Hey Mr. Tambourine Man!

Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me,
I'm not sleepy
and there ain't no place I'm going to.
Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song
for me,
In the jingle jangle morning I'll come following
you.

Though I know that evenings empire has returned into
sand,
Vanished from my hand,
Left me blindly here to stand but still not
sleeping.
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet,
I have no one to
meet,
And the ancient empty
street's too dead for dreaming.

---Bob Dylan, Mr. Tambourine
Man

It’s Christmas Day! We hope we can have all the gadgets that our hands could ever get----cellphones, internet, telephone, blueberries, Palm Pilots, walkie-talkies---whatever, so just as we can greet as many friends as possible.

I want to greet Tony and Russell and others but Tony must be at his Mom’s house as usual like in the past years( I spent some memorable Christmases there when we were in highschool) and Russell must be in Sibuco right now. I had some friends in mind whom I could only reach through the cellphone but the darnest thing happened when I lost my unit sometime ago and never had any replacement since then. But Merry Christmas to every one and to every soul that may have gotten lost in the abyss of blogosphere and found themselves lost and peeking into this site.

The wife, Evelyn, as usual prepared the Noche Buena but we were so tired doing some last minute buying spree and it was already morning that the kids were up and about, eating whatever was prepared. There were just a lot of celebrations the past week that I did not feel good eating any meat or any cooked food for that matter and I just wallowed into bowls after bowls of fruit salad. By the volume and variety of food on our table, this year saw us having lesser. There are just a lot to spend for like gifts for the kids and the grandsons and granddaughters---I bet you could not have the best of all worlds.

And we are planning to buy a new bicycle for the second child, Yves. Partly, the reason why the food on our Noche Buena table is much lesser now is because we are planning to have the neighborhood kids in our house today for kiddie games again. Last time they have the most native of pansit that one could ever find, but now they may have some hotdogs and spaghettis, a little occidental dish for them. We may have lesser this year but having the neighborhood kids for a little fun makes the day more meaningful for us---and much, much more eventful than any Christmas in the past. I see my kids growing and I delight to see them starting to have relationships with other kids around. Reminds me how blissful we were in our childhood when there are more kids around to play with us.

Now, that I finally became more and more a Christian, I was dreaming of hams in my sleep, but no hams on the table. I wonder how it taste like.

We all have our Christmas stories but what is this year’s storiest of all stories? What does this day mean to all of us? Is it merely a day of great food and merriment? Do we understand what we are celebrating and whose day we are glorifying? Who is Christ to us and how does He fit into this bedlam of joy and pleasure?

I do not mean to be preachy. I apologize. As what Bono quipped in his live rendition of the U2 song Silver and Gold, “I don’t mean to bug you, huh.”

This afternoon, I was retreating to my bed and put on some MP3 music, the ones I hacked from file-sharing modules. I have stopped hacking lately since my conscience clarified the fact that downloads of this kind may be a form of thievery. Some thief we are at times. Although some Supreme court in some U.S. states decided that file-sharing is legal.

And so I lay there on my bed reading the papers and Bob Dylan got to croon some old-time ditties. His song “Like A Rolling Stone”, the one with “once upon a time you look so fine…” just got recently honored by the Rollingstone magazine as “The Greatest Rock and Roll Song” of all time.

And funny how Bob’s voice reverberated through my head, as I was slowly lulled into half-sleep. He kept on singing in an almost yelping manner, “….Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man sing a song for me….I’m not sleepy and there is nowhere I am going to…..Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man sing a song for me…In a jingle-jungle morning I come following you….”.

Then I saw the streets in my head and many of those homeless people in their dirty and tattered clothes. When I was in Manila, I use to pass by these people through Recto St., a place I frequent almost daily as I head towards San Beda College where I was reviewing for the bar examinations. Through Sta. Mesa, Cubao and Taft Avenue, they go walking and sleeping in the sidewalks that everywhere I see them, they seem to have the same faces and the same clothes, as if they were clones that was generated into a whole specie of man, in order to suffer and grieve, for the sole purpose of letting the world know how grave some suffering of man is.

In my last Sunday in Manila that year, a man with a cart kept on following me as I walk down Taft Avenue towards La Salle where I was to take the darnest examination of all. I panicked a little since it was so early in the morning and the daylight was not yet come, thinking the man in ragged clothes might pull a knife on me and make just another entry in the crime statistic. But I cleared all of my senses and stopped walking, and earned enough courage to ask him why he was after me. He pointed to the food I was carrying in a plastic bag. Without any hesitation, I gave it to him. I was expecting some food handouts from my brods in the Alpha Rho Lambda Law fraternity that day anyway, as part of the bar operations. And I still remember his face. He wasn’t that old but some sanity was lost on his face. I have reckoned then that hunger and desperation could make a person lost sanity slowly bit by bit, day by day and moments after moments as the pangs of hunger gradually eats up the person. I thought then that if I had a lot of more food then, I would have given more. He was singing to me, “…hey Mr. Tambourine Man…sing a song for me…”.

Then I saw Koming in my head as Mr. Dylan repeats and repeats his glorious verses. I do not know why the hell he was called Koming. I have never heard a moniker like that before. Maybe his real name was Nicomedus, in deference to some Greek icon---and it becomes Koming in the shortest breath of the tongue.

He is an old man living on the streets; in fact he rolls his linen in the vicinity just fronting our house. He had no relations, or more particularly he had lost relations, or to put it more clearly, his relations does not tend to him as what was expected.

