Soul Food To Go
Soothsayers may be pleased to share what dreaming about foods presages because foods are usually associated with bounty and other good things. So, what is more interesting and exciting than dreaming about feasting on delicacies and other cookery which had been part of one’s coming of age in a small provincial town?
The scenes still play in my head, so I write them down as soon as I wake up lest I forget some details. I’m writing this dream in present tense like I’m imagining every scene in three dimensions as I’m gathering them.
An old woman walks in slow motion as she peddles some home-prepared foods packed in yellow rectangular paper boxes. With the nigo full of these boxes mounted atop her head and with her both hands supporting the opposite ends of the nigo’s diameter parallel to her sagging shoulders, she yells "Pangudtoan! Pangudtoan!" to attract possible patronage. Some children my age and I watch her pass by the house whose wooden windows we paint yellow. As she struts down the rugged asphalt road, we notice the boxes slipping from the pile and falling one after the other behind her in a seemingly choreographed fashion. As soon as each box touches the asphalt road, we see familiar foods spill out. The first box spills out sinâsâ na tilapia riddled with quartered green tomatoes and red siling labuyo. An ugly-looking black dog from nowhere devours it and turns yellow. Binûtong comes out of the next box upon hitting the ground. More boxes fall one after the other. Among the foods the boxes contain, I recall, are pancit Bato, molidong pili, sinapot and tinêtê. Same ugly dog, now yellow, feasts on every food spilling out of every box that hits the ground. The beast then transforms to a bizarre-looking bird with unsymmetrical wings, then flies away and disappears. The peddling woman, petrified by the freak show, turns then darts toward us. She pleads that we paint her yellow, so that the beast will not find her when it comes back. She hands me a box, a bribe maybe, whose content I don’t know yet, as one boy empties the paint can on the woman’s head. I open the box and find ninatkang piga nin carpa to everyone’s delight. The woman screams, grabs the box, and disappears.
I wake up.
I regretted not having tasted any of the foods I saw (even) in the dream. I envy that freak dog (or bird). The dream, however, prompted me to write about these foods which I ate growing up in Buhi, Camarines Sur. I promise to describe the “foreign-sounding” words (italicized) in my next post.
The scenes still play in my head, so I write them down as soon as I wake up lest I forget some details. I’m writing this dream in present tense like I’m imagining every scene in three dimensions as I’m gathering them.
An old woman walks in slow motion as she peddles some home-prepared foods packed in yellow rectangular paper boxes. With the nigo full of these boxes mounted atop her head and with her both hands supporting the opposite ends of the nigo’s diameter parallel to her sagging shoulders, she yells "Pangudtoan! Pangudtoan!" to attract possible patronage. Some children my age and I watch her pass by the house whose wooden windows we paint yellow. As she struts down the rugged asphalt road, we notice the boxes slipping from the pile and falling one after the other behind her in a seemingly choreographed fashion. As soon as each box touches the asphalt road, we see familiar foods spill out. The first box spills out sinâsâ na tilapia riddled with quartered green tomatoes and red siling labuyo. An ugly-looking black dog from nowhere devours it and turns yellow. Binûtong comes out of the next box upon hitting the ground. More boxes fall one after the other. Among the foods the boxes contain, I recall, are pancit Bato, molidong pili, sinapot and tinêtê. Same ugly dog, now yellow, feasts on every food spilling out of every box that hits the ground. The beast then transforms to a bizarre-looking bird with unsymmetrical wings, then flies away and disappears. The peddling woman, petrified by the freak show, turns then darts toward us. She pleads that we paint her yellow, so that the beast will not find her when it comes back. She hands me a box, a bribe maybe, whose content I don’t know yet, as one boy empties the paint can on the woman’s head. I open the box and find ninatkang piga nin carpa to everyone’s delight. The woman screams, grabs the box, and disappears.
I wake up.
I regretted not having tasted any of the foods I saw (even) in the dream. I envy that freak dog (or bird). The dream, however, prompted me to write about these foods which I ate growing up in Buhi, Camarines Sur. I promise to describe the “foreign-sounding” words (italicized) in my next post.
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