(as published in People’s Journal)

Once I got used to New York’s dizzying scale, and I could walk, instead of float, on its streets, I felt at home. Amazing how like larva shedding its cocoon, we soon blend with our surroundings. Absorbed in the city’s shifting moods and my own changing needs, I lost track of time and the home I left behind panned out of mind. And then, it was time to go back.

I flew from JFK airport to LAX for the PAL connection on a late September in the declining light. It was a lonely walk on the solitary pathway between American Airlines and PAL terminals.

Soon, right off the entrance of the second building I was walking into, amid a crowd just massing, I saw bobbing up the landing balikbayan boxes being wheeled in, some by six, most by four hands on the bar of pushcarts. My heart popped at the sight. I rushed past a guard from whom I meant to ask where PAL was – I knew I was on my way home.

Drawn into the stream of Filipino families that made of the terminal lobby a halfway stop in an exodus, I lost every bit of my anxiety and shed off a just-acquired New York nonchalance. In the line that snaked from behind the short queues of other airline counters, I stared and listened and swapped smiles.

Snatches of the chatter told me that these kababayan had flown from Hawaii, Chicago, Alaska, and South Carolina. But in the clump of maybe five or six, only one was going home; the rest made up the send-off party. There was a lot of backslapping, and coat-tugging, and loud banter in Tagalog, Ilocano, and Bisaya.

A huddle soon gelled in front of me. From excited voices, I picked up those of a couple going back to the Philippines for the first time, and those of a double quartet who escorted them to the airport. Like some uncanny set in a play, four balikbayan boxes marked how the huddle shifted about, whispering into each other’s necks, or gesturing with the full length of arms. The women wore their long, island-maiden hair in ponytails beating the waist; the men swaggered in newly tailored pastel suits to which they had lost their nimbleness. I glimpsed white soles of brand new sneakers peeking under striped gabardine pants.

There was really no line to the check-in counter, just a moving horde. Someone was always breaking away, tugging at an arm in a run to exchange a gushy kumusta with a pair who had waved from across the lobby, zigzagging past more clumps of kababayan now knelt over heaps of clothing and canned goods they were unloading, reloading, and repacking in the boxes. It had seemed that everyone left in a rush and only then, right at the airport, was there time to re-fold and re-fit things into bulging suitcases, or boxes stretched to the seams.

At one point in the crab-crawl, I got nudged into a tight knot. Five women in look-alike eye glasses were bent over an old man in a wheel chair, their gray streaked heads hung like heavy hydrangeas for a shade. As one dropped to her knees to adjust a canvas bag tucked in between the old man’s legs, another tipped his woolen hat off his brow, the third patted his tweed’s padded shoulders, as the fourth and fifth looked on, arms gripping their rib cage.

They asked him how he felt, each daughter rephrasing the same question. He, in raspy Ilocano would assure them that he’s OK, and then, he would look up, eyes shining perhaps from thoughts of Narvacan, Ilocos Sur, the hometown he left as a young man– so I overheard. And the daughters stared, transfixed on his gnarled hands tapping on the hand rest of his wheel chair, tracing perhaps a melody silently playing in his mind. I had listened and strained for more, delighted at the sound of my childhood tongue.

In the plane, hours later, I would hear his animated story telling from an aisle seat across mine, of his boyhood by a fishing village along Ilocos’s craggy coastline. The daughter flying with him would break his reverie to recount her own second hand tales of his days as pineapple picker in Waipahu for more than half of his life. He was going home for the first time. The listener in the seat fronting theirs and others, whose ears would be cocked to the stories, would laugh at the comic turn of a once backbreaking life.

The waiting area at the gate for the flight was already half-full even if takeoff was yet two hours away. The fiesta air in the terminal lobby had followed the throng and hovered like a cheery cloud. I took the farthest seat I sighted. Soon, three women in native barong dresses plopped into the vacant seat beside mine. A floral fragrance wafted from their fans. They slipped off their pumps, raised their feet on their parked rolleys, and wiggled their toes.

So where is home? One of them asked me. It took me minutes to decide how to answer: should I have said I have not been home to my ancestral town since I was fifteen years old because only the ruins of a stone house was left of my family’s roots, or should I have just said, I’m from Manila, denying my origins.

Impatient for my answer, the woman went on to tell me about her holiday among cousins in the Big Island. She had long waited for it, she said, through all her teaching years in a farming community on the hillsides of her town. Now retired and widowed with the children all married, she fulfilled her dream, spending almost all of her retirement funds on this holiday. But it was worth it, she said, shaking a head she held high, smiling at me an abstract smile.

It took us almost an hour to board. On the line, ground stewardesses were still carting away hand-carry items in excess of two persons. The last time I turned my head to the fuss behind me, I saw a woman pulling frantically, and banging on the marble tiles her three-way rolley which gave her a tiny seat but which wouldn’t contract now; and if it didn’t, how would it fit the overhead bin?

Someone had taken my seat when I got to it. He had settled on it squarely, without qualms. He held his chin up to me but I could not catch his shaded eyes. I was miffed, and I made him feel it when I told him stiffly to please move because he took my seat. I’m sorry, he said, and he rose, tapping a pencil-thin cane on the back of the seat in front. He was blind. I felt shamed. He was going home for the first time to a town in the Central Plains after he migrated to Washington. His father had died and his brothers could not seem to wade through the crisis; they needed him to see them through. I worried how he could make it on a rough bus ride to his town I knew had no asphalted roads. He said, they’ll meet me by the riverside, and I’ll a ride a carabao like I always did as a child. I watched him smile calmly through his thoughts.

From my window seat, the setting sun above the clouds put on a show like I had never seen. Bands of rainbow colors spanned the atmosphere, and shifted in hues no painting has yet copied. Clouds too, massed up and rose like castles, towers and spires, and then curled down to low-lying ramparts and walls when bundles of purple light turning lilac, mauve then tender pink ushered the darkness. New York by then was but a dream.

The hum in the plane settled into a soothing purr. My nerves earlier splintered from the wrenching goodbyes in New York had calmed. I had started slipping into a snooze when a clink from glasses tipping startled me. I opened my eyes to the steward leaning over to ask me.

Anong gusto ‘nyo, wine o kape?

To my answer, he added, Ah, wine. Ano, pula o puti?

I chuckled at the sound, which rang like the choice the Kristo in a cockfight poses to gamblers. Half-laughing I answered, sa puti. Through the swell in my heart, I knew I was finally home.

Copyright © 1999 by Alegria Imperial