The man that he is

“Bahagan mo nga are,” Papa said as he handed me the needle and the spool of thread, having finally given up after several failed attempts at shooting the thread through.

I was at first amused and driven to remember my home economics class in grade school. This thread-through-the-eye-of-the-needle thing, I realized, was all I retained from that subject: Snip the tip of the thread, wet it with spit, put it through. I passed the written tests about the kinds of stitches and of cloths and all that but, along with achara (pickle)-making, it’s not something that I can apply in real life.

I belong to a generation in which everyone appears to be educated but no one seems to know how to do things. One scenario where this becomes painfully obvious is when there’s a celebration in our little barangay in rural Batangas. We’ve kept to the tradition of bayanihan catering, in which the men butcher, prepare and cook homegrown pigs, all the while sharing bottles of gin and brotherly camaraderie. While the neighborhood fathers—fiftyish—sweat over simmering talyasi (cauldrons) of various pork recipes (afritada, say, and, ah, sweet humba), men of my age—twentyish—sit around partaking of our share of gin shots and “chicks” stories, but are generally useless with the pork chores.

I have begun to wonder how we’ll manage with our own weddings, our kids’ graduations, and our birthdays in the future, when nobody has learned how to butcher a pig or cook. We don’t even raise pigs anymore. Most probably, we will celebrate fiestas and wedding receptions at the nearest Jollibee a couple of towns away.

I’ll never find myself stitching torn seams, like Papa does, I’ve realized.

Aren’t you amazed at how our fathers seem to know practically everything? How many times has your father hammered and sawed and painted, taken apart some faulty electrical appliance, fixed a toy, or fiddled with plumbing, while you stood watching with the embarrassed gratitude of the helpless? Times like those unman me, knowing that one day, my kid would tearfully plead, beg and beseech me to fix something—and I would, most probably, just cry with him because of frustration at my own incompetence.

In many ways, I will never be the man my Papa is. I belong to a generation that will replace rather than repair—be it torn shorts, mobile phones, even relationships. The most sensible thing I can do for a torn pair of shorts, for example, is to put it in the back of the closet and forget about it, and in time rediscover it and get sentimental about it, think of the happy times I had wearing it, take a photo, and then write about it on Facebook, before tearing it apart to make something on which to wipe my shoes.

Fathers also have a different perspective on time that my generation, understandably, with the epic change brought about by the speed of things, does not possess. We have that kind of patience in which we will not fall in line unless we have no choice, but we will be happy to spend a day on a reality-show audition where we have almost no chance of being selected, or spend a night in the streets waiting for a movie to start showing when that same movie will still be shown for a whole month, and a copy will be available online ever after.

Papa keeps urging me to get my own house—one of those units payable in 25 years—and I always reply with an incredulous “What? Twenty-five years?!” And he retorts with “Well, 25 years isn’t that long.”

That results in a more incredulous, a more drawn-out “Whaaaat?!” from me. Putting thread through the needle’s tiny eye is definitely much easier than putting “25 years isn’t that long” through my head, being 22 years old and not even living that long.

Come to think of it, when Papa was my age he was already working hard because one rainy May day, a baby will be born bearing his blood, his dreams and his name—and this same baby will need a lot of milk, a lot of food, and a lot of schooling to grow into a man who, at 22, spends his days daydreaming about having six-pack abs and, somehow, without working too hard, a car; a young man who hopes that the combination of both will result in several, simultaneous and steamy love affairs with hot girls.

Thinking about the love brings me back to the thought about fathers’ different perspective on time. Being a suki of neighborhood events and gatherings (without being a part of the pork chores that precede the celebration), I have seen my share of silver and golden wedding anniversaries. I have always looked at the happy, if wrinkled, couples with a mixture of awe and envy. Somehow, they were able to create a romance without mobile phones and social networking sites, or six-pack abs and cars, but still I can’t look at them and at the same time mouth the favorite line of my generation nowadays: “Walang forever!” Because in fact there is forever.

Papa may not think of it as “forever” since for him, 25 years is not that long, but this, this teary-eyed couple basking in the warmth of their children, their relatives and their friends, celebrating their love, this is the “forever” in which we want to be.

Love letters in their youth may have taken weeks, even months, to arrive—and still their love proved up to the test. Sadly, the same cannot be said of my generation, as I know of couples my age who, after a few days without communication, break up, irreparably.

But then again, we are a generation that does not repair, but replaces.

Handing the bahag or threaded needle back to Papa, it suddenly came to me that he could not perform the operation himself because his eyesight was beginning to fail. I felt a million tiny heartbreaks thinking about it, along with the instances when he squints and angles his head just to be able to read the tiny letters on text messages, how he slightly stoops now, and walks just a bit slower than I remember…

I have realized that I have to man up, because, ready or not, I will have to take my turn and take over. And there is one thing not even this “no-repair generation” can replace in our lives: the men that they are, our fathers.

Carlo Bonn Felix Hornilla, 22, is a customer care representative. He lives in Lipa City, Batangas.