
bukod sa tanang sampaga,
di matuyo't di malanta
dikit mong kaaya-aya.
Ikaw rin po't siya lamang
Sedes Serpientine ang ngalan;
luklukan ng karunungan
at kaban kang sinusian
ng Diyos sa kalangitan.
Toreng walang pangalawa
ni David, bunying Propeta
bahay na ganitong sinadya,
pinamahayang talaga
ng ikalawang Persona.
Ikaw rin Birheng Mahal
bituin sa karagatan
mapag-aliw sa may lumbay,
kuta ng makasalanan
matibay sa katibayan.
Reynang walang kahulilip
ng sanlangitan angheles
pinupuring walang patid,
ng Tronos, Dominaciones,
Virtudes at Potestades.
Emperatris na mataas
ng Patriarkas, Propetas
Birheng walang makatulad,
bukod sa babaing lahat
ng nag-iwi sa Mesias.
Yayang ikaw ay di iba
batis ng Misericordia
binabalungan tuwi na,
ng awa't mahal na grasya
ng bunying tatlong persona.
Kami po ay uod lamang
sa lupa ay gumagapang
lipos ng dilang kasamaan,
Birhen, kundi mo tulungan anong aming
kapakanan?
The Indolence of the Filipino
Jose Rizal
Text courtesy of Project Gutenberg

DOCTOR Sancianco, in his Progreso de Filipinas, (1), has taken up this question, agitated, as he calls it, and, relying upon
facts and reports furnished by the very same Spanish authorities that rule the Philippines, has demonstrated that such
indolence does not exist, and that all said about it does not deserve reply or even passing notice. Nevertheless, as discussion
of it has been continued, not only by government employees who make it responsible for their own shortcomings, not only by
the friars who regard it as necessary in order that they may continue to represent, themselves as indispensable, but also by
serious and disinterested persons; and as evidence of greater or less weight may be adduced in opposition to that which Dr.
Sancianco cites, it seems expedient, to us to study this question thoroughly, without superciliousness or sensitiveness, without
prejudice, without pessimism. And as we can only serve our country by telling the truth, however bit, tee it be, just as a flat
and skilful negation cannot refute a real and positive fact, in spite of the brilliance of the arguments; as a mere affirmation is
not sufficient to create something impossible, let us calmly examine the facts, using on our part all the impartiality of which a
man is capable who is convinced that there is no redemption except upon solid bases of virtue.

The word indolence has been greatly misused in the sense of little love for work and lack of energy, while ridicule has
concealed the misuse. This much-discussed question has met with the same fate as certain panaceas and specifies of the
quacks who by ascribing to them impossible virtues have discredited them. In the Middle Ages, and even in some Catholic
countries now, the devil is blamed for everything that superstitious folk cannot understand or the perversity of mankind is
loath to confess. In the Philippines one's own and another's faults, the shortcomings of one, the misdeeds of another, are
attributed to indolence. And just as in the Middle Ages he who sought the explanation of phenomena outside of infernal
influences was persecuted, so in the Philippines worse happens to him who seeks the origin of the trouble outside of accepted
beliefs.

The consequence of this misuse is that there are some who are interested in stating it as a dogma and others in combating it as
a ridiculous superstition, if not a punishable delusion. Yet it is not to be inferred from the misuse of a thing that it does not
exist.

We think that there must be something behind all this outcry, for it is incredible that so many should err, among whom we
have said there are a lot of serious and disinterested persons. Some act in bad faith, through levity, through want of sound
judgment, through limitation in reasoning power, ignorance of the past, or other cause. Some repeat what they have heard,
without, examination or reflection; others speak through pessimism or are impelled by that human characteristic which paints
as perfect everything that belongs to oneself and defective whatever belongs to another. But it cannot be denied that there are
some who worship truth, or if not truth itself at least the semblance thereof, which is truth in the mind of the crowd.

Examining well, then, all the scenes and all the men that we have known from Childhood, and the life of our country, we
believe that indolence does exist there. The Filipinos, who can measure up with the most active peoples in the world, will
doubtless not repudiate this admission, for it is true that there one works and struggles against the climate, against nature and
against men. But we must not take the exception for the general rule, and should rather seek the good of our country by
stating what we believe to be true. We must confess that indolence does actually and positively exist there; only that, instead
of holding it to be the cause of the backwardness and the trouble, we regard it as the effect of the trouble and the
backwardness, by fostering the development of a lamentable predisposition.

Those who have as yet treated of indolence, with the exception of Dr. Sancianco, have been content to deny or affirm it. We
know of no one who has studied its causes. Nevertheless, those who admit its existence and exaggerate it more or less have
not therefore failed to advise remedies taken from here and there, from Java, from India, from other English or Dutch
colonies, like the quack who saw a fever cured with a dozen sardines and afterwards always prescribed these fish at every rise
in temperature that he discovered in his patients.
We shall proceed otherwise. Before proposing a remedy we shall examine the causes, and even though strictly speaking a
predisposition is not a cause, let us, however, study at its true value this predisposition due to nature.

The predisposition exists? Why shouldn't it?

A hot, climate requires of the individual quiet and rest, just as cold incites to labor and action. For this reason the Spaniard is
more indolent than the Frenchman; the Frenchman more so than the German. The Europeans themselves who reproach the
residents of the colonies so much (and I am not now speaking of the Spaniards but of the Germans and English themselves),
how do they live in tropical countries? Surrounded by a numerous train of servants, never going afoot but riding in a carriage,
needing servants not only to take off their shoes for them but even to fan them! And yet they live and eat better, they work for
themselves to get rich, with the hope of a future, free and respected, while the poor colonist, the indolent colonist, is badly
nourished, has no hope, toils for others, and works under force and compulsion! Perhaps the reply to this will be that white
men are not made to stand the severity of the climate. A mistake! A man can live in any climate, if he will only adapt himself
to its requirements and conditions. What kills the European in hot countries is the abuse of liquors, the attempt to live
according to the nature of his own country under another sky and another sun. We inhabitants of hot countries live well in
northern Europe whenever we take the precautions the people there do. Europeans can also stand the torrid zone, if only they
would get rid of their prejudices. (2) The fact is that in tropical countries violent work is not a good thing as it is in cold
countries, there it is death, destruction, annihilation. Nature knows this and like a just mother has therefore made the earth
more fertile, more productive, as a compensation. An hour's work under that burning sun, in the midst of pernicious
influences springing from nature in activity, is equal to a day's work in a temperate climate; it is, then, just that the earth yield
a hundred fold! Moreover, do we not see the active European, who has gained strength during the winter, who feels the fresh
blood of spring boil in his veins, do we not see him abandon his labors during the few days of his variable summer, close his
office--where the work is not violent and amounts for many to talking and gesticulating in the shade and beside a lunch-
stand,--flee to watering places, sit in the cafés or stroll about? What wonder then that the inhabitant of tropical countries,
worm out and with his blood thinned by the continuous and excessive heat, is reduced to inaction? Who is the indolent one in
the Manila offices? Is it the poor clerk who comes in at eight in the morning and leaves at, one in the afternoon with only his
parasol, who copies and writes and works for himself and for his chief, or is it the chief, who comes in a carriage at ten
o'clock, leaves before twelve, reads his newspaper while smoking and with is feet cocked up on a chair or a table, or
gossiping about all his friends? Which is indolent, the native coadjutor, poorly paid and badly treated, who has to visit all the
indigent sick living in the country, or the friar curate who gets fabulously rich, goes about in a carriage, eats and drinks well,
and does not put himself to any trouble without collecting excessive fees? [3]

Without speaking further of the Europeans, in what violent labor does the Chinaman engage in tropical countries, the
industrious Chinaman, who flees from his own country driven by hunger and want, and whose whole ambition is to amass a
small fortune? With the exception of some porters, an occupation that the natives also follow, he nearly always engages in
trade, in commerce; so rarely does he take up agriculture that we do not know of a single case. The Chinaman who in other
colonies cultivates the soil does so only for a certain number of years and then retires. [4]

We find, then, the tendency to indolence very natural, and have to admit and bless it, for we cannot alter natural laws, and
without it the race would have disappeared. Man is not a brute, he is not a, machine; his object is not merely to produce, in
spite of the pretensions of some Christian whites who would make of the colored Christian a kind of motive power somewhat
more intelligent and less costly than steam. Man's object is not to satisfy tile passions of another man, his object is to seek
happiness for himself and his kind by traveling along the road of progress and perfection.

