dre poetic: words by adrien salazar

I wrote this last week and meant to post it. In light of the recent passing of Al Robles, it brings me to deeper pause.

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I haven’t been back to the Philippines in five years, this April. This time marks the fifth anniversary of my grandpa’s death. The timing is not coincidental.

Five years ago in March I was with the rest of my family in Fresno. We stood around his quiet. I remember the small chapel in the hospital where we prayed. I guess it makes sense to have a chapel in a hospital.

In a few days it was over.

Grandpa was not a man who laughed heartily. My dad told me stories of how he would disappear into the mountains in Kalibo for months. Grandpa also apparently was a very ill-tempered man.

Since they all had moved to America, a certain arrangement kept him in the homes of his children, each taking their turn through the years. I asked my dad why they did this, even with all the man did to them.

“Because we’re his kids, this is what you’re supposed to do.”

Whenever grandpa was at our house he would ask me to do things for him. Buy him hamburgers at McDonald’s. Help him find things. He liked me apparently. He often called me Al or Albert, my cousin’s names. During long days he would walk the block or stand and stare out the open garage. At night I heard him praying.

The year he died all the Salazars came back to the Philippines. The Salazars had not been together on this island for more than thirty years. We carried with us a small bronze box sealed tight.

The church was hot, naturally. I was responsible for reading the Prayer for the Faithful, a litany that included blessings for the departed. I read his name written out “Lolo Amado.” After the mass, a woman kept saying “Lolo Amado, Lolo Amado” to me and laughing. She seemed a little crazy. I was probably related to her. Everyone knew him as Lolo Adoy. Even me. I just read what was on the paper.

That trip I found loose pieces of a man that I never knew. We visited his brother’s house. They fed us suman. In Libacao there was a man who cried hard because no one told him my grandpa had died.

I remember the grave of my grandma was broken open to put the small metal box next to her casket. I threw a small white flower in and then a man began to seal the grave with fresh concrete. We walked away before it was finished.

My grandpa is the country I was born, memories blurred together in humidity, the parts of me hard to get a hold of. He is as vague to me as this land of former lives and ghost possibilities that may only be half true.

I wonder if he ever wanted to really talk to me. It would have been hard. I can’t speak the island anymore. The language left my lips years ago and his English was not so good.