SALINAS, California — Believe it or not, there was a rather long power outage here in Salinas on Tuesday night that lasted almost seven hours. Salinas, located northeast of Monterey, is where my older brother works on weekdays (he drives home to his family in Los Angeles on weekends), and since this is close to Monterey this is where I’ve been staying during my attachment to the Monterey County Herald. One of the objectives of the International Journalism Exchange (IJE) is to expose the participants not just to American newspapers but to American culture as well, and the preference is to have us stay with families during the attachment period. Unfortunately, the Herald folks couldn’t find a family to host me, so since my brother lives in Salinas it was suggested that I stay with him instead. I’m missing out on the exposure to an American family, but then again I’m getting to spend more time with my brother and mother than I’ve had in the past 20 years. American culture can wait.
Anyway, we were having coffee at home after a big Japanese dinner when all of a sudden the lights went out. At first we were afraid we had blown a fuse, but we looked out the window and saw that the entire neighborhood had been plunged into darkness. “It’ll only be a few minutes,” my brother said, adding that outages did happen once in a while in Salinas. “It’s like being in the Philippines,” I said, although I was sure this one wouldn’t last as long as the brownouts back home. As it turned out, the lights were out the entire night, returning only before 4 the next morning (I know this because I had just gotten up to use the bathroom when the lights came back on).
With the TV off and the entire apartment dark, my brother and I took the opportunity to do something we had enjoyed doing as kids but have not done in two decades: play guitar together. It was my brother who taught me guitar, and we played together at our front yard through our childhood and teens. My best friend and next door neighbor jammed with us, and we grew to love music through those sessions. Back then my brother had a cheap Lumanog nylon string guitar that our father had bought, and we didn’t know that it didn’t actually play and sound all that nice. All we knew was that we could play our favorite Beatles or Apo Hiking Society or Bee Gees songs with it, and that was more than enough.
The Tuesday night jam session in Salinas was a little more, shall we say, ostentatious because instead of a dinky Lumanog, we were playing two Ovation acoustic guitars. Now the Ovation used to be my dream guitar. My best friend and I lusted after it and vowed to ourselves that we would each buy one when we grew up. Ovations are US-made and thus expensive, out of reach for two Pinoy kids who had the talent but not the wherewithal to buy one. What had us focused on it was its body design, specifically the back: it was made of a composite material and was shaped like a bowl. There was nothing like it and therefore we wanted it.
Many years later I would lose my interest in the Ovation when I found that it was a little hard to play while seated: since the back was rounded, it wouldn’t stay put and would slide down and out, away from my body. The appeal of the Ovation was also based on the claim that, because of its design, even its shallow-body models produced good volume and tone. I have since discovered that this was true only of the full-sized ones, and so when it was time for me to buy a guitar I chose an Ibanez which, aside from being within my budget, also played easier and sounded nicer, at least to my ears.
My brother, though, still likes Ovations, and he has bought two of them. So during the dark night of September 30, 2008 in Salinas, California, we played the songs we used to play when we were kids in Malabon, Metro Manila. Beatles, Simon and Garfunkel, America — we found that we still enjoy the same music, and the soft music filled the house and warmed what would have otherwise been a long, cold night.
Random Posts:
Thanks for letting me know where you are blogging now! I wish we could have met while you were “relatively” close.
-Fr. Ron
Hi Jon,
I taught Paolo 7 chords last summer and a little more than a year later he is better than me. He wants to show off his skills to you on Skype one of these days. Maybe he and Daniel can jam online.
AMJ