These two parakeets are new to the front porch.
The two birds and cage were a thousand pesos, about $20.00. The two of them sing, preen, watch the world from their small enclosure.They are confined, but they are safe.
Sitting below is one of Alma’s cats, looking up, calculating ways to reach them.He caught a mouse yesterday and played with it in the dining room before making it a meal.
Morning sunlight pours into the porch and the green blue white tropical birds share love poems.
This cat is out of luck, but yearning.
These are the makings of a country western song.
Excitement builds during the week .
As Sunday afternoon grows close, the roosters crowing takes on more urgency. On Sunday afternoons, a stadium in a local neighborhood opens for business and men pay for permits to fight their birds.
The fighting cage in the middle of this stadium looks small from the bleachers and the birds inside it are hard to see.However, you can tell how the match is going by listening to the rise and fall of waves of sound. Sound rumbles at the beginning of the fight as birds are primed and hawkers take bets. It crescendos during the match, if it is a good one. At the end, there is almost a silence as the referee picks up a dead rooster who has lost and presents it to the owner of the winning rooster to take home and put in his cooking pot.
Fighting is both human and animal history.
Martial Arts cage fighting makes the old Friday night television boxing matches look tame. Gladiators in Roman extravaganzas bled in the sand and crowds watched the Emperor’s thumb to see if a man lived or died. David and Goliath was a spectacular Biblical fight.
This early round is over quickly and a new pair of animal contestants and their human trainers enter the ring.
I bet a thousand pesos and lose, but next week will be different.
This event, for me, isn’t entertaining.
Betting on life or death isn’t a wager I like to make, especially when animals are involved.
Each week, rooster fights happen.
Men of all ages bring their favorite fighting roosters to this stadium, pay a fee to enter, put their rooster and their reputation on the line.
These battles are to the death, and, to ensure that, roosters have a finger long barbed metal spike attached to one of their legs just before they are set on the ground in the stadium ring and their owner, and trainer, step back and leave the fight to fate.
This stadium is filled this Sunday afternoon and is a series of intense moments broken by stretches of boredom.
People stand on the seats, move as close to the cage as they can to see better, wave or nod at bet takers who are yelling at them, raising fingers, making eye contact, scratching their right ear. Vendors move through the crowd selling food, snacks, drinks and cigarettes.
I have been told there are a few birds who are favorites but it is really impossible to tell which rooster will be ready to fight when it is time.
The noise in the arena grows deafening as the two roosters start pecking at one another, jumping into the air with outstretched wings,striking out with their talons.
The fights last most of the afternoon and emotions are live wires, as feathers float, in the air, in the cage.
The best statistic to remember is that half of the roosters come out of the war alive.
Today, Gwen wants blue toenails. She is four years old but has a mind of her own, like all of us.
Today, Alma sits on the floor in a doorway and carefully puts a new more beautiful blue on previously red toenails.
Every little girl needs these moments.
Alma knows this better than anyone.
Gwen will remember this, forever.
March is one of the dryer months on Marinduque but, even in March, it rains.
This is a morning rain that lasts an hour, steady. Rain runs off the tin roof and puddles in the yard. After thirty minutes, soil turns to a mud so thick you can’t shake it off your shoes.
We stay indoors and wait.
I listen to the rain make drumbeats on the roof.
Nature makes good music.
The Mogpog market is a place we return each day, more than once,
By lunch most of the fresh products have been sold, fisherman have returned to sleep in their berths after a night on the waters. There are newly slaughtered hogs carried into the market throughout the day, loaded on tables and butchered in public..Flounders look at you with both eyes, flat as pancakes on a diner grill. Chickens, plucked and washed, lie in neat rows, headless. Vegetables look like a Monet painting with their colors bright and bold, splashes from Mother Nature’s paint pot.
Today, we shop for a graduation party and look for a Barbie doll for little girl Gwen.
The market is a kaleidoscope of images, a cacophony of sounds, a security blanket of the familiar.
We find Gwen her Barbie and she carries it home, in the box, happy as a new mom.
Our Jeepney is loaded with twenty family members, kids, teens, babies, adults, inner tubes, coolers, pots of food, towels and swim gear.
Today is a family pool party at the Villa Arcos in Santa Cruz, Marinduque.
