It was a sumptuous dinner I had the other night over at a friend’s house — manila clam with talbos ng sili, pork barbeque, fried shrimp, pancit, empanada, adobo, menudo, grilled-to-tenderness squid, grilled tilapia, and more competed for prime table space (we had to extend it to accommodate the rest.)
The grill and the firebowl provided enough warmth (and smoke) in the patio in an otherwise chilly autumn night making an early beer pong possible were it not for the matriarch’s demand of another table space for the plates and for those who would prefer a sitdown dinner.
“Hey, that’s too early! We need that table for eating!”, she yelled but was apparently not heard from the kitchen. She then switched her attention to the crackling logs at the fire bowl.
“Won’t the plants get burned by that firebowl?” she asked me casually.
In between shots of vodka or gulps of beer ( my host friend, our surfer friend and I stuck with our wine, as usual), the younger crowd alternated in singing their own version of favorite karaoke tunes. The older crowd would later take over belting usual pinoy favorites from Iisa pa Lamang to Green Green Grass of Home, one of them completely off-key you would think he’s singing a different song while being intense, eliciting laughter from and disrupting the endless chat of the women in the back .
“Ok ba?” he would ask me quietly after a performance. I nodded rather hesitantly in approval. I was just chilling to really care.
I arrived before dinner time, with my appetite and a napa valley cab sauv, after a couple of hours in an unusually very low tide beach ( I was able to jog the coastline past the rocks without getting my shoes wet this time) with a common friend who, after discovering surfing some two or three years ago and making it an inescapable lifestyle, wanted to catch a few waves before sundown.
And the dinner started, with everybody partaking of a meal made festive not much by the numerous viand but by the unquestionable appeal to the palate. The atmosphere was as usual, also festive and the noise sometimes unbearable but fun. Halfway through my meal, I then asked half jokingly.
“So, where’s the turkey?”
My host friend’s mom heartily laughed, though perhaps unaware of the political undertones of my otherwise apolitical question, and told my friend I was looking for the turkey. He then came in with a grilled whole chicken, unmistakable in size and effluvia that filled the whole room.
“I don’t like turkey” she said disapprovingly. Neither do I. And nobody was missing it that night.
It was Thanksgiving day.
But the occasion was not so much about remembering the early pilgrims and slicing the stuffed turkey. It was rather a chance for a typical Filipino family and community to get together once again.
I remember a Filipina immigrant who, while waiting for her citizenship papers, insisted that we have thanksgiving in the Philippines (I remember Marcos made the declaration of Martial Law as thanksgiving day, which we had nothing to thank for and celebrate but more to curse and protest against — but even then, it’s not the kind hallucinated about) and further bragged about how she had thanksgiving dinners in the East coast.
“In New York.” she would point out with pride.
And like a phony social graces sophisticate, she would lecture before a crowd of kababayans who she perhaps assumed were a bunch of lowly uncultured migrants used only to boodle fights, on how seating was arranged in the formal dinner table of the white people.
The manners maven wannabe was obviously ignorant of the more telling barbaric side of these pilgrims. She was both disgusting and pathetic I had to leave and could have hit her with a frozen turkey to bring her back to her senses — and give her a sample of the real story of overstaying pilgrims called Americans taking over the land of Indians who are now in reservations like some endangered animals — had I not.
I don’t celebrate thanksgiving. So what? I like the long weekend it affords us. But there are more significant events in history more worthy of a real celebration. Besides, why would I stand in long queues for hours just to get a slice of turkey because it’s thanksgiving day when I can get a foot-long turkey sandwich from Subway anytime I want?
