To sing like There’s no Tomorrow
These past weeks have been extremely stressful. While we look forward to every new morning hoping for a better day, it invariably brings new aggravation. The constant barrage of EJKs, the hubris of the House of Representatives , the violence of the Maute, the egotism of some senators, the President’s foul and lying mouth, the injustice from the Secretary of Justice, to name just the major irritants, have driven some citizens to consider packing up and escaping to parts unknown.
Facebook and Twitter users are spitting out their disgust at how badly the country is being run. A plunderer is out on bail. Constitutional officers are being impeached. The Commission on Human Rights is threatened with extinction; the President has called its chair a pedophile. Big drug smugglers are getting away with murder while small drug users and pushers are being summarily executed. Truly, there is much to be upset about. Our democracy, as we know it, is being subverted by the very people we elected.
But I have managed to survive the past four weeks without a major meltdown. That’s because August and September are intense celebration months in my family. In these past weeks, one brother (Gabby) turned 70 and our eldest (Jesse) turned 80. Gabby, who was the lead singer in a campus band before he decided to go to business school, likes to hire a band on his birthday to play for him as he reprises his old hits. Jesse gets a piano player to accompany us when we belt out our old songs. From the Polo Club to the City State Hotel in Malate, we partied hard, singing and dancing non-stop until we dropped.
In between these two major events, Jim and Lory celebrated their birthdays, and we held despedidas for Babsy and Ducky who flew in from the US and Mindanao to party with us. Yes, music filled the air, with Jim at the guitar and our nephew Joey Quirino on the piano, and the rest of us singing song after song like Energizer Bunnies. We also observed our mother’s 20th death anniversary with Mass and dinner out.
As if we were not all partied out, the larger Paredes clan held its biggest family reunion ever, the Timpuyog dagiti anak
ti Paredes, where we met kabagyan who came from the Ilocos, Cordillera, Batangas, Bicol, Zamboanga, Davao, Iloilo, and Palawan to celebrate being a Paredes.
The wall-to-wall parties seriously challenged my wardrobe, my throat, and my sleep cycle, but the intense family time was not to be missed. Usually, when two or three of us are gathered in one place, the talk turns rabidly political. But on these occasions, a reminder to just enjoy the company and sing was happily heeded.
It was so much better bonding through music than in anger and frustration over the socio-political situation. With our cousins, we went through a large repertoire of folk songs, Elvis, Sinatra, the Gershwins, Cole Porter, Bacharach and David, the Beatles, Broadway musicals, even our childhood records and songs we invented as children. And when the evening ended, we realized there were still songs we hadn’t sung.
Music has always defined my family. We didn’t have much growing up but our dad splurged on a record player and vinyls when we were kids. Jesse and Ducky taught us the songs they sang with the Ateneo Glee Club, Tictac taught us the Christmas carols she learned from caroling at her work, and we played Dad’s Broadway LPs over and over on the stereo at home. When Tictac came back from a year abroad, she brought home folk LPs by Peter, Paul and Mary, and Joan Baez, broadening our repertoire even more.
We were in our teens when we met a true music man who enriched not only our musical repertoire, but our very lives. Sonny Joaquin taught us more folk songs than we thought existed, and gave us the most wonderful summers of our lives in Baguio and La Union singing around a bonfire, printing photographs in his dark room, and staying up all night to catch the sunrise. Our friendship endured through the decades.
Amid all the singing and family bonding these past weeks, we got word that Sonny was very ill. Lory, Jim, and I visited him in the hospital and sang with him songs he taught us. Three days later, he was gone.
Growing up with Sonny and my family, I learned to sing in joy and in grief, like there’s no tomorrow. And when tomorrow comes, as it does inevitably, to be strong and focused in pushing back and coping with the aggravation and anger over the goings-on in our country today.