The evil is not that indolence exists more or less latently but that it is fostered and magnified. Among men, as well as among
nations, there exist not only aptitudes but also tendencies toward good and evil. To foster the good ones and aid them, as well
as correct the evil and repress them, would be the duty of society and governments, if less noble thoughts did not occupy their
attention. The evil is that the indolence in the Philippines is a magnified indolence, an indolence of the snowball type, if we
may be permitted the expression, an evil that increases in direct proportion to the square of the periods of time, an effect of
misgovernment and of backwardness, as we said, and not a cause thereof. Others will hold the contrary opinion, especially
those who have a hand in the misgovernment, but we do not care; we have made an assertion and are going to prove it.
Blasted Hopes
Leona Florentino

What gladness and what joy

are endowed to one who is loved
for truly there is one to share
all his sufferings and his pain.

My fate is dim, my stars so low

perhaps nothing to it can compare,
for truly I do not doubt
for presently I suffer so.

For even I did love,

the beauty whom I desired
never do I fully realize
that I am worthy of her.

Shall I curse the hour

when first I saw the light of day
would it not have been better a thousand times
I had died when I was born.

Would I want to explain

but my tongue remains powerless
for now do I clearly see
to be spurned is my lot.

But would it be my greatest joy

to know that it is you I love,
for to you do I vow and a promise I make
it’s you alone for whom I would lay my life.
Dead Stars
Paz Marquez Benitez

THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room, quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very
thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to
crush--they lost concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of conversation issued from the
brick-tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were busy puttering away among the rose pots.

"Papa, and when will the 'long table' be set?"

"I don't know yet. Alfredo is not very specific, but I understand Esperanza wants it to be next month."

Carmen sighed impatiently. "Why is he not a bit more decided, I wonder. He is over thirty, is he not? And still a bachelor!
Esperanza must be tired waiting."

"She does not seem to be in much of a hurry either," Don Julian nasally commented, while his rose scissors busily snipped
away.

"How can a woman be in a hurry when the man does not hurry her?" Carmen returned, pinching off a worm with a careful,
somewhat absent air. "Papa, do you remember how much in love he was?"

"In love? With whom?"

"With Esperanza, of course. He has not had another love affair that I know of," she said with good-natured contempt.
"What I mean is that at the beginning he was enthusiastic--flowers, serenades, notes, and things like that--"

Alfredo remembered that period with a wonder not unmixed with shame. That was less than four years ago. He could not
understand those months of a great hunger that was not of the body nor yet of the mind, a craving that had seized on him
one quiet night when the moon was abroad and under the dappled shadow of the trees in the plaza, man wooed maid. Was
he being cheated by life? Love--he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of
perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love
life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the
eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.

Sitting quietly in his room now, he could almost revive the restlessness of those days, the feeling of tumultuous haste, such
as he knew so well in his boyhood when something beautiful was going on somewhere and he was trying to get there in
time to see. "Hurry, hurry, or you will miss it," someone had seemed to urge in his ears. So he had avidly seized on the
shadow of Love and deluded himself for a long while in the way of humanity from time immemorial. In the meantime, he
became very much engaged to Esperanza.

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed--the desire to crowd into a
moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when
but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed--
mortgaging the future--forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate.

"What do you think happened?" asked Carmen, pursuing her thought.

"I supposed long-engaged people are like that; warm now, cool tomorrow. I think they are oftener cool than warm. The
very fact that an engagement has been allowed to prolong itself argues a certain placidity of temperament--or of affection--
on the part of either, or both." Don Julian loved to philosophize. He was talking now with an evident relish in words, his
resonant, very nasal voice toned down to monologue pitch. "That phase you were speaking of is natural enough for a
beginning. Besides, that, as I see it, was Alfredo's last race with escaping youth--"

Carmen laughed aloud at the thought of her brother's perfect physical repose--almost indolence--disturbed in the role
suggested by her father's figurative language.

"A last spurt of hot blood," finished the old man.

Few certainly would credit Alfredo Salazar with hot blood. Even his friends had amusedly diagnosed his blood as cool and
thin, citing incontrovertible evidence. Tall and slender, he moved with an indolent ease that verged on grace. Under straight
recalcitrant hair, a thin face with a satisfying breadth of forehead, slow, dreamer's eyes, and astonishing freshness of lips--
indeed Alfredo Salazar's appearance betokened little of exuberant masculinity; rather a poet with wayward humor, a
fastidious artist with keen, clear brain.

He rose and quietly went out of the house. He lingered a moment on the stone steps; then went down the path shaded by
immature acacias, through the little tarred gate which he left swinging back and forth, now opening, now closing, on the
gravel road bordered along the farther side by madre cacao hedge in tardy lavender bloom.

The gravel road narrowed as it slanted up to the house on the hill, whose wide, open porches he could glimpse through the
heat-shrivelled tamarinds in the Martinez yard.

Six weeks ago that house meant nothing to him save that it was the Martinez house, rented and occupied by Judge del Valle
and his family. Six weeks ago Julia Salas meant nothing to him; he did not even know her name; but now--

One evening he had gone "neighboring" with Don Julian; a rare enough occurrence, since he made it a point to avoid all
appearance of currying favor with the Judge. This particular evening however, he had allowed himself to be persuaded. "A
little mental relaxation now and then is beneficial," the old man had said. "Besides, a judge's good will, you know;" the rest
of the thought--"is worth a rising young lawyer's trouble"--Don Julian conveyed through a shrug and a smile that derided his
own worldly wisdom.

A young woman had met them at the door. It was evident from the excitement of the Judge's children that she was a recent
and very welcome arrival. In the characteristic Filipino way formal introductions had been omitted--the judge limiting
himself to a casual "Ah, ya se conocen?"--with the consequence that Alfredo called her Miss del Valle throughout the
evening.

He was puzzled that she should smile with evident delight every time he addressed her thus. Later Don Julian informed him
that she was not the Judge's sister, as he had supposed, but his sister-in-law, and that her name was Julia Salas. A very
dignified rather austere name, he thought. Still, the young lady should have corrected him. As it was, he was greatly
embarrassed, and felt that he should explain.

To his apology, she replied, "That is nothing, Each time I was about to correct you, but I remembered a similar experience I
had once before."

"Oh," he drawled out, vastly relieved.

"A man named Manalang--I kept calling him Manalo. After the tenth time or so, the young man rose from his seat and said
suddenly, 'Pardon me, but my name is Manalang, Manalang.' You know, I never forgave him!"

He laughed with her.

"The best thing to do under the circumstances, I have found out," she pursued, "is to pretend not to hear, and to let the
other person find out his mistake without help."

"As you did this time. Still, you looked amused every time I--"

"I was thinking of Mr. Manalang."

Don Julian and his uncommunicative friend, the Judge, were absorbed in a game of chess. The young man had tired of
playing appreciative spectator and desultory conversationalist, so he and Julia Salas had gone off to chat in the vine-covered
porch. The lone piano in the neighborhood alternately tinkled and banged away as the player's moods altered. He listened,
and wondered irrelevantly if Miss Salas could sing; she had such a charming speaking voice.

He was mildly surprised to note from her appearance that she was unmistakably a sister of the Judge's wife, although Doña
Adela was of a different type altogether. She was small and plump, with wide brown eyes, clearly defined eyebrows, and
delicately modeled hips--a pretty woman with the complexion of a baby and the expression of a likable cow. Julia was taller,
not so obviously pretty. She had the same eyebrows and lips, but she was much darker, of a smooth rich brown with
underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality.

