By Gerard Ramos
AT about this time of the year many—many—summers ago, I would already have escaped to some nice beach for a weekend, if not retreated from the insufferable heat of urban living to the temperate climes of Tagaytay or Baguio, returning to the daily grind some days later feeling recharged and ready to take on more of life’s challenges.
These days, however, my idea of the perfect retreat would be to check into some lovely hotel, set the room temperture at 18°C (the cold never bothered me anyway), inform the front desk to give me a wake-up call 24 hours later, pop some nice all-natural sleeping pill, slip onto a soft but firm bed, pull a 500-thread count Egyptian cotton blanket over my head—and shut away the madness now engulfing the world. Escape all that, even if only for 24 hours, and perhaps even lose the bucket bags that have taken seemingly permanent residence under my eyes.
“Oh dear, apparently you have arrived at a Norma Shearer moment,” quipped a longtime friend after learning what now constitutes the perfect weekend escape to me. I was, of course, tempted to tell her that I don’t do Norma at all (I am and always will be a Joan Crawford fan to my dying breath), but I let it pass in my desire to keep her as one of the very few good friends I have maintained since my 20s. Which now seems like ancient history.
“How about we fly off to San Francisco for a couple of weeks when a good seat sale comes around?” my friend suggested, determined to be helpful.
I must admit that for a moment, for an ever-so-fleeting moment at least, I was tempted. After all, I have a US Visa that is valid until 2021, and spring in San Francisco—particularly farther north of this city of steep rolling hills and sensuous fog, where the laidback charms of Bolinas, Stinson Beach and Marin County await—is nothing short of the most magical thing.
The reality of travel these days is, of course, anything but magical, especially in but not limited to the US under the administration of former reality TV star-turned-president Donald J. Trump. True, the outrageous executive orders regarding travel involving persons originating from certain countries, which Trump signed shortly after his poorly attended inauguration, did not include the Philippines in the list of infamy. Nonetheless, the news have since been replete with individuals being detained at US airports for hours as they are questioned by immigration officers, even people originating or coming from countries not cited in Trump’s EOs, including those born and raised in the US but whose ancestries have become marginalized under the current US government.
I have had my fair share of trying times and still get served up with lemons routinely by this thing called life, from which I try very hard to make lemonade, of course, but racism is something I have difficulty suffering quietly. Thus, given the prevailing conditions in the US, what sane person would want to start off the few vacations he allows himself detained at the airport and questioned by immigration officers for hours simply because he looks like, say,
Omar Sharif, the Egyptian actor who starred in such film classics as Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia?
(I know, I know—there is no such resemblance, even in my youth, but one of my mentors, the wonderful editor Marita Pascual Nuque, made the claim many years ago and continues to swear by it.)
And so, these days I am happy enough to snatch mini-breaks here and there. Not in some posh hotel, not just yet, but in the 30 square meters that make up the studio which I have called home for some years now. I have air-conditioning, I have a big-enough LED TV, I have a stock of digestives that go especially well with strawberry jams—and all seven series of The Great British Bake Off, the lovely hit baking competition from the UK which has expanded my knowledge to include such fascinating details as “split sauce”, the origins of “umble pie” (or what is now known as humble pie), the Royal Wedding Cake for the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1840 which had a circumference of three yards and weighed nearly 300 pounds. And so on and so forth.
What could be make for a more wonderful staycation than that? It certainly beats traveling thousands of miles, only to be subjected to the racism appearing in ugly spurts with appalling regularity—in the US and, increasingly, everywhere else. ✚