Of Eggs, and Hummingbirds

Tags

eggs, evolution, hummingbirds, memories, San Francisco

I went to Catholic school from 6th grade until the end of high school. Sister Stephanie Ann was my 6th grade teacher. She was an old school nun: black wimple, blue knee length skirt with matching cardigan sweater, sensible rubber-soled shoes, Polish accent. To my sixth grade self, she seemed a million years old, though I suppose she was only in her early fifties or so.

There was nothing gentle or maternal about Sr. Stephanie Ann (I’ve never met a nun who embodied either of those qualities). She was sarcastic, she was cranky, and she was the master of the bon mot. My personal favorite: “Jesus commanded me to love you; he didn’t say anything about me having to like you.” I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but in retrospect, I like her a lot.

Soft boiled egg with black lava salt from hawaii (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought of her today — of one specific moment of my time in her class. It was lunchtime, and it was raining. Sister happened to sit down at a table near my desk, with her lunch: an apple, and a boiled egg. She unwrapped her egg and took a bite, eyes closed. Upon finishing the bite, she opened her eyes. She looked at the egg, and then she looked at me, and said:

You can’t eat an egg and not believe in God.

Well, of course, you can. But I think even a non-believer can appreciate the beauty of that statement. The egg, that perfect little packet of protein, that chicken in the bubble of the subjunctive, that gold and white ellipsoid, the ordinary, everyday miracle that waits for us each time we walk into the supermarket, a dozen to the carton in the refrigerated section.

Hummingbird in Golden Gate Park
Photo: Shayne Kaye, Flickr/Creative Commons

I remembered that incident as I ate lunch today, sitting out on the patio of my apartment on this beautiful San Francisco spring day. A hummingbird zipped into the yard, and hovered in the air above my husband and me, just staring. It must have decided we were no threat; it zipped away to the other corner of the yard, where the lemon tree blooms. It flitted from blossom to blossom to feed, never landing. It was no bigger than the young fruit already on the branches. Its blue-green wings made a buzzy-hummy sound as it flew; I could hear it faintly from where I sat. It sounded like bees. Blue-green, iridescent bees.

“They’re like feathered insects,” my husband said. It’s true.

You can’t watch a hummingbird and not believe in natural selection.

That really doesn’t have the same ring to it as Sr. Stephanie Ann’s words. But I think it’s just as beautiful.

A Daisy Chain of Words and Pictures

Tags

books, Goethe, Herman Melville, Jack Cady, memories, photography, quotations, St. Teresa of Avila, Stephen King, travel

If the pulse lies, then the heart lies.

– Cebuano folk healer, quoted by Richard W. Lieban, Cebuano Sorcery: Malign Magic in the Philippines

Vienna, Austria. Photo: Julie Mount

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Losing Melanin

Tags

folklore, hair, humor, memories, superstitions

Photo: John Mount

“You don’t dye your hair, do you?”

I don’t know where that question came from. I had been sitting at the kitchen counter, transcribing my parents’ ghost stories over toast and my morning coffee, when my mother popped that on me.

“Yup. For years, now.”

“Really?!?”

She sounded so shocked that I had to replay the question in my mind. She asked me if I dye my hair, right? Not if I strip for a living?

The Soul that Swam

Tags

Aglipayan church, ghost stories, history, memories, near-death stories, Philippines, superstitions

I almost didn’t post this one. It’s a classic near-death story, so classic it verges on stereotypical. It does have a few unusual details, though, so I just decided to go ahead.

Photo: John Mount

“This happened to my father, your lolo, when he was a young man, doing missionary work,” Dad said. “He had been assigned to a parish in Mindanao — Cagayan de Oro.”

I’m a bit hazy as to what “missionary work” means in this context. My grandfather was a priest who belonged to the Philippine Independent, or Aglipayan, Church. The church was founded as a reaction to the Spanish-dominated Catholic hierarchy, which slighted native Filipino clergy and churchgoers. Its nationalistic position attracted a lot of converts.

So I would imagine that my grandfather’s missionary work entailed ministering to an Aglipayan parish, one similar to the Roman Catholic parish that his parishioners had abandoned. Mindanao has a relatively large Muslim population as well; it’s possible that he also proselytized.

At any rate, from what my father describes, his father had many of the duties of a parish priest: saying Mass, visiting members of his congregation, managing the day to day activities of the church.

“One night, he came home quite late in the evening, after visiting with a sick parishioner. As he entered his house, a large black moth flew at him. He killed it. Then he finished up for the day, and went to bed.”

“When he fell asleep, he dreamt that he died.”

Footsteps from Empty Rooms

Tags

ghost stories, memories, Philippines, superstitions

It was my mother’s turn. She sat at the kitchen table, eating tangerines. Dad leaned over the kitchen counter with a banana. I sat at the kitchen counter, so I could listen to both of them.