On Sunday mornings after mass, father and son would go crunching up the gravel road to the house on the hill. The Judge's
wife invariably offered them beer, which Don Julian enjoyed and Alfredo did not. After a half hour or so, the chessboard
would be brought out; then Alfredo and Julia Salas would go out to the porch to chat. She sat in the low hammock and he in
a rocking chair and the hours--warm, quiet March hours--sped by. He enjoyed talking with her and it was evident that she
liked his company; yet what feeling there was between them was so undisturbed that it seemed a matter of course. Only
when Esperanza chanced to ask him indirectly about those visits did some uneasiness creep into his thoughts of the girl
next door.

Esperanza had wanted to know if he went straight home after mass. Alfredo suddenly realized that for several Sundays now
he had not waited for Esperanza to come out of the church as he had been wont to do. He had been eager to go
"neighboring."

He answered that he went home to work. And, because he was not habitually untruthful, added, "Sometimes I go with Papa
to Judge del Valle's."

She dropped the topic. Esperanza was not prone to indulge in unprovoked jealousies. She was a believer in the regenerative
virtue of institutions, in their power to regulate feeling as well as conduct. If a man were married, why, of course, he loved
his wife; if he were engaged, he could not possibly love another woman.

That half-lie told him what he had not admitted openly to himself, that he was giving Julia Salas something which he was
not free to give. He realized that; yet something that would not be denied beckoned imperiously, and he followed on.

It was so easy to forget up there, away from the prying eyes of the world, so easy and so poignantly sweet. The beloved
woman, he standing close to her, the shadows around, enfolding.

"Up here I find--something--"

He and Julia Salas stood looking out into the she quiet night. Sensing unwanted intensity, laughed, woman-like, asking,
"Amusement?"

"No; youth--its spirit--"

"Are you so old?"

"And heart's desire."

Was he becoming a poet, or is there a poet lurking in the heart of every man?

"Down there," he had continued, his voice somewhat indistinct, "the road is too broad, too trodden by feet, too barren of
mystery."

"Down there" beyond the ancient tamarinds lay the road, upturned to the stars. In the darkness the fireflies glimmered,
while an errant breeze strayed in from somewhere, bringing elusive, faraway sounds as of voices in a dream.

"Mystery--" she answered lightly, "that is so brief--"

"Not in some," quickly. "Not in you."

"You have known me a few weeks; so the mystery."

"I could study you all my life and still not find it."

"So long?"

"I should like to."

Those six weeks were now so swift--seeming in the memory, yet had they been so deep in the living, so charged with
compelling power and sweetness. Because neither the past nor the future had relevance or meaning, he lived only the
present, day by day, lived it intensely, with such a willful shutting out of fact as astounded him in his calmer moments.

Just before Holy Week, Don Julian invited the judge and his family to spend Sunday afternoon at Tanda where he had a
coconut plantation and a house on the beach. Carmen also came with her four energetic children. She and Doña Adela
spent most of the time indoors directing the preparation of the merienda and discussing the likeable absurdities of their
husbands--how Carmen's Vicente was so absorbed in his farms that he would not even take time off to accompany her on
this visit to her father; how Doña Adela's Dionisio was the most absentminded of men, sometimes going out without his
collar, or with unmatched socks.

After the merienda, Don Julian sauntered off with the judge to show him what a thriving young coconut looked like--"plenty
of leaves, close set, rich green"--while the children, convoyed by Julia Salas, found unending entertainment in the rippling
sand left by the ebbing tide. They were far down, walking at the edge of the water, indistinctly outlined against the gray of
the out-curving beach.

Alfredo left his perch on the bamboo ladder of the house and followed. Here were her footsteps, narrow, arched. He
laughed at himself for his black canvas footwear which he removed forthwith and tossed high up on dry sand.

When he came up, she flushed, then smiled with frank pleasure.

"I hope you are enjoying this," he said with a questioning inflection.

"Very much. It looks like home to me, except that we do not have such a lovely beach."

There was a breeze from the water. It blew the hair away from her forehead, and whipped the tucked-up skirt around her
straight, slender figure. In the picture was something of eager freedom as of wings poised in flight. The girl had grace,
distinction. Her face was not notably pretty; yet she had a tantalizing charm, all the more compelling because it was an
inner quality, an achievement of the spirit. The lure was there, of naturalness, of an alert vitality of mind and body, of a
thoughtful, sunny temper, and of a piquant perverseness which is sauce to charm.

"The afternoon has seemed very short, hasn't it?" Then, "This, I think, is the last time--we can visit."

"The last? Why?"

"Oh, you will be too busy perhaps."

He noted an evasive quality in the answer.

"Do I seem especially industrious to you?"

"If you are, you never look it."

"Not perspiring or breathless, as a busy man ought to be."

"But--"

"Always unhurried, too unhurried, and calm." She smiled to herself.

"I wish that were true," he said after a meditative pause.

She waited.

"A man is happier if he is, as you say, calm and placid."

"Like a carabao in a mud pool," she retorted perversely

"Who? I?"

"Oh, no!"

"You said I am calm and placid."

"That is what I think."

"I used to think so too. Shows how little we know ourselves."

It was strange to him that he could be wooing thus: with tone and look and covert phrase.

"I should like to see your home town."

"There is nothing to see--little crooked streets, bunut roofs with ferns growing on them, and sometimes squashes."

That was the background. It made her seem less detached, less unrelated, yet withal more distant, as if that background
claimed her and excluded him.

"Nothing? There is you."

"Oh, me? But I am here."

"I will not go, of course, until you are there."

"Will you come? You will find it dull. There isn't even one American there!"

"Well--Americans are rather essential to my entertainment."

She laughed.

"We live on Calle Luz, a little street with trees."

"Could I find that?"

"If you don't ask for Miss del Valle," she smiled teasingly.

"I'll inquire about--"

"What?"

"The house of the prettiest girl in the town."

"There is where you will lose your way." Then she turned serious. "Now, that is not quite sincere."

"It is," he averred slowly, but emphatically.

"I thought you, at least, would not say such things."

"Pretty--pretty--a foolish word! But there is none other more handy I did not mean that quite--"

"Are you withdrawing the compliment?"

"Re-enforcing it, maybe. Something is pretty when it pleases the eye--it is more than that when--"

"If it saddens?" she interrupted hastily.

"Exactly."

"It must be ugly."

"Always?"

Toward the west, the sunlight lay on the dimming waters in a broad, glinting streamer of crimsoned gold.

"No, of course you are right."

"Why did you say this is the last time?" he asked quietly as they turned back.

"I am going home."

The end of an impossible dream!

"When?" after a long silence.

"Tomorrow. I received a letter from Father and Mother yesterday. They want me to spend Holy Week at home."

She seemed to be waiting for him to speak. "That is why I said this is the last time."

"Can't I come to say good-bye?"

"Oh, you don't need to!"

"No, but I want to."

"There is no time."

The golden streamer was withdrawing, shortening, until it looked no more than a pool far away at the rim of the world.
Stillness, a vibrant quiet that affects the senses as does solemn harmony; a peace that is not contentment but a cessation of
tumult when all violence of feeling tones down to the wistful serenity of regret. She turned and looked into his face, in her
dark eyes a ghost of sunset sadness.

"Home seems so far from here. This is almost like another life."

"I know. This is Elsewhere, and yet strange enough, I cannot get rid of the old things."

"Old things?"

"Oh, old things, mistakes, encumbrances, old baggage." He said it lightly, unwilling to mar the hour. He walked close, his
hand sometimes touching hers for one whirling second.

Don Julian's nasal summons came to them on the wind.

Alfredo gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the girl turned her face away, but he heard her voice say very
low, "Good-bye."

II

ALFREDO Salazar turned to the right where, farther on, the road broadened and entered the heart of the town--heart of
Chinese stores sheltered under low-hung roofs, of indolent drug stores and tailor shops, of dingy shoe-repairing
establishments, and a cluttered goldsmith's cubbyhole where a consumptive bent over a magnifying lens; heart of old brick-
roofed houses with quaint hand-and-ball knockers on the door; heart of grass-grown plaza reposeful with trees, of ancient
church and convento, now circled by swallows gliding in flight as smooth and soft as the afternoon itself. Into the quickly
deepening twilight, the voice of the biggest of the church bells kept ringing its insistent summons. Flocking came the devout
with their long wax candles, young women in vivid apparel (for this was Holy Thursday and the Lord was still alive), older
women in sober black skirts. Came too the young men in droves, elbowing each other under the talisay tree near the
church door. The gaily decked rice-paper lanterns were again on display while from the windows of the older houses hung
colored glass globes, heirlooms from a day when grasspith wicks floating in coconut oil were the chief lighting device.
Soon a double row of lights emerged from the church and uncoiled down the length of the street like a huge jewelled band
studded with glittering clusters where the saints' platforms were. Above the measured music rose the untutored voices of
the choir, steeped in incense and the acrid fumes of burning wax.