After we arrive and pay our entry fees, we tiptoe down steep stone stairs to two turquoise color pools, the first one smaller, the second one big. This jungle theme park has penguins, zebras, crocodiles,and an airplane in the tree tops where you can climb and sit in the open cockpit. The two pools stand out like enormous gemstones in the bright tropical sun.
When you go down the park water slide you pick up speed, hold your nose, and fly feet first into the water. Only a few of us have the guts to go down the slide head first.Those who can’t swim play in the pool’s shallow water and use inner tubes. Some of the men stay up in the cabanas,drink beer and tell jokes most of the day.
By mid afternoon, everyone is tired and ready to go home and our hired Jeepney driver starts his engines. Empty pots slide on the floor of the Jeepney as we navigate down a winding road towards home, a road that makes a sidewinder look straight.
Three generations are represented on this pleasure trip.
Going down the slide, head first, I felt like a kid.
In our mind and heart we can defy the ravages of time.
The most common vehicles on Marinduque are bikes, tricycles with a cab, tribikes with a cab, motorcycles, and jeepneys.
Jeepneys are the most colorful and most used on narrow winding mountain roads that take a traveler three or four hours to go around an island that is called small by locals.
Jeepneys are versions of World War 11 jeeps enlarged and modified to carry multiple passengers. They are intensely decorated with signs, slogans, horns, bumper stickers. On dash boards are replicas of Jesus with hands praying. There are beads and charms with rooster feathers swinging from rear view mirrors and, on the outside of one, the words, ” GOD WILLS, ” is hard to miss.
For tall Americans or Europeans, you have to bend low when you enter a jeepney and there are railings on the ceiling you hold if you need stability. Windows are small and there is no place to pause and take a photo as the transport moves down the road as quick as the driver can be safe.
Getting down the road is a game of chicken where transports usually stop a few millimeters from collision.
You can rent a car if you need one, but Jeepney’s are an adventure worth having.
Getting around is one of a trip’s great pleasures and getting around in style is the best way to fly.
Coconut trees make pretty pictures, but they make money too.
On Marinduque, coconut trees grow up the sides and over mountains, in valleys and in flat areas that have been cleared of brush to make orchards, rows of the trees standing like sailors at morning muster, in a line, Irish pennants clipped and shoes spit shined.
All the land on this island is owned and coconuts are harvested every two to three months, those that survive typhoons,rainy seasons, and wind storms.The coconuts are harvested by hand and families supplement their income by working in the groves when the time is right, bringing down coconuts for sale to local agents to ship to Manilla, and, from there, around the world.
Uncle Estoy works on the first step in the harvest process, using a long stick with a hooked curved blade on one end to cut the neck that attaches the coconut to its tree. The coconuts look like clusters of grapes from the ground but when they fall you need to stand back because they feel like a bag of rocks if they hit your head.
The rest of the team, once the coconuts fall to the ground, carry or toss them to a burning station where the skin is burned off.
These guys work most of the day, and, when they walk home, the colorful T shirts wrapped around their heads make them look like tired but happy pirates.
By the end of the day, they harvest over a hundred coconuts ready to go to Manilla. Everyone is tired, but all are safe, and it is a job well done.
You wouldn’t want to do this every day.
Then, it would really be work.
In Belize, karaoke machines appear in bars and hotel ballrooms with guests wearing Wal-Mart pineapple and palm tree short sleeved perma-press shirts. They sing into late hours and consume vast quantities of rum.
In Mogpog, karaoke machines appear in people’s front yards, or living rooms, and friends and family wear Rock and Roll T shirts, shorts, flip flops, sing into late hours and consume even larger quantities of Red Horse beer and home cooked food.
As competitors sing they are heckled, make mistakes and laugh. The music has to shut down at ten in the evening and each party gets a party permit from city officials before it can begin.
Holding a microphone, the star of the moment follows lyrics on a tv screen and sings the melody, adding emotion and dynamics. Some of the lyrics are in English and some are in Tagalog. When a song ends, there is a moment of silence as the machine calculates a final score and flashes it on the screen.
One hundred is the best score you can make,and, when someone gets a hundred, there are whoops and hollers.
One of the things I need to practice, before going back to Mogpog, is my singing.
The best way to describe my singing is that it sounds like a hungry cat with a tooth missing.
Not being able to sing shouldn’t mean we can’t be a star.
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