“The thing to look out for is a house where someone died,” Mom said. “You know, in California, when you sell your house, you have to disclose whether or not someone died there, or if there was a tragedy in the house.”

“Really? I never heard anything like that,” I said.

My husband and I bought our house from our landlord, after renting it for eight years. Our landlord had been the second owner, and I would not be at all surprised if the first owner had passed away in the house.

“Well, did you ask about it?” Mom asked.

“Um. No.” I said.

“Well, there you go. But the people who bought our house in Pinole, they asked. They had a whole list of questions we had to answer for them! No one wants to move into a house with a multo. Maybe you have one in your house, and you don’t even know it.”

“If we don’t know we have a multo, then it doesn’t make any difference, right, Mom?” She made a tsk noise.

“Okay, okay. Did you have a multo at your house when you were a kid?”

My Great-Grandparents’ house, about 1929

“Well, the house that you remember was built in the fifties, especially for your lolo and lola, so it was brand new when we lived in it. Before that, when I was little, we lived in the big house, my lola’s house, which is next door to where your lolo and lola’s eventually built their house. My lola had moved out by then, to live with her daughter, but my uncle, Tio Pedro, still lived there, with us. The big house was old, and lots of people died there: my grandfather, and some of my great-uncles and great-aunts…”

Empty Houses

Tags

enkanto, ghost stories, memories, Philippines, superstitions, World War II

Photo: Nina Zumel

“When a house is empty for a long time, the enkanto — the fairies — come to live there.”

Dad was warming to our ghost story conversation.

“I know this is true, because it happened to our house in Saraat, during the War.”

He meant World War II. The Philippines was not a happy place, during that war, but my father’s memories of that time are surprisingly pleasant. He was only about eight or nine years old when the Japanese occupation began, the youngest of his siblings, by far — what they call an “afterthought child”. When the Japanese came, I think some of my uncles ran to the mountains, to join the resistance, and much of the town evacuated as well. My grandfather chose to stay.

Stories my Parents Tell Me

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fiilipino folklore, folklore, kapre, memories, taong lipod

“In Ilokos, we don’t have the aswang,” my dad said, as we sat back after dinner, “but we have the kapre. He’s a giant black ogre, ten feet tall, with big fiery eyes.”

I had been asking Mom and Dad about aswangs, and whether or not they knew any stories about them, or any other beasties. It took some prodding — I doubt either of them had thought about these things in ages — but the memories were begininng to trickle forward from the backs of their brains.

In Praise (and Memory) of Serendipity

Tags

Berkeley, books, bookstores, memories, Peter B. Howard, Serendipity, True Life

ser·en·dip·i·ty  (srn-dp-t)
n. pl. ser·en·dip·i·ties
1. The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
2. The fact or occurrence of such discoveries.
3. An instance of making such a discovery.

[From the characters in the Persian fairy tale 
 The Three Princes of Serendip, who made such discoveries, 
from Persian Sarandp, Sri Lanka, from Arabic sarandb.]

I’m planning a folklore-related blog post (out soon), and, as always, I started with my own bookshelves for the research.

They failed me. Or so I thought.

I went to the web, of course, and I found bits and pieces of what I needed — but not enough. This became inspiration for another blog post that will come after the folklore one.

But then, purely by accident, I found a book that I had forgotten that I owned, that had a bit more of what I wanted. I love my bookshelves.

And this experience reminded me of a wonderful place in Berkeley: Serendipity Books.

A Tap on the Shoulder

Tags

Coke Sign, ghost stories, landmarks, memories, San Francisco

It’s time to return this blog a little closer to its originally intended theme: ghosts. This follow-up on a previous post about one of my childhood San Francisco landmarks leads to the closest I can come to a ghost experience of my own.

Selective Memories

Tags

ghosts of buildings past, landmarks, memories, San Francisco, Union 76 clock tower

We’ve just returned from a trip from Budapest to Vienna, through the Wachau Valley and eventually to Nuremberg. I saw several lovely towns and beautiful cities, magnificent palaces and churches, had great food and heard good music.

But you know what sticks in my mind?

On a long evening bus ride from Budapest towards Austria, the dullest part of the trip as far my traveling companions were concerned, I saw a little village rising up out of the mist. It was a factory town, or a mill town, I have no idea what it was called, but it was wreathed in the foggy, misty weather, and in the steam, or maybe smoke, coming from the industrial buildings along the river. I could see the church, and the houses, looming on the hills above the riverbanks through the opaque steamy air, as if the town was materializing before my eyes in just that very second.

And not too long after that, we passed an oil refinery. A HUGE oil refinery, possibly bigger than my little village, every building and structure alight from the ground all the way to the top, all interconnected. It reminded me of Ridley Scott’s vision of future Los Angeles, perpetually midnight, in Bladerunner. Even after seeing Vienna, and Melk, and Nuremberg, I still remember that anonymous town, that oil refinery.

Funny how the mind works.