The sight of Esperanza and her mother sedately pacing behind Our Lady of Sorrows suddenly destroyed the illusion of
continuity and broke up those lines of light into component individuals. Esperanza stiffened self-consciously, tried to look
unaware, and could not.

The line moved on.

Suddenly, Alfredo's slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming down the line--a girl that was striking,
and vividly alive, the woman that could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed ordering of
his life.

Her glance of abstracted devotion fell on him and came to a brief stop.

The line kept moving on, wending its circuitous route away from the church and then back again, where, according to the
old proverb, all processions end.

At last Our Lady of Sorrows entered the church, and with her the priest and the choir, whose voices now echoed from the
arched ceiling. The bells rang the close of the procession.

A round orange moon, "huge as a winnowing basket," rose lazily into a clear sky, whitening the iron roofs and dimming the
lanterns at the windows. Along the still densely shadowed streets the young women with their rear guard of males loitered
and, maybe, took the longest way home.

Toward the end of the row of Chinese stores, he caught up with Julia Salas. The crowd had dispersed into the side streets,
leaving Calle Real to those who lived farther out. It was past eight, and Esperanza would be expecting him in a little while:
yet the thought did not hurry him as he said "Good evening" and fell into step with the girl.

"I had been thinking all this time that you had gone," he said in a voice that was both excited and troubled.

"No, my sister asked me to stay until they are ready to go."

"Oh, is the Judge going?"

"Yes."

The provincial docket had been cleared, and Judge del Valle had been assigned elsewhere. As lawyer--and as lover--Alfredo
had found that out long before.

"Mr. Salazar," she broke into his silence, "I wish to congratulate you."

Her tone told him that she had learned, at last. That was inevitable.

"For what?"

"For your approaching wedding."

Some explanation was due her, surely. Yet what could he say that would not offend?
"I should have offered congratulations long before, but you know mere visitors are slow about getting the news," she
continued.

He listened not so much to what she said as to the nuances in her voice. He heard nothing to enlighten him, except that she
had reverted to the formal tones of early acquaintance. No revelation there; simply the old voice--cool, almost detached
from personality, flexible and vibrant, suggesting potentialities of song.

"Are weddings interesting to you?" he finally brought out quietly

"When they are of friends, yes."

"Would you come if I asked you?"

"When is it going to be?"

"May," he replied briefly, after a long pause.

"May is the month of happiness they say," she said, with what seemed to him a shade of irony.

"They say," slowly, indifferently. "Would you come?"

"Why not?"

"No reason. I am just asking. Then you will?"

"If you will ask me," she said with disdain.

"Then I ask you."

"Then I will be there."

The gravel road lay before them; at the road's end the lighted windows of the house on the hill. There swept over the spirit
of Alfredo Salazar a longing so keen that it was pain, a wish that, that house were his, that all the bewilderments of the
present were not, and that this woman by his side were his long wedded wife, returning with him to the peace of home.

"Julita," he said in his slow, thoughtful manner, "did you ever have to choose between something you wanted to do and
something you had to do?"

"No!"

"I thought maybe you had had that experience; then you could understand a man who was in such a situation."

"You are fortunate," he pursued when she did not answer.

"Is--is this man sure of what he should do?"

"I don't know, Julita. Perhaps not. But there is a point where a thing escapes us and rushes downward of its own weight,
dragging us along. Then it is foolish to ask whether one will or will not, because it no longer depends on him."
"But then why--why--" her muffled voice came. "Oh, what do I know? That is his problem after all."

"Doesn't it--interest you?"

"Why must it? I--I have to say good-bye, Mr. Salazar; we are at the house."

Without lifting her eyes she quickly turned and walked away.

Had the final word been said? He wondered. It had. Yet a feeble flutter of hope trembled in his mind though set against that
hope were three years of engagement, a very near wedding, perfect understanding between the parents, his own
conscience, and Esperanza herself--Esperanza waiting, Esperanza no longer young, Esperanza the efficient, the literal-
minded, the intensely acquisitive.

He looked attentively at her where she sat on the sofa, appraisingly, and with a kind of aversion which he tried to control.

She was one of those fortunate women who have the gift of uniformly acceptable appearance. She never surprised one
with unexpected homeliness nor with startling reserves of beauty. At home, in church, on the street, she was always
herself, a woman past first bloom, light and clear of complexion, spare of arms and of breast, with a slight convexity to thin
throat; a woman dressed with self-conscious care, even elegance; a woman distinctly not average.

She was pursuing an indignant relation about something or other, something about Calixta, their note-carrier, Alfredo
perceived, so he merely half-listened, understanding imperfectly. At a pause he drawled out to fill in the gap: "Well, what of
it?" The remark sounded ruder than he had intended.

"She is not married to him," Esperanza insisted in her thin, nervously pitched voice. "Besides, she should have thought of
us. Nanay practically brought her up. We never thought she would turn out bad."

What had Calixta done? Homely, middle-aged Calixta?

"You are very positive about her badness," he commented dryly. Esperanza was always positive.

"But do you approve?"

"Of what?"

"What she did."

"No," indifferently.

"Well?"

He was suddenly impelled by a desire to disturb the unvexed orthodoxy of her mind. "All I say is that it is not necessarily
wicked."

"Why shouldn't it be? You talked like an--immoral man. I did not know that your ideas were like that."

"My ideas?" he retorted, goaded by a deep, accumulated exasperation. "The only test I wish to apply to conduct is the test
of fairness. Am I injuring anybody? No? Then I am justified in my conscience. I am right. Living with a man to whom she is
not married--is that it? It may be wrong, and again it may not."
"She has injured us. She was ungrateful." Her voice was tight with resentment.

"The trouble with you, Esperanza, is that you are--" he stopped, appalled by the passion in his voice.

"Why do you get angry? I do not understand you at all! I think I know why you have been indifferent to me lately. I am not
blind, or deaf; I see and hear what perhaps some are trying to keep from me." The blood surged into his very eyes and his
hearing sharpened to points of acute pain. What would she say next?

"Why don't you speak out frankly before it is too late? You need not think of me and of what people will say." Her voice
trembled.

Alfredo was suffering as he could not remember ever having suffered before. What people will say--what will they not say?
What don't they say when long engagements are broken almost on the eve of the wedding?

"Yes," he said hesitatingly, diffidently, as if merely thinking aloud, "one tries to be fair--according to his lights--but it is hard.
One would like to be fair to one's self first. But that is too easy, one does not dare--"

"What do you mean?" she asked with repressed violence. "Whatever my shortcomings, and no doubt they are many in your
eyes, I have never gone out of my way, of my place, to find a man."

Did she mean by this irrelevant remark that he it was who had sought her; or was that a covert attack on Julia Salas?

"Esperanza--" a desperate plea lay in his stumbling words. "If you--suppose I--" Yet how could a mere man word such a
plea?

"If you mean you want to take back your word, if you are tired of--why don't you tell me you are tired of me?" she burst out
in a storm of weeping that left him completely shamed and unnerved.

The last word had been said.

III

AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling over the lake, he wondered if Esperanza would
attribute any significance to this trip of his. He was supposed to be in Sta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the
Philippine Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been if Brigida Samuy had not been so important
to the defense. He had to find that elusive old woman. That the search was leading him to that particular lake town which
was Julia Salas' home should not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed to a degree utterly out of proportion to the
prosaicalness of his errand. That inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight years he had become used to such
occasional storms. He had long realized that he could not forget Julia Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to
remember too much. The climber of mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness, and the chill, finds a
certain restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He looks up sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of
evening, but he knows he must not heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up.

