MEDIUM RARE It’s not a glass house, it’s The Glass House. And there it sits, like a huge cube of ice – better yet, like a diamond almost as big as the Ritz – beside Goldenberg Mansion, one of the jewels of Malacañang Park. Several footsteps away from Goldenberg, especially when both...
MEDIUM RARE Letty Hahn turned 93 years and one day old last Tuesday, Nov. 5, and like magic a pretty cake frosted in pastel colors showed up under her nose. Just as wonderfully, the room full of gentle people erupted into polite waves of applause under the soft glitter of a colony of Czech-made...
MEDIUM RARE When Dr. Isa Cojuangco Suntay and her mom and namesake, Isabel Cojuangco Suntay, declare the Belenismo season open in Tarlac, that’s the signal for the spirit of Christmas to descend not only on Tarlac but also the rest of our provinces. Belenismo, mismo! The Belenismo tradition...
MEDIUM RARE Fukuoka, Japan’s sixth largest city. Laid back, compared with the hustle and bustle of Tokyo, or with the touristy Osaka. Fukuoka, call letters FUK, gateway to Japan. We landed in Fukuoka, too late to catch the cherry pink of the season of cherry blossoms, too early to earn a glimpse...
MEDIUM RARE Now that our Christmas tree is up and dominating the living room, let me sing praises to what makes it different. First, it’s not new, it’s no longer young and fresh. Next, many of the ornaments hanging on it are older than the tree, and they come from cities near and far,...
MEDIUM RARE My all-time favorite Christmas book, published in the last year of the last century, 1999, is The Twelve Teas of Christmas. Not that I’m that deep into tea, but because it’s a charming book with pretty illustrations and notes on decorating, gift-making and giving, with a table of...
MEDIUM RARE Seven days to go before October gives way to November. Thirty days in November. Then it’s December, the merriest month. Peru, a Catholic nation like ours, jumped the gun on us by declaring Christmas officially opened on Oct. 1. One supposes their season ends just like ours on...
MEDIUM RARE Like most people, my mother was my first teacher. She was a real teacher, with a bachelor’s degree in elementary education. Yaya Andrea was a real public school teacher who helped me with my Tagalog and handicraft projects, plus her uncanny knowledge of the names of flowers, plants,...
MEDIUM RARE A prophesy has been made by the United Nations that the next pandemic will be a familiar condition called loneliness. In a one-act play, Lea Salonga and Dolly de Leon take turns playing an anonymous middle-aged character who their audiences assume is an overseas Filipino worker,...
MEDIUM RARE When a tree falls in the forest but no one hears it, did a tree fall in the forest? Can a musician make music without touching someone? What is the use, or usefulness, of music if there is no one to hear it? It may be a philosophical or rhetorical question, but how many...
MEDIUM RARE I don’t know much about architecture, I only know what I like, what I see when I step into a house for the first time. For such a house as old as Goldenberg Mansion, built in 1898 and one of the gems that form the President’s residential estate, it has got to be the prettiest of the...
MEDIUM RARE “Look at you all, such great potential!” That was Imelda R. Marcos speaking to a roomful of about 40 ladies and one or two gentlemen, here for the fourth in a series of first-Tuesday-of-the-month Merienda with Meldy in Malacañang’s Goldenberg Mansion. “You can do so much...