Koming was a regular tambay in the streets of Lustre St. in his healthier days. If I am not mistaken, the last time I saw him in fair physical condition, he was peddling cigarettes along the sidewalks of downtown Zamboanga. In many previous days and months or years ago, I saw him often with a hammer in a hand and some other carpenter’s tool in another, and a cigarette was always tuck behind his ears. In legends told now by those who knew him well, they said that the old man did gain some wealth in his younger days that he had owned cows and traded rice by the sacks. I see this particular story as mere legend for how could he have fallen so steeply into hard times. Such things are staple of movies, aren’t they? Now as I see him, he has completely nothing and he is as raggedy as any person living in the streets, with dirt darkening his skin and his clothes do not fit him no more.

About months ago, Koming fell ill and stopped selling cigarettes in a corner of the downtown streets. He just fell ill one day and the sickness so bad that he could not tend to his own necessities anymore. He could not even attend to the proper manner of nature’s call, and thus began his downright desperation. The owner of the house where he had rented a room for quite sometime now had asked him to leave as his immediate surroundings became so unsightly with feces and urine. His other relations living in the same barangay refused to allow him shelter mainly for reasons that I have mentioned above (he could not tend on his own). He has no wife and children, that was his main inadequacy; for if he ever did had a child, somebody would have tended to him through a difficult sickness like he has now where only the loved ones could have the patience to care through such often sickening situation.

And so Koming slept on the streets just near us. So near that in the beginning I talked to him for some while and took note that not only was his movement was so weakened and limited, but his mind is already much clouded. He blubbers and talk about things without connection to anything he said previously. The effect of stroke tells on him so gravely but at some moment when I converse with him, he becomes lucid and suddenly talked like his mind is intact. I wonder if he was just making up his blubbering act. I feel at times that it was only his defensive mechanism to stave off the embarrassment of his situation. You see I am insane already so I am excused for looking so dirty and smelling so awful, he must have declared to all of us by pretending to be mentally retarded. At times, he cries when I give him food and I could see that he was trying his best to keep the tears back. I thought for once then, that this man might just be playing dumb.

And now it’s raining outside, that for every drop of rain, my mind imagines how that man must be feeling in the coldness of the night. Among the things that have I delivered to him was a spread of foam, which I cut out in order for him to sleep a little more comfortable, a pail where water could be poured for washing, a pair of slippers and some plate. I think I forgot to give him some blankets.

It is not that the relations have abandoned him altogether. They give him regular food. There are even some richer relations that would pass by and leave him packs of cigarettes and tetra-packed orange juices. When there are days to celebrate in the community, like Christmas, someone would hand him some real cooked food. It is mainly the unsanitary condition of his person that makes it harder for his relations to take him in. So he had been built a little wooden shack nearby us, and he passes these kind of cold nights in a house without a door with only a huge opening and nothing much else. No window, no ceiling. One day I whispered to him “you know, you just have to be contented with these things. Some street people could not even expect food handouts on such a regular basis”. At least, I said to him, he has food on a fairly regular basis.

For once, I felt nothing but scorn against his relatives living nearby for I believe they must at least exert more patience in order to give him some more relief. But there are things that we just could not meddle into. And there are reasons perhaps, that we do not know. They just wouldn’t take him into their shelter.

When Koming sometimes appear near our gate, while I wash the jeep (despite his weakness, he could fairly move around albeit in a very slow pace), I take him in and give him a thorough shower---so thorough that I scrubbed his body with soap and water. I could not believe I was doing it. Dirt I could feel easily in my hands and the smell was at some moment excruciating. But I overcame any inhibitions because every time I see his very dirty figure, I tend to squirm and feel extreme repulsion to the fact that there is a man like him whose body has become so desecrated by lack of attention. I believe that despite poverty and nothingness, no human should live like dogs on the streets. And besides, such pity overwhelms me every time I see the person that he had become.

Yet, hours after I washed his body, he dirtied himself again by just flaying his body all over the muddied ground. I did wash him again after a week when the time to wash the jeep came up again and I gave him some of my clothes. Still, Koming would dirty himself again as soon as he goes back into the streets. I finally gave up and deduce that I just could not have the time to tend for him as much as I desire to for I have some family duties that keeps me until early evening just driving and keeps me wide awake so deep into dawn singing lullabies to my youngest daughter Evette, who is just four months old by now.

I often asked the Lord in the night if I already measured up to what was expected of a Good Samaritan? Of course, I could not take Koming into our house even if I want to for the wife would go crazy. And besides, the apartment space is already too small already for us. I felt that I must help more but what more I could do except to include him in my prayers that whenever soon he would depart this world, certainly Koming shall enter the Kingdom of God, for he had been so poor and suffering while he is here on earth and blessed is he like the Lord Christ said.

Actually, I could see the food being delivered to him had become more regular these recent days but at times I am disturbed thinking that he might not have anything on his stomach in any particular moment. But all I do is worry and become so tired in the night that I just have no time to tend to his needs. At times, I deliver some bread and water to him in the middle of dawn because at times he just comes up into my mind. In recent weeks, my pocket was so tight that I wasn’t more inclined to buy bread for the night. You see, the wife buys bread in the morning. If I want to give to Koming, I still have to buy some bread in the afternoon after I fetch my kids from school. The morning breads are usually gone when I woke up often late into the day.

In rainy days like these, there I go again thinking of that sick old man as if I was his own keeper. This afternoon, I saw someone gave him some Christmas food. I saw some bottles of water. I see that he just needs some blankets. Maybe, there are some unused blankets somewhere in the cabinets.

“Hey Mr. Tambourine Man sing a song for me. I’m not sleeping and there is nowhere I am going to.”

That’s the song of Koming. How I wish our relief organization were already up and about by this time for “Mr. Tambourine Man” is the song sang by many Komings in the streets of our country.

VERSE OF THE DAY. From St James. Chapter 2 and Verse 17: “ Even so faith, if it hath no works, is dead, being alone.”