He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of capitulation to what he recognized as irresistible
forces of circumstance and of character. His life had simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no more stirring up of
emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment he derived a strange solace. The essential
himself, the himself that had its being in the core of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When
claims encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness, and from that vantage he
saw things and people around him as remote and alien, as incidents that did not matter. At such times did Esperanza feel
baffled and helpless; he was gentle, even tender, but immeasurably far away, beyond her reach.

Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted town nestling in the dark greenness of the
groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the ancient church. On the outskirts the evening smudges glowed red through
the sinuous mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in the purple shadows of the hills. There was a young moon which
grew slowly luminous as the coral tints in the sky yielded to the darker blues of evening.

The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing a wake of long golden ripples on the dark water. Peculiar hill inflections
came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet the boat--slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lake-
shore speech. From where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether
the presidente was there to meet him or not. Just then a voice shouted.

"Is the abogado there? Abogado!"

"What abogado?" someone irately asked.

That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.

It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with Brigida Samuy--Tandang "Binday"--that noon
for Santa Cruz. Señor Salazar's second letter had arrived late, but the wife had read it and said, "Go and meet
the abogado and invite him to our house."

Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board since the boat would leave at four the next
morning anyway. So the presidente had received his first letter? Alfredo did not know because that official had not sent an
answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could not write because we heard that Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so
we went there to find her."

San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do something for him. It was not every day
that one met with such willingness to help.

Eight o'clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into a somnolent quiet. A cot had been
brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare to be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he would walk
around the town. His heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the rafts made fast to sundry piles driven into the
water.

How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim light issuing forlornly through the single
window which served as counter. An occasional couple sauntered by, the women's chinelasmaking scraping sounds. From a
distance came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street--tubigan perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken." The
thought of Julia Salas in that quiet place filled him with a pitying sadness.

How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything to her? That unforgettable red-and-gold
afternoon in early April haunted him with a sense of incompleteness as restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not
married--why? Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory. It was something unvolitional,
maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability. Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices
in a dream--at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an insistent, unfinished prayer.

A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young moon wove indistinct filigrees of fight and
shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw its angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight
the cock's first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz.
Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she would surely be sitting at the window. Where
else, before bedtime on a moonlit night? The house was low and the light in the sala behind her threw her head into
unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise.

"Good evening," he said, raising his hat.

"Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?"

"On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.

"Won't you come up?"

He considered. His vague plans had not included this. But Julia Salas had left the window, calling to her mother as she did
so. After a while, someone came downstairs with a lighted candle to open the door. At last--he was shaking her hand.

She had not changed much--a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet something had gone. He missed it, sitting opposite
her, looking thoughtfully into her fine dark eyes. She asked him about the home town, about this and that, in a sober,
somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with a growing wonder that he should be there at
all. He could not take his eyes from her face. What had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity
creeping into his gaze. The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a blush.

Gently--was it experimentally?--he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt undisturbed and emotionless. Did she still
care? The answer to the question hardly interested him.

The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a star-studded sky.

So that was all over.

Why had he obstinately clung to that dream?

So all these years--since when?--he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their
appointed places in the heavens.

An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of the heart far away
where faded gardens bloom again, and where live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves of vanished youth.

This is the 1925 short story that gave birth to modern Philippine writing in English.
Footnote to Youth
(Jose Garcia Villa)

The sun was salmon and hazy in the west. Dodong thought to himself he would tell his father about Teang when he got
home, after he had unhitched the carabao from the plow, and let it to its shed and fed it. He was hesitant about saying it,
but he wanted his father to know. What he had to say was of serious import as it would mark a climacteric in his life.
Dodong finally decided to tell it, at a thought came to him his father might refuse to consider it. His father was silent hard-
working farmer who chewed areca nut, which he had learned to do from his mother, Dodong's grandmother.

I will tell it to him. I will tell it to him.

The ground was broken up into many fresh wounds and fragrant with a sweetish earthy smell. Many slender soft worms
emerged from the furrows and then burrowed again deeper into the soil. A short colorless worm marched blindly to
Dodong's foot and crawled calmly over it. Dodong go tickled and jerked his foot, flinging the worm into the air. Dodong did
not bother to look where it fell, but thought of his age, seventeen, and he said to himself he was not young any more.

Dodong unhitched the carabao leisurely and gave it a healthy tap on the hip. The beast turned its head to look at him with
dumb faithful eyes. Dodong gave it a slight push and the animal walked alongside him to its shed. He placed bundles of
grass before it land the carabao began to eat. Dodong looked at it without interests.

Dodong started homeward, thinking how he would break his news to his father. He wanted to marry, Dodong did. He was
seventeen, he had pimples on his face, the down on his upper lip already was dark--these meant he was no longer a boy. He
was growing into a man--he was a man. Dodong felt insolent and big at the thought of it although he was by nature low in
statue. Thinking himself a man grown, Dodong felt he could do anything.

He walked faster, prodded by the thought of his virility. A small angled stone bled his foot, but he dismissed it cursorily. He
lifted his leg and looked at the hurt toe and then went on walking. In the cool sundown he thought wild you dreams of
himself and Teang. Teang, his girl. She had a small brown face and small black eyes and straight glossy hair. How desirable
she was to him. She made him dream even during the day.

Dodong tensed with desire and looked at the muscles of his arms. Dirty. This field
work was healthy, invigorating but it begrimed you, smudged you terribly. He turned back the way he had come, then he
marched obliquely to a creek.

Dodong stripped himself and laid his clothes, a gray undershirt and red kundiman shorts, on the grass. The he went into the
water, wet his body over, and rubbed at it vigorously. He was not long in bathing, then he marched homeward again. The
bath made him feel cool.

It was dusk when he reached home. The petroleum lamp on the ceiling already was lighted and the low unvarnished square
table was set for supper. His parents and he sat down on the floor around the table to eat. They had fried fresh-water fish,
rice, bananas, and caked sugar.

Dodong ate fish and rice, but did not partake of the fruit. The bananas were overripe and when one held them they felt
more fluid than solid. Dodong broke off a piece of the cakes sugar, dipped it in his glass of water and ate it. He got another
piece and wanted some more, but he thought of leaving the remainder for his parents.

Dodong's mother removed the dishes when they were through and went out to the batalan to wash them. She walked with
slow careful steps and Dodong wanted to help her carry the dishes out, but he was tired and now felt lazy. He wished as he
looked at her that he had a sister who could help his mother in the housework. He pitied her, doing all the housework
alone.

His father remained in the room, sucking a diseased tooth. It was paining him again, Dodong knew. Dodong had told him
often and again to let the town dentist pull it out, but he was afraid, his father was. He did not tell that to Dodong, but
Dodong guessed it. Afterward Dodong himself thought that if he had a decayed tooth he would be afraid to go to the
dentist; he would not be any bolder than his father.

Dodong said while his mother was out that he was going to marry Teang. There it was out, what he had to say, and over
which he had done so much thinking. He had said it without any effort at all and without self-consciousness. Dodong felt
relieved and looked at his father expectantly. A decrescent moon outside shed its feeble light into the window, graying the
still black temples of his father. His father looked old now.

"I am going to marry Teang," Dodong said.

His father looked at him silently and stopped sucking the broken tooth. The silence became intense and cruel, and Dodong
wished his father would suck that troublous tooth again. Dodong was uncomfortable and then became angry because his
father kept looking at him without uttering anything.

"I will marry Teang," Dodong repeated. "I will marry Teang."

His father kept gazing at him in inflexible silence and Dodong fidgeted on his seat.

"I asked her last night to marry me and she said...yes. I want your permission. I... want... it...." There was
impatient clamor in his voice, an exacting protest at this coldness, this indifference. Dodong looked at his father sourly. He
cracked his knuckles one by one, and the little sounds it made broke dully the night stillness.

"Must you marry, Dodong?"

Dodong resented his father's questions; his father himself had married. Dodong made a quick impassioned easy in his mind
about selfishness, but later he got confused.

"You are very young, Dodong."

"I'm... seventeen."

