Rose Garden

One ordinary, lazy weekend afternoon, as my wife and I talked about plants and vegetation and greenery, my thoughts suddenly drifted to memories of my mom's rose garden. Memories have an uncanny way of intruding into consciousness at the oddest hours and via the most ordinary stimuli.

When the family moved into its own home in Las Piñas in the early 70's, in what was then a sleepy, rural town south of Manila, famous for its salt beds and a church organ made of bamboo, and where one could still see rice fields and grasslands and open spaces, Mom discovered she had a green thumb.

The original house, before it was expanded in 1976, was a small, boxy, two-bedroom affair, but with a rather large lot compared to today's working class houses. Dad, the son of farmers, had a knack for growing vegetables, and so on one side of the lot we had kalabasa and sitaw; at the back we had kamatis and talong. On the lot's other end we had an atis tree, a calamansi, and two prolific trees each of papaya and kamias.

Mom's domain was ornamentals and, naturally, the lot's front was hers. Our front lawn had the nicest, luxuriant grass, similar to what can be found on a golf green. We had an interesting dwarf palmera near the garden tap; two dwarf coconut trees on the left and right sides, a row of santan and a shrub with a name I can't quite recall, with leaves that turned white at the edges, as if they had been painted. And then there was Mom's rose garden.

It occupied a rectangular plot in front of the house, and was about five meters long and a meter wide. A rather small area, admittedly, but during its heyday it teemed with some of the most beautiful red and white blooms. Mom obtained the plantings from kin, with some tips and advice thrown in. The rest was natural ability, which surprised many, including Mom herself, I think. The rose garden turned my brother Benjie and I into celebrities on the school bus. The girls we rode with would often request us for roses, pleading with us for Mom's beautiful blooms. We naturally didn't want to disappoint them and, riding on the wave of our newfound popularity, cajoled Mom into letting us pick some of her prized reds and whites.

Mom took good care of her rose garden, spending many afternoons removing weeds, loosening the soil, and plucking dead leaves from the stems. She also kept a sharp eye out for pests, always preempting them thru careful detection of their telltale signs. Afternoons was when Mom worked in her garden. She always donned work gloves, and used a trowel and shears. While she went about her business, Benjie and I would play on the grass, usually wrestling each other, or playing catch-me-if-you-can. At other times we would just be near Mom, like chicks to their mother hen, and helped her prune her roses when she asked us to.

Benjie and I have the clearest recollections of Mom's rose garden, as our other siblings were very young then. We are from the Popeye, Beany and Cecil, and Gumby era; our younger siblings, from Sesame Street and Voltes Five. They had no idea then who Godzilla and Mothra were, and probably thought The Green Slime was the ectoplasm in Ghostbusters.

The time of Mom's rose garden was the time I was becoming more aware of our own little world: Mom tending her blooms, us children whiling our sweet, carefree time by endless play; Dad getting home from work, and then the family having dinner together. Over steaming rice and Mom's delicious dishes we had a very fluid agenda. Dad talked about office events and gossip; Mom, about what she did at home and, neighborhood gossip. I wanted to talk about my school bus crushes but never dared to, and so told Mom that I had additional requests for her blooms. Benjie listened and seconded anyone when he felt like it; Benson had a timid appetite and would only take in a morsel or two. He regularly dozed off at the dinner table, exhausted from the school day. Belinda loved veggies at an early age, and was Dad's and the family's little girl. Brian always had a good appetite! He sat to my right, and between us were the drinking glasses and the Magnolia Milk bottles or the plastic orange juice containers of ice cold water. We were the water boys at dinner.

Routines. We lived them day in and day out, never realizing, until now, that they were in fact some of the happiest moments of our lives.

Sorry, Jesse.

I must admit, Jesse, that I lumped you with all the politicians I hate. I hate them all, politicians and lawyers. They make life complicated and miserable for a lot of people.

I didn't know you. I'm not a Naga native, nor have I ever been to Naga, or ever cared about it. You and your Naga and your history were totally outside my collective consciousness. "Naga" was a name from way, way back in my grade school days, as an obscure place from Philippine social studies. If you presided over the place at one time, and life for its inhabitants became better, then you must have taken something from it in return. That is how things have always been in this country, right Jesse? Give little things and then take back a multitude. Ask people and firms to donate trash bins and paint, use the paint to paint the trash bins and letter your name on them, donate them to the town or city, have your picture taken during the turn-over ceremonies, making sure not to miss your wide grin and you pointing to the donated trash bins, and presto! A free, effective PR opportunity equivalent to at least a hundred votes for your re-election! Do this thing many times over and the whole town or city will vote for you.

Or you can let the roads rot for years in your town or city, let motorists' disgust and tempers simmer, convene the council well before the start of the campaign period which carries a ban on public works and construction, order truckloads of overpriced, inferior quality asphalt, overlay the rutted roads with it, put up billboards with your big photo and name on them: "Mayor So-and-So, in coordination with This-and-That agency, has made possible this project for the beloved constituents of This-and-That town or city." Just a few days of rain "melts" the asphalt overlay, but the billboards are so durable they can withstand an IED. Laudable.

I lumped you with these imbeciles, Jesse. I'm so biased against your kind. You were a politician. You played politics. I now see that you played it differently. A bit unorthodox, but effective and endearing to a lot of people. You hit it right on the mark.

But Fate is cruel and unkind. Death took you away and you've left us behind. You did wonderful things that gave hope to a lot of people. You showed the way to fresh starts. You could have led those starts yourself, and a whole lot more, but many genuinely good men get plucked early from life. I don't know why. It's a question for philosophers to answer.

I think the hundreds upon hundreds of people who believe in you and hold you dear can't be wrong, Jesse. There are those who remain unconvinced or don't care. They don't matter now. But I WAS one of them, and for this I'm sorry, Jesse.