Behind the Scenes Special

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            Hello everyone! Kumusta ka! Welcome to today’s episode. And it is the spooky season, which did sneak up on me a bit, but now that I am aware of what the calendar has been trying to tell me, I’m excited. Or I was. Or I still am partially because as a pet-parent of a black cat, we’re going to have a mini birthday party at my home. Because I never get trick or treaters anyway.

            But that’s irrelevant. Last year, I came up with a little ghost story around the White Lady, a character in Filipino folklore that haunts the road at night, waiting to hitch a ride with unsuspecting drivers and soon to be victims. Other cultures have their own equivalent. But as someone who gets intense nervous when they drive or ride in a car at night, this seemed like the perfect ghost story to tell.

            However, this year’s Spooky Special really hit a roadblock. And that’s the unfortunate story I’m going to tell you today because when I went on this journey with no clue what I was going to find, I ended up stumbling on something that felt important. Well I mean it has ramifications for this show, so yeah, it pretty much is important. It was one of those experiences or perspectives that probably seemed inevitable but fell through the cracks, and now is the time for it. Maybe, but I will get there in a moment.

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            So remember our good old friend Maximo D. Ramos, and if “friend” needs to be in quotation marks for you, fair enough. I used his work to do some of the retellings on this show, giving the Filipino folklore the same treatment other folk traditions have gotten. And his book was great for that. So imagine my excitement to see the list of all of his other books. Never mind the contextually specific excitement of seeing a book about the (quote) “Creatures of Midnight.” I mean, that would make a great Halloween activity for us, right?

            Well, I’m still convinced that I’m not exactly wrong about that. Or I wasn’t. But it got complicated.

The alternative—the thing that might make more sense to some of you listening to my voice—is to go into Filipino cultural traditions. For that, I sent a quick text to my mother.

            Because—undoubtedly—there was going to be a lot of variation across the different ethnolinguistic groups or provinces. And I wanted to know, before doing any research of my own, what her experience had been. However, for the sake of this story, let me point out that my mom is not very good at answering her messages. So there’s that, which is a reason to put a pin into that part of the story for now. We will get back to it.

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            After some shipping delays, I got the book in question. And the first thing I noticed is that… Well, there are reading comprehension questions at the end of each description. And yes, it’s a true description not story. Which I was happy to work with. It really was the questions. Or question. One question per entry that threw me off.

            I didn’t really understand why I was looking at that sort of thing. Or what I was looking at. And when it doubt, look at the author’s premise which you should probably do in the first place. But in reading the premise, I didn’t come away with a sense of clarification. So much as I confirmation of sorts. And that’s probably inaccurate. Look, in the preface, Ramos explains that part of the motivation behind this book was creating a record of those things that lie beneath the surface of the daily superstitions that define Filipino life. These superstitions have outlasted the storybehind them, and Ramos was concerned about that.

            His concern really resonated with me. Within this observation was the confirmation that I wasn’t the only person struggling to keep a tether to my ancestral past and all the richness within it. I mean, that couldn’t have been strictly true. Anyone raised abroad was going to have some difficulties on that front. Then there’s complex ethnic identities. Colonialism. Globalization. A bunch of things can lead to this for a bunch of different people.

There were always going to be other people in a similar situation to me. I’ve even heard from some when doing this podcast. But this confirmation felt different.

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            In the meantime, Mom answered my message. Just saying that she did in fact celebrate Halloween as a kid, but she didn’t go into specifics. And she knows about this podcast, so I hadn’t thought that I needed her to explicitly say why I was asking. But yeah, there was that.

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            Maximo D. Ramos was born in 1910 and died in 1988. In that time, which was a little bit ago, he was already concerned that cultural traditions and old beliefs were fading away and completely out of memory. Or that’s the preface of this book seemed to say. It is hard to know if this is why he was doing what he did. The records for that aren’t that great. I mean, they never are for anybody. The internal worlds we maintain aren’t easily captured. But I sometimes worry that there’s more to than that.

            I remember a temp job I had where I had to close out former donors and other important people from their databases. To do that, I had to find confirmation that they had died like an obituary. And obituaries aren’t that common in Filipino culture.

It’s a different relationship with the dead and with the things that haunt us than anything I had known in my time in America.

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            When we did make the trip back to the Philippines, I remember going to the graveyard with spaghetti for my grandfather. It wasn’t just that culturally speaking long noodles have a special significance. That was his favorite meal. And it is mine too. I don’t exactly know how or why, but Filipino spaghetti always tasted a little sweeter than what I would eat anywhere else. And I love it that way.

            I never visited the grave of my other grandparents. Not after their deaths. But in the Philippines, it was part of life. No pun intended.

            If you are familiar with YouTube’s friendly neighborhood mortician Caitlin Doughty then you know that it’s her mission to make her audience confront their own morality and the death of their loved ones in a personal and productive way. She does in response to the sanitation of and sequestering of the death process that is incredibly common in the US but also found in any place the American funeral industry has had great influence.

            These leads to Halloween and death anniversaries—in some circumstances—being the only time death comes up in conversation as a fact of life and not something to be escaped or dreaded.

            But I don’t think it’s that way in the Philippines. The other side of life, the darker side that contains death, is more present in the Filipino consciousness. The dead are thought about and fed whenever the family comes together. They are a part of your story in so far as the memory can last.

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            My godchildren in the Philippines celebrate with costumes like American children do. Or at least I keep sending them costumes, and no one has corrected me. My mom said that she and her siblings did not have costumes, which makes sense for different reasons but they would still go around to sing and see their neighbors. And maybe that’s really all Halloween is to them. It’s not a dive into the darkness that is normally kept at a distance. That part of life is always there.

            Or it was. And it still lingers. But as Ramos might have feared, it could very well be getting harder to see. And that leads to a different kind of horror: the existential kind that lingers when you bring up the future. Like the future of this podcast?

            Look, I know I can be scattered and all over the place. I also know that I seldom upload on time. I’m usually a day or two late. And while sometimes that is because my computer figuratively eats the files, sometimes it’s just because I can’t get something together in ti9e. Or I get too many things together.

            One of the things I thought of doing and I even alluded to on Twitter was to explore one specific legend in great detail. But then I started looking into those details, and I found more and more of them. And I found this entire narrative that I wanted to unpack, and I didn’t know what to do. It was just too much for a show like this.

            And that’s not the first time this has happened. There are so many things to talk about and discuss that probably should be done in a great deal of depth, and sure I could do that by spreading the topic out to multiple episodes, even if I miss a holiday season, which would be okay. But it leaves a different concern. Is the final product going to be what I want it to be if I don’t give myself the option to revise and rework previous chapters when new discoveries come out in the course of later ones.

            It’s not that I don’t want to do this podcast but that I never knew what this podcast was going to be when I started. I wanted to reclaim the stories that were mine by blood, but there are so many more out there than I could have ever imagined. And sure, retelling keeps them alive, but so does understanding and analysis. And that’s what I feel like I’m called to do.

            I want to do a lot of things. But in saying that, I don’t think I can do that in this format, and the growing pains are starting to get unbearable. Instead of one series, it should have been a bunch of limited run podcasts grouped together. And that’s what I need to look into doing.

            For now, I can promise content on this feed until the end of 2019, but then I need to make some changes. I’m hopeful and excited for these possibilities, but I do hope that you will trust me and stick around for the ride.

            But thank you for being here this far.

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