"That's very young to get married at."

"I... I want to marry...Teang's a good girl."

"Tell your mother," his father said.

"You tell her, tatay."

"Dodong, you tell your inay."

"You tell her."

"All right, Dodong."

"You will let me marry Teang?"

"Son, if that is your wish... of course..." There was a strange helpless light in his father's eyes. Dodong did not read it,
so absorbed was he in himself.

Dodong was immensely glad he had asserted himself. He lost his resentment for his father. For a while he even felt sorry for
him about the diseased tooth. Then he confined his mind to dreaming of Teang and himself. Sweet young dream....
Dodong stood in the sweltering noon heat, sweating profusely, so that his camiseta was damp. He was still as a tree and his
thoughts were confused. His mother had told him not to leave the house, but he had left. He had wanted to get out of it
without clear reason at all. He was afraid, he felt. Afraid of the house. It had seemed to cage him, to compares his thoughts
with severe tyranny. Afraid also of Teang. Teang was giving birth in the house; she gave screams that chilled his blood. He
did not want her to scream like that, he seemed to be rebuking him. He began to wonder madly if the process
of childbirth was really painful. Some women, when they gave birth, did not cry.

In a few moments he would be a father. "Father, father," he whispered the word with awe, with strangeness. He was
young, he realized now, contradicting himself of nine months comfortable... "Your son," people would soon be telling him.
"Your son, Dodong."

Dodong felt tired standing. He sat down on a saw-horse with his feet close together. He looked at his callused toes. Suppose
he had ten children... What made him think that? What was the matter with him? God!

He heard his mother's voice from the house:

"Come up, Dodong. It is over."

Suddenly he felt terribly embarrassed as he looked at her. Somehow he was ashamed to his mother of his youthful
paternity. It made him feel guilty, as if he had taken something no properly his. He dropped his eyes and pretended to dust
dirt off his kundiman shorts.

"Dodong," his mother called again. "Dodong."

He turned to look again and this time saw his father beside his mother.

"It is a boy," his father said. He beckoned Dodong to come up.

Dodong felt more embarrassed and did not move. What a moment for him. His parents' eyes seemed to pierce him through
and he felt limp.

He wanted to hide from them, to run away.

"Dodong, you come up. You come up," he mother said.

Dodong did not want to come up and stayed in the sun.

"Dodong. Dodong."

"I'll... come up."

Dodong traced tremulous steps on the dry parched yard. He ascended the bamboo steps slowly. His heart pounded
mercilessly in him. Within, he avoided his parents eyes. He walked ahead of them so that they should not see his face. He
felt guilty and untrue. He felt like crying. His eyes smarted and his chest wanted to burst. He wanted to turn back, to go
back to the yard. He wanted somebody to punish him.

His father thrust his hand in his and gripped it gently.

"Son," his father said.

And his mother: "Dodong..."

How kind were their voices. They flowed into him, making him strong.

"Teang?" Dodong said.

"She's sleeping. But you go on..."

His father led him into the small sawali room. Dodong saw Teang, his girl-wife, asleep on the papag with her black hair soft
around her face. He did not want her to look that pale.

Dodong wanted to touch her, to push away that stray wisp of hair that touched her lips, but again that feeling of
embarrassment came over him and before his parents he did not want to be demonstrative.

The hilot was wrapping the child, Dodong heard it cry. The thin voice pierced him queerly. He could not control the swelling
of happiness in him.

“You give him to me. You give him to me," Dodong said.

Blas was not Dodong's only child. Many more children came. For six successive years a new child came along. Dodong did
not want any more children, but they came. It seemed the coming of children could not be helped. Dodong got angry with
himself sometimes.

Teang did not complain, but the bearing of children told on her. She was shapeless and thin now, even if she was young.
There was interminable work to be done. Cooking. Laundering. The house. The children. She cried sometimes, wishing she
had not married. She did not tell Dodong this, not wishing him to dislike her. Yet she wished she had not married. Not even
Dodong, whom she loved. There has been another suitor, Lucio, older than Dodong by nine years, and that was why she
had chosen Dodong. Young Dodong. Seventeen. Lucio had married another after her marriage to Dodong, but he was
childless until now. She wondered if she had married Lucio, would she have borne him children. Maybe not, either. That
was a better lot. But she loved Dodong...

Dodong whom life had made ugly.

One night, as he lay beside his wife, he rose and went out of the house. He stood in the moonlight, tired and querulous. He
wanted to ask questions and somebody to answer him. He w anted to be wise about many things.

One of them was why life did not fulfill all of Youth's dreams. Why it must be so. Why one was forsaken... after Love.

Dodong would not find the answer. Maybe the question was not to be answered. It must be so to make youth Youth. Youth
must be dreamfully sweet. Dreamfully sweet. Dodong returned to the house humiliated by himself. He had wanted to know
a little wisdom but was denied it.

When Blas was eighteen he came home one night very flustered and happy. It was late at night and Teang and the other
children were asleep. Dodong heard Blas's steps, for he could not sleep well of nights. He watched Blas undress in the dark
and lie down softly. Blas was restless on his mat and could not sleep. Dodong called him name and asked why he did not
sleep. Blas said he could not sleep.

"You better go to sleep. It is late," Dodong said.

Blas raised himself on his elbow and muttered something in a low fluttering voice.

Dodong did not answer and tried to sleep.

"Itay ...," Blas called softly.

Dodong stirred and asked him what it was.

"I am going to marry Tona. She accepted me tonight."

Dodong lay on the red pillow without moving.

"Itay, you think it over."

Dodong lay silent.

"I love Tona and... I want her."

Dodong rose from his mat and told Blas to follow him. They descended to the yard, where everything was still and quiet.
The moonlight was cold and white.

"You want to marry Tona," Dodong said. He did not want Blas to marry yet. Blas was very young. The life that would follow
marriage would be hard...

"Yes."

"Must you marry?"

Blas's voice stilled with resentment. "I will marry Tona."

Dodong kept silent, hurt.

"You have objections, Itay?" Blas asked acridly.

"Son... n-none..." (But truly, God, I don't want Blas to marry yet... not yet. I don't want Blas to marry yet....)

But he was helpless. He could not do anything. Youth must triumph... now. Love must triumph... now. Afterwards... it will
be life.

As long ago Youth and Love did triumph for Dodong... and then Life.

Dodong looked wistfully at his young son in the moonlight. He felt extremely sad and sorry for him.
 How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife

(American Colonial Literature)

By Manuel E. Arguilla

She stepped down from the carretela of Ca Celin with a quick, delicate grace. She was lovely. She was tall. She looked up to
my brother with a smile, and her forehead was on a level with his mouth.

"You are Baldo," she said and placed her hand lightly on my shoulder. Her nails were long, but they were not painted. She
was fragrant like a morning when papayas are in bloom. And a small dimple appeared momently high on her right cheek.
"And this is Labang of whom I have heard so much." She held the wrist of one hand with the other and looked at Labang,
and Labang never stopped chewing his cud. He swallowed and brought up to his mouth more cud and the sound of his
insides was like a drum.

I laid a hand on Labang's massive neck and said to her: "You may scratch his forehead now."

She hesitated and I saw that her eyes were on the long, curving horns. But she came and touched Labang's forehead with
her long fingers, and Labang never stopped chewing his cud except that his big eyes half closed. And by and by she was
scratching his forehead very daintily.

My brother Leon put down the two trunks on the grassy side of the road. He paid Ca Celin twice the usual fare from the
station to the edge of Nagrebcan. Then he was standing beside us, and she turned to him eagerly. I watched Ca Celin,
where he stood in front of his horse, and he ran his fingers through its forelock and could not keep his eyes away from her.

"Maria---" my brother Leon said.

He did not say Maring. He did not say Mayang. I knew then that he had always called her Maria and that to us all she would
be Maria; and in my mind I said 'Maria' and it was a beautiful name.

"Yes, Noel."

Now where did she get that name? I pondered the matter quietly to myself, thinking Father might not like it. But it was only
the name of my brother Leon said backward and it sounded much better that way.

"There is Nagrebcan, Maria," my brother Leon said, gesturing widely toward the west.

