Wednesday, December 30, 2020

2020 A strnge year

 Here we stand in the closing days of 2020 and a new year on the horizon.

How was it for you?

The taxi industry,the tourist trade and the pub business were utterly devastated as well as other industries.There is a field in England where hundreds of Black cabs are parked up, many of them were rented out and when the work dried up the drivers gave the cars back. Those cars were costing in the region of  £60,000 and they seemed like a gold standard investment, all the owners had to do was collect the rent every week.

Alas now there is no work

My taxi has been off the road since February,  I changed the insurance to social and domestic and sat back.

I got a strange call from the carriage office to say that I had to go back to work now, that they needed the entire fleet  back at work. 

When I said I now had my phone set to record and I wanted him to identify himself and repeat what he had just said he hung up.

Of course I took time off to write the book 

"The steering wheel university"

 The author drove a million miles and met thousands of people and they all educated him.

Buy it on Amazon and support my lifestyle.

If you want to give writing a book a go yourself, type it up on Microsoft word, then go to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) and follow the link.Transfer it chapter after chapter.

One thing you need to know is that there is no spell checker on the Kindle app, so that explains my 4 spelling mistakes.

A big word of thanks to the guy who designed the cover, he lives in the Philippians and did it for me in 3 days.

Good luck to you there is at least one good book in every taxi driver.

We do not know what the future holds, the past  is only there to remind us of what happened, to caution us perhaps.

One thing for sure is that 2021 is a new beginning.

Mistakes in the past are long gone.

The future awaits you.

Rise up to meet the challenges of the future.

One very wise man told me that mistakes are only there to educate you.


Go in Peace and may your God go with you.



Thursday, December 17, 2020

The spirit of Christmas past

Once upon a Christmas time I was driving my Fiat Scudo taxi when I was hailed down at a McDonalds. He pulled the door open and said I have a party of 6. When he went in to get them I had to stop people getting in at random. So the six got in and the guy was giving me directions for a multi drop. One of the girls in the group was wailing like a banshee.

The group were very angry over something, the first one dropped off. "Don't cry I will sort this out" 

The second and third ones were dropped off. "I will ring you tomorrow"

So I was left with the last one and he lived near the hill of Tara.

What happened ? I asked.

He started to tell me 

"I am a computer programmer and the guy who runs the company was in trouble. 

Big trouble.

I came in at  the last minute and saved the company, not without help. Remember the girl who was crying? She has a fantastic way with the customers, all the team chipped in and gave their all. 

I mean altogether we saved the company. 

It was not easy, but we did it.

The BOSS invited us all to a Christmas doo and to meet at McDonalds. 

He came in,

He walked away and came back with a happy meal for everyone.

Everyone thought it was a joke.

It was no joke at all.

"I was brought in to the company at the last minute to save the company and I did not sign a non disclosure agreement, so tomorrow I will start to dismantle his company and I will re employ all his staff

it will not be difficult.

why he did that stunt I will never know, you probably heard one of the girls say that nothing would have been better than this.

Next week this is what he will have

 Nothing" 

This is one of the lessons I will carry to my grave 

Friday, December 04, 2020

The Pogues - Fairytale Of New York (Official Video)

 

Well there are rituals to follow.

 

This Christmas will be very different.

FOR SURE

Thursday, November 19, 2020

A spoonfull of medicine

 Often wisdom comes in a throw away remark and it will come back to remind you years later.
The man said 
"If you come across bad doctors you had better meet good lawyers" 
So it came to pass in the paper a while ago when a woman had a baby boy and she felt that there was something wrong with the child, the doctors fobbed her off, so again she insisted on another second opinion.
One nurse mentioned a strange diagnosis, she thought they were telling her that this was what is wrong with the child. 
But no she referred to a mental illness where the parent insists that the child is ill.
 
So she went home, her regular doctor was on holiday and as soon as he came back she went to see him. He listened to the child's heart and phoned for an ambulance, the child was brought into hospital and straight to a scanning machine and was operated on there and then.
The poor kid had a double hole in the heart and the delay in having the operation would have a bad effect on the outcome of the procedure.
You would love to look at those arrogant faces when they came in front of the medical council. 
 
Sometimes you cannot see the obvious.
 
 This is a repeat.
I was not well a good while ago.
If I was counting money or dealing cards I would fumble and drop some. Then when I was walking