Welding With Children

On the way to my sister's condo, I get down the bus at the MRT station in Ayala and walk the three malls (SM, LANDMARK, Glorieta 1) then cross the road, turn left then right up to Radissons. The best part of this long walk aside from the shops and the air-condition is the book display at the walkway at SM. I have already bought three good books in my last three visits to my sister's place (99 each). I always carry a book on my bag and read it on my way to and from Manila. On the bus and while waiting on lines are some of my most concentrated reading times. Right this morning, as I waited for my call at the doctor's office at St Luke, I finished (yeah, that's how long I waited, talk about hospital insurance cards) the short story collection of Tim Gautreaux entitled WELDING WITH CHILDREN. The title did not catch my attention at first, 'coz the word welding sounded so manly. However, the words "with children" caught me. "Interesting," I thought and started flipping the pages. Good bargain because it turned out that this book is one short story collection I will put on my shelf, and possibly reread, both for study and for entertainment.

The blurb says that "Tim Gatreaux's work has appeared in Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Story, and the three most recent editions of Best American short stories. His novel, The Next Step in the Dance won the 1999 SEBA Book Award. He is a writer in residence at Southeastern Louisiana University and lives in Hammond, Louisiana." I don't recognize the magazines except Harper's coz I bought some old issues a long time ago (yes, because of the stories in them). But I wanted some short reads and this was one I could be comfortable with while "in transit."

There are eleven short stories in his collection and my favorites are the following: Welding with Children; Misuse of Light; Easy Pickings; The Piano Tuner; The Pine Oil Writer's Conference.

In the first story, Welding with Children, the character realizes that his grandchildren are growing up without any sense of right or wrong, and he's to blame. He thinks that he wasn't able to raise his daughters the way they should have been raised, that's why his grandchildren are being raised the way they are. It's like a vicious cycle to his mind. The grandchildren left with him to babysit as he proceeds with his tasks (including welding) in his house are the epitome of what can go wrong with the future generation. Their parents work so hard that they are left to fend for themselves, watching television and catching all the pop-innuendoes that cloud their minds with adult stuff too loaded for their young minds. Anyway, I thought the story is very real and compassionate, showing how the old people suddenly do an accounting of their mistakes once they are face to face with how the very young are forced to cope with issues that they should be facing only when they get to middle age. In Filipino context where children live with their parents for as long as they want, the story maybe alien since most children are mamas boys and girls. But at a very young age, if they are left on their own, to be independent and all that, they become dwarf adults, speaking the language of the not-so-very-young while their sponge-minds apply the jaded-meanings to their lives which have yet to evolve. Talking "sense" and "good manners" into them is like welding. The story is sad but it also makes me understand the old people more, when they shake their heads at the ways of youth and say "In our days we used to..."

Misuse of Light is simply beautiful. It's the story of a photographer who doesn't really do much photography on his own but he works in a kind of junk shop buying and selling all used stuff. He gets this walk-in client who sells him an old camera, and as he does with all old cameras, he checks if there's an old film stuck there and if there is, he develops the film himself. This is how he stumbles upon a love story, between two people, an artist photographer and her lover. The photographer died when the ship she and her lover were riding sank, and the story says that instead of saving her, the lover saved the camera. This story is revealed to the grand daughter who sold the camera. The discovery devastates her since she looked at her grandfather - the lover - as a kind of hero. The photographer's curiosity has led him to old newspaper articles which exploited the story. He casually shows the clips to his walk-in client without realizing how they will affect her. But he tries to remedy the situation by studying the picture and the surrounding stories. It turns out that the lover saved the camera because he so loved his photographer-artist friend. He caught the camera and in one instant, as he turned around, the girl he loved had drowned. I thought the title is the very metaphor of how reality is often clouded by perceptions. The camera freezes a story in time, and those who sees the picture looks only at one obvious aspect and completely miss the other details. The characters didn't get the story right the first time because there are details in the picture that they didn't pay particular attention to. It took the photographer's eyes to tell them that the eyes of the girl caught by the camera and her parted lips, plus the other details in the pictures tell no other story but that of true love, and the one who caught those pictures is the entire opposite of the selfish, indifferent creature that the newspaper pictured him to be.

Easy Pickings is kind of funny. A robber victimizes an old woman who lives alone in a house. But this old woman isn't ordinary. She is a survivor, and has experienced several deaths in the family in her lifetime. So, undaunted, she asks the robber as he threatens to cut her neck with a knife if she doesn't give him his money, "OK if you kill me, what will you do with me? You can't eat me afterwards." Well, she lures him with her boiling stuff on the stove, feeds him with chicken stew and dessert until he is dizzy with food. The Sheriff arrives, the robber takes the old woman with him as hostage. But the woman isn't at all fazed. She even tells the Sheriff as the robber drags her out to help himself with coffee. The sheriff allows this robber to take his gun and the old woman out the door and the robber uses the sheriff's vehicle as the escape car. The robber thinks that the Sheriff is kind of stupid. On their way the old woman feigns a heart attack. The robber is faced with police checks at the end of the road and his hostage's death, so he turns back and goes the way he went that led him to the woman's house. But unfortunately for him, her old neighbors who are the ones who alerted the Sherrif finds a gun in their house. The robber sees the four of them, and their house which is the old woman's only neighbor. One of them fires at one of his wheels and it flops. He finds out that the old woman isn't dead at all, and the gun he forced the Sheriff to give to him isn't loaded. These are old people he thought are old and naive and stupid to be living outside town. But he's handcuffed by his own assumptions.

The Piano Tuner is about a piano tuner who helps a hermit-like talented musician get out of her shell. At first, she seems weird, living alone in an old house, with an old piano, with nothing else to do but live on her inheritance. No social life, no boyfriend, not even a dog. But when her piano got tuned up, the tuner realizes how heart stopping her music is. He helps her find a job in a lounge frequented by miners. And then she plays music there which is incongruent with the surroundings and out of place with how the people thought music should be. But she goes on playing her own music, until the people got used to it, and in between playing the piano she inserts her own queer small talk which sounds heart-stopping even to the manager. The piano tuner realizes in the end how ordinary the other people are compared to this extraordinary character. I am impressed with this story since I know some quite "queer" people who do not blend with the crowd, and when they try, they look even more queer. But since they allow their uniqueness to stand out, they become the kind of person you realize are the real stuff, no masks, just different, vulnerable and brave.

The Pine Oil Writer's Conference is about a minister who would like to be a writer. He attends this workshop where famous writers comment on participant's work. But he realizes in the course of the seminar that he's probably the only one serious about serious writing. Most of the attenders have not even written a single decent manuscript but they "like" to be writers. Other motives don't even matter. His roommate is more interested in getting laid and with the help of a lady participant he flirts with hacks up a document that is filled with cliches. The minister stays in his room working hard on his manuscript, while his roommate had his time with his lady friend. During the presentation, his roommate comes out of the workshop panel shattered 'coz he heard all the bad things about his manuscript. Meanwhile, the best panelist-writer in the workshop tells the minister that he should stop being a pastor and continue what he began since she has never read anything that is so full of promise. So the minister goes home with a good feeling and somehow, he is affirmed that he has a gift and that he can use it. But after three long years, he isn't able to write anything. And then he reads about his roommate, who has published a book, and it is a bestseller!