She moved close to him and slipped her arm through his. And after a while she said quietly.

"You love Nagrebcan, don't you, Noel?"

Ca Celin drove away hi-yi-ing to his horse loudly. At the bend of the camino real where the big duhat tree grew, he rattled
the handle of his braided rattan whip against the spokes of the wheel.

We stood alone on the roadside.

The sun was in our eyes, for it was dipping into the bright sea. The sky was wide and deep and very blue above us: but along
the saw-tooth rim of the Katayaghan hills to the southwest flamed huge masses of clouds. Before us the fields swam in a
golden haze through which floated big purple and red and yellow bubbles when I looked at the sinking sun. Labang's white
coat, which I had wshed and brushed that morning with coconut husk, glistened like beaten cotton under the lamplight and
his horns appeared tipped with fire.
He faced the sun and from his mouth came a call so loud and vibrant that the earth seemed to tremble underfoot. And far
away in the middle of the field a cow lowed softly in answer.

"Hitch him to the cart, Baldo," my brother Leon said, laughing, and she laughed with him a big uncertainly, and I saw that he
had put his arm around her shoulders.

"Why does he make that sound?" she asked. "I have never heard the like of it."

"There is not another like it," my brother Leon said. "I have yet to hear another bull call like Labang. In all the world there is
no other bull like him."

She was smiling at him, and I stopped in the act of tying the sinta across Labang's neck to the opposite end of the yoke,
because her teeth were very white, her eyes were so full of laughter, and there was the small dimple high up on her right
cheek.

"If you continue to talk about him like that, either I shall fall in love with him or become greatly jealous."

My brother Leon laughed and she laughed and they looked at each other and it seemed to me there was a world of
laughter between them and in them.

I climbed into the cart over the wheel and Labang would have bolted, for he was always like that, but I kept a firm hold on
his rope. He was restless and would not stand still, so that my brother Leon had to say "Labang" several times. When he
was quiet again, my brother Leon lifted the trunks into the cart, placing the smaller on top.

She looked down once at her high-heeled shoes, then she gave her left hand to my brother Leon, placed a foot on the hub
of the wheel, and in one breath she had swung up into the cart. Oh, the fragrance of her. But Labang was fairly dancing with
impatience and it was all I could do to keep him from running away.

"Give me the rope, Baldo," my brother Leon said. "Maria, sit down on the hay and hold on to anything." Then he put a foot
on the left shaft and that instand labang leaped forward. My brother Leon laughed as he drew himself up to the top of the
side of the cart and made the slack of the rope hiss above the back of labang. The wind whistled against my cheeks and the
rattling of the wheels on the pebbly road echoed in my ears.

She sat up straight on the bottom of the cart, legs bent togther to one side, her skirts spread over them so that only the
toes and heels of her shoes were visible. her eyes were on my brother Leon's back; I saw the wind on her hair. When
Labang slowed down, my brother Leon handed to me the rope. I knelt on the straw inside the cart and pulled on the rope
until Labang was merely shuffling along, then I made him turn around.

"What is it you have forgotten now, Baldo?" my brother Leon said.

I did not say anything but tickled with my fingers the rump of Labang; and away we went---back to where I had unhitched
and waited for them. The sun had sunk and down from the wooded sides of the Katayaghan hills shadows were stealing
into the fields. High up overhead the sky burned with many slow fires.

When I sent Labang down the deep cut that would take us to the dry bed of the Waig which could be used as a path to our
place during the dry season, my brother Leon laid a hand on my shoulder and said sternly:

"Who told you to drive through the fields tonight?"

His hand was heavy on my shoulder, but I did not look at him or utter a word until we were on the rocky bottom of the
Waig.
"Baldo, you fool, answer me before I lay the rope of Labang on you. Why do you follow the Wait instead of the camino
real?"

His fingers bit into my shoulder.

"Father, he told me to follow the Waig tonight, Manong."

Swiftly, his hand fell away from my shoulder and he reached for the rope of Labang. Then my brother Leon laughed, and he
sat back, and laughing still, he said:

"And I suppose Father also told you to hitch Labang to the cart and meet us with him instead of with Castano and the
calesa."

Without waiting for me to answer, he turned to her and said, "Maria, why do you think Father should do that, now?" He
laughed and added, "Have you ever seen so many stars before?"

I looked back and they were sitting side by side, leaning against the trunks, hands clasped across knees. Seemingly, but a
man's height above the tops of the steep banks of the Wait, hung the stars. But in the deep gorge the shadows had fallen
heavily, and even the white of Labang's coat was merely a dim, grayish blur. Crickets chirped from their homes in the cracks
in the banks. The thick, unpleasant smell of dangla bushes and cooling sun-heated earth mingled with the clean, sharp scent
of arrais roots exposed to the night air and of the hay inside the cart.

"Look, Noel, yonder is our star!" Deep surprise and gladness were in her voice. Very low in the west, almost touching the
ragged edge of the bank, was the star, the biggest and brightest in the sky.

"I have been looking at it," my brother Leon said. "Do you remember how I would tell you that when you want to see stars
you must come to Nagrebcan?"

"Yes, Noel," she said. "Look at it," she murmured, half to herself. "It is so many times bigger and brighter than it was at
Ermita beach."

"The air here is clean, free of dust and smoke."

"So it is, Noel," she said, drawing a long breath.

"Making fun of me, Maria?"

She laughed then and they laughed together and she took my brother Leon's hand and put it against her face.

I stopped Labang, climbed down, and lighted the lantern that hung from the cart between the wheels.

"Good boy, Baldo," my brother Leon said as I climbed back into the cart, and my heart sant.

Now the shadows took fright and did not crowd so near. Clumps of andadasi and arrais flashed into view and quickly
disappeared as we passed by. Ahead, the elongated shadow of Labang bobbled up and down and swayed drunkenly from
side to side, for the lantern rocked jerkily with the cart.

"Have we far to go yet, Noel?" she asked.

"Ask Baldo," my brother Leon said, "we have been neglecting him."

"I am asking you, Baldo," she said.

Without looking back, I answered, picking my words slowly:

"Soon we will get out of the Wait and pass into the fields. After the fields is home---Manong."

"So near already."

I did not say anything more because I did not know what to make of the tone of her voice as she said her last words. All the
laughter seemed to have gone out of her. I waited for my brother Leon to say something, but he was not saying anything.
Suddenly he broke out into song and the song was 'Sky Sown with Stars'---the same that he and Father sang when we cut
hay in the fields at night before he went away to study. He must have taught her the song because she joined him, and her
voice flowed into his like a gentle stream meeting a stronger one. And each time the wheels encountered a big rock, her
voice would catch in her throat, but my brother Leon would sing on, until, laughing softly, she would join him again.

Then we were climbing out into the fields, and through the spokes of the wheels the light of the lantern mocked the
shadows. Labang quickened his steps. The jolting became more frequent and painful as we crossed the low dikes.

"But it is so very wide here," she said. The light of the stars broke and scattered the darkness so that one could see far on
every side, though indistinctly.

"You miss the houses, and the cars, and the people and the noise, don't you?" My brother Leon stopped singing.

"Yes, but in a different way. I am glad they are not here."

With difficulty I turned Labang to the left, for he wanted to go straight on. He was breathing hard, but I knew he was more
thirsty than tired. In a little while we drope up the grassy side onto the camino real.

"---you see," my brother Leon was explaining, "the camino real curves around the foot of the Katayaghan hills and passes by
our house. We drove through the fields because---but I'll be asking Father as soon as we get home."

"Noel," she said.

"Yes, Maria."

"I am afraid. He may not like me."

"Does that worry you still, Maria?" my brother Leon said. "From the way you talk, he might be an ogre, for all the world.
Except when his leg that was wounded in the Revolution is troubling him, Father is the mildest-tempered, gentlest man I
know."

We came to the house of Lacay Julian and I spoke to Labang loudly, but Moning did not come to the window, so I surmised
she must be eating with the rest of her family. And I thought of the food being made ready at home and my mouth
watered. We met the twins, Urong and Celin, and I said "Hoy!" calling them by name. And they shouted back and asked if
my brother Leon and his wife were with me. And my brother Leon shouted to them and then told me to make Labang run;
their answers were lost in the noise of the wheels.

