It was midnight and I was not sleepy at all. Perhaps it was because of the grande Cafe Mocha I had with Borgy after work.

I needed a rugby or a Mighty Bond or anything to fix my white shoe. I wanted to wear it today. I searched the house up and down, but couldn't find anything to glue the sole of my shoe with. Frustrating.

For the first time in three years, I opened Tatay's bodega under the staircase. It smelled the same: old, musty, it reeked of oil and rat poop. I missed seeing Tatay fixing something in the house, seeing his hands working.

Tatay had the most junk--scraps of metal, rusty pipes, blocks of wood, a handleless saw, a cranky transistor radio, old bicycle tires, a twenty year old BMX named Nat--anything and everything an obsessive-compulsive housewife could die of. Oh but Nanay loved him alright. But I digress.

Tatay had refused to throw these junk because he said he'd find use for them or make them work again. It was his own excuse to be busy despite admonishing him to rest, take a break, wash his hands off that grime. He wouldn't sit still, much less allow himself to be idle. Sometimes we suspected that he deliberately broke stuff or dismantled, say, the radio or the electric egg beater or the faucet, just so he could fix them again.

Sometimes they'd work out alright but then the old-fashioned black telephone never sounded right again. You know what I mean.

His bodega is much more organized now. We have also earned thousands of pesos from all the clutter that had accumulated in the house. We had a musem of junk that virtually made us and the house a tinder box. Light up a matchstick and throw it inside the house and the Chinese volunteer fire brigades would go scampering to our street.

So Tatay never made it possible for our house look spotless or Zen or plain orderly (clean but cluttered). He had kept too much useless, broken pieces of things that used to be functional and indispensable to the household. He had taken too much space in the house. No, you couldn't throw that old sofa out even if your butt already touched the springs under it. That cracked mirror could be turned into a smaller one, probably for the bathroom. There is really no junk. Nothing is useless. Nothing is irreparable. Nothing is really broken unless you cease looking for glue, hammer on a nail, screw in on a knot.

For Tatay, anything can be turned into something more than what it promises to be.

I didn't find a rugby or a Mighty Bond in his bodega. I saw only an image of him sitting on his stool contemplating on a dismantled cuckoo clock. After, I sat there on the now spotless sala, wondering how we had easily gotten rid of decades of junk and unused objects in the house. Somehow we threw away pieces of Tatay too. The thought of it made me want to wake up everyone in the house and make them assure me that Tatay isn't mad at us or sad or disappointed.

I took out my white shoe whose sole smiled at me, but I cried back. Perhaps I could turn it into a hand puppet instead.

For Tatay
12:40 am 01 September 2004