Open Me
Traveling is not a lifestyle. It’s life and style, is a choice. Journalists, citizen or professional, stitch their findings into narratives that carry relevance and compelling detail that inspire action. Be where you are.
Thanks for coming. Dabble in travel and sample a life’s glimpses. For years, my grandmother Aurea woke up hours before the sound of morning birds, in the rays of light peeking out of clouds and weathered power lines. She rose at 3am in the stillness before dawn. In the brisk breeze of an impeding tropical day, she would clean raw rice in a flat basket. With an upward flick of the wrists, the white, at times brown grains would travel two feet in the air and return on the handmade woven basket. 
The rhythmic movement was the first step to making pastries for the house front and literal walking business, which sustained and continues to contribute to the livelihood of my mother’s family. She mixed the rice with different flavors, such as coconut, yam or vanilla. She would then add special recipes that would complete and distinguish each pastry’s identity. One of my favorites is puto. A taste of the fluffy white bread, with its small bits of cheese hidden inside, could reward the wonder of a traveler in an airplane and window seat, who muses on what it must be like to gather a handful of white, unpolluted cloud and take a delicate bite.
She was out of the small barrio by 5am to walk the rugged Philippine dirt roads and potholed streets. Streets and its crowds of people, some idle, others haggling for fresh fruit or vegetables, were recovering from two world wars. In the walk, she announced the day’s pastries that rested on a flat basket atop her head. She towered above me in my childhood and stood at a lean height that surpassed average Filipinos. On my first collegiate spring break in the United States, I returned for the first time since leaving the Philippines at age 7. With a hazy perception and jetlag induced by LAX to Nagoya to Manila, I had no trouble tasting every detail in a nation so sensory.
A steamy breeze graced the next day’s unbearable heat. Below the floors of our high rise, two miles away, and at a wooden bench overlooking the streets she conquered, my grandmother sat waiting for me. On the same graying paths and two lane roads made into five lanes by a developing world’s traffic, my father carved a living as the oldest of nine siblings and for his family of four children. The streets gravitated him to Saudi Arabia, then the United States. It would take seven years for my oldest brother and sister to join him, another nine months for my mom and I, and a year for my second-oldest brother. Any busy street may seem foreign, but at a longer glance, family is the commonality that frames every moment of effort, sorrow, happiness and exchanged photographs.
This brief revival of my grandmother and father’s recent pasts is inspired by a glimpse. A universe of glimpses, no matter how temporary, brands a lifetime. It is a collective memory, such as stories shared from my grandmother, mother, to me, which vibrate in our being and make us move in certain ways of generosity, humility and actions for social progress. Each story house glimpses of different times and people linked by the harshness and beauty of the Philippine islands. For my parents who migrated and toiled in the United States for their four children, they’ll return to the humid locales—in the city’s chaos, the taste of locally grown mangoes and gumamela, in the conflicts they help resolve and quiet beaches in need of their own sanctuary—they will sip coffee where it began.
Where, where to begin. Here – now.