I stopped labang on the road before our house and would have gotten down but my brother Leon took the rope and told
me to stay in the cart. He turned Labang into the open gate and we dashed into our yard. I thought we would crash into the
camachile tree, but my brother Leon reined in Labang in time. There was light downstairs in the kitchen, and Mother stood
in the doorway, and I could see her smiling shyly. My brother Leon was helping Maria over the wheel. The first words that
fell from his lips after he had kissed Mother's hand were:

"Father... where is he?"

"He is in his room upstairs," Mother said, her face becoming serious. "His leg is bothering him again."

I did not hear anything more because I had to go back to the cart to unhitch Labang. But I hardly tied him under the barn
when I heard Father calling me. I met my brother Leon going to bring up the trunks. As I passed through the kitchen, there
were Mother and my sister Aurelia and Maria and it seemed to me they were crying, all of them.

There was no light in Father's room. There was no movement. He sat in the big armchair by the western window, and a star
shone directly through it. He was smoking, but he removed the roll of tobacco from his mouth when he saw me. He laid it
carefully on the windowsill before speaking.

"Did you meet anybody on the way?" he asked.

"No, Father," I said. "Nobody passes through the Waig at night."

He reached for his roll of tobacco and hithced himself up in the chair.

"She is very beautiful, Father."

"Was she afraid of Labang?" My father had not raised his voice, but the room seemed to resound with it. And again I saw
her eyes on the long curving horns and the arm of my brother Leon around her shoulders.

"No, Father, she was not afraid."

"On the way---"

"She looked at the stars, Father. And Manong Leon sang."

"What did he sing?"

"---Sky Sown with Stars... She sang with him."

He was silent again. I could hear the low voices of Mother and my sister Aurelia downstairs. There was also the voice of my
brother Leon, and I thought that Father's voice must have been like it when Father was young. He had laid the roll of
tobacco on the windowsill once more. I watched the smoke waver faintly upward from the lighted end and vanish slowly
into the night outside.

The door opened and my brother Leon and Maria came in.

"Have you watered Labang?" Father spoke to me.

I told him that Labang was resting yet under the barn.

"It is time you watered him, my son," my father said.

I looked at Maria and she was lovely. She was tall. Beside my brother Leon, she was tall and very still. Then I went out, and
in the darkened hall the fragrance of her was like a morning when papayas are in bloom.
The Phabletized Future

PENMAN - Butch Dalisay (The Philippine Star) - September 29, 2014 - 12:00am

Having written with dead seriousness about writing for six straight columns, I hope my readers will
indulge me this digression — a periodic, practically biennial, one — having to do with utter frivolity.

Okay, I’ll fess up: I have the new iPhone 6. Naturally. I’ve been an incorrigible Apple fanboy since the
mid-1980s — practically since Apple was born — and so no one should be surprised by my prompt (I’ll
say “timely”) acquisition of this new bauble, among 10 million other lunatics who snapped up the 6 and
its bigger sibling, the 6+, in the gadget’s first three days of being on sale in the global market.

Like an arthritic hippie or a superannuated rebel, I should have no business, as a card-carrying senior,
salivating over shiny new toys better seen on 30-somethings dashing off to work or to a dinner date.
Well, maybe a little. US demographic studies from 2012 suggest that nearly one-fourth of all iPhone
users are 55 and older (and a bit lower for Android and BlackBerry users), so older guys (men use it
more than women, 60-40 percent) still make up a good chunk of the iPhone market. That makes sense,
because these things don’t come cheap.

Along with literally millions of other people in the US and around the world, I stayed up until dawn on
September 12 on the US East Coast to get my order in, and after an interminably long week during
which I could only distract myself by doing honest and humorless work on my book project, a brown
UPS van arrived to deliver the gadget du jour, a pristine iPhone 6 in smoke gray, 64GB, contract-free
under T-Mobile. (Let’s get this out of the way: if you can’t wait for the local telcos to release the IP6 /6+
and want your US-based tita to send you one for an early Christmas, ask for a contract-free T-Mobile
unit from the Apple Store — don’t get one from T-Mobile itself, or it will be network-locked.) I took my
Globe nano SIM out of the 5s and popped it into the newcomer, and voila — it was alive!

Never mind the rest of that digital drama, which can only be unremitting silliness to anyone but the most
besotted geek. (And it’s only fair to say that millions of other geeks — the Android and Samsung crowd
— slept soundly that night.) You can get the full specs and features of the IP6/6+ on dozens of sites
online. I’ll cut to the chase with my quickie personal review, because I can just see a bunch of people
asking me, “Is it worth it?”

If you’re moving from an older iPhone, the first thing you’ll notice is how thin and light it is — and yet
how large. The 6 is larger than the 5/5s, and the 6+ is larger than the 6. I held and tried to like the 6+ in
an Apple Store, but came away convinced that it was a cool thing to have if you’re 25, but definitely not
for me. I got the 6 because, like many old guys, I prefer smaller, more discreet phones; the IP4 was
perfect, but now it won’t run the newest software.

If you need an excuse to upgrade, recite this mantra: better battery, faster processor, bigger screen,
thinner profile, better camera, more storage. Add them all up and you might convince yourself that it’s
worth a good chunk of change. At 60, I don’t need an excuse; I’m just hopelessly curious, and the older
I get, the more curious I am about what the future is going to be like, so every new gadget lets me
cheat time.

After a week of playing with the new iPhone, I can say that I can best appreciate the brilliant screen, the
excellent camera (I’ve done almost all of my photography with the iPhone for the past few years), and
the longer battery life. I still have to get used to the slimness and the lightness of the thing; I’m using a
plastic skin on it, but I keep tapping my pocket to make sure it’s still there. I’ve ordered a thick leather
wallet case to lend it some heft, and then I’m sure it’ll be just fine.

I know that the so-called “bendgate” issue has come up online alleging that the big IP6+ will bend if you
try hard enough (which makes me ask, who would, and why would you?). These “bend” tests are mildly
interesting, but if you’re going to base your buying decisions on these, then go buy a tank, not an
iPhone. I mean, how many people buy their cars based on crash tests?

What intrigues me more about the future is the new word I picked up this week: “phablet,” which the
IP6+ is — a cross between phone and tablet. Frankly, all this talk of a phabletized future — where
people walk around with 7- or 8-inch phones stuck to their ears—scares me. If this is the way we’re
going, we might as well stick a phone into an iPad mini and call it the iPhone 9. I’ll probably hang
around long enough to catch the iPhone 13, which will include telepathic commands among its
features. By then, Apple and the iPhone will have gone one of two ways — the way of Godzilla, or the
way of Yoda. Godzilla will have a battery life of 20 days and will be strangely reminiscent of the iPad
mini; Yoda will have half the battery life but will remind some really old people of the iPhone 1.

By this time, to be fair, size will not be a problem for many people, because fashion designers (starting
with Project Runway season XX) have made big pockets trendy; already, one Mafia boss (yes, the
Mafia outlived Pope Francis) attributes his surviving an assassination attempt to the big iPhone he
carries in his suit pocket, like a shield (it still bends, but it can stop bullets); boardrooms and Mafiosi
meetings are soon full of men with bulging fronts. An ad with a digitally recycled Mae West says, “Is
that an iPhone, or are you just happy to see me?”

Heck, I’m just happy to see this iPhone now.

Answer the following questions on yellow pad paper:

1. The author comments, “I should have no business, as a card-carrying senior, salivating over
shiny new toys”. Do you agree that senior citizens should not be preoccupied with new
technologies? Defend your answer.

2. Comment on the author’s description of his new iPhone. Does he come across as a credible
source of information, or does his description sound forced?

3. Which features of the iPhone did the author appreciate the most? Why do you think he likes
these features best of all?

4. What does the term “phablet” refer to? What does the author say about the “phabletized” future?

5. The author ends his essay by simply saying ”Heck, I’m just happy to see this iPhone now”. What
does this ending indicate? What does the author truly feel about his new gadget?