Happy Hearts and Gall Bladders
Who would you spend Valentine's Day with when your one true love is an ocean away? Why, with your best college buddy, of course! And I did just that in Gen. Trias, Cavite in 2016 when traffic got impossibly snarled with flower vendors hawking their wares and young lovers holding hands and stealing kisses in the streets.
I escaped the chaos of the big city of Makati to be in GenTri on V day and visit with Bing, Maria Emma Yenko Kasilag, my best friend in college, kumare, and niece to National Artist in Music, Dean Lucrecia Kasilag. Other than a cropped mane, (she used to have the loveliest jet black hair down to her waist) and some wisdom wrinkles here and there, she looked just about the same to my eyes, still looking like a “hippieng mabango,” her moniker from our artist friends at the Ayala Museum.
Bing and I went way back to the First International Summer Field School in Prehistory and Ethnography sponsored by UP, the National Museum, and ASEAN in 1973. We were two of several anthropology students from local and foreign universities selected to participate in the excavation of a 14th century burial site and to conduct ethnographic studies of a fishing village in San Piro, Balayan, Batangas.
Mentored by resident and visiting male archaeologists and university professors, we quickly romanticized the field of Anthropology which we were just then getting to know. We were mapping and surveying in the mornings, sharing three meals a day, digging trenches in midafternoon, getting initiated sipping wine from a just-excavated porcelain bowl covering what was the face of a skeleton, getting serenaded by the local boys on moonlit nights and going on short evening excursions to the coves that hide along the beaches of Balayan Bay. It was an experience so sensually charged that one of us eventually married our archaeology professor who was visiting from Hawaii.
Bing and I, not so exotic in looks, were picked for special mentoring by the National Museum archaeologists and UP professors who were simply looking to develop their very own proteges. I soon became Lolo Fred's (Alfredo Evangelista, then Assistant Director of the National Museum) who later got me into the field of Museography and Museology while Bing became Dr. Peralta's (Jesus Peralta) who later got her working on accessioning the thousands upon thousands of pottery shards in the cavernous storage building of the National Museum. Way to get free assist, Jess!
Bing and I later went our separate ways developing our respective careers which were limited to museum work. We did not lose touch, however, and managed to participate in each other's domestic lives. We had numerous sleepovers in each other's homes, shared friends, got ourselves and family members play a part in the milestones of our lives: I was maid-of-honor at her wedding, she was veil sponsor while her mom stood as principal sponsor at mine, and she became ninang to my special child and I, to her firstborn.
But, just the rosy parts do not necessarily seal friendships, I believe. It's the common secrets that you share, secrets that you take to your grave and never reveal, things that you know about the other that make your bond stronger, that make you friends-for-life. That is how it is with Bing and I.
And so, one Valentine's Day, I visited her at her new home, a home she created all by herself in a shell of a house in a subdivision project. I felt blissfully warm inside because I see the Bing that I know in every furniture and furnishing that she chose and in every way that she positioned them, like a museum curator putting up disparate objects that help tell one story.
Fast-forward to years later today, when she texted me of her impending gall stone removal surgery asking for a little prayer. I gave her a ton, keeping her closer to my heart and mind until she had gone through it and recovering very well. Having had my own cholecystectomy in 2019, which was a bit different because I had a rupture and endured a 5-hour surgery and longer recuperation, I would say not only are Bing and I bound by our hearts across a distance but also by our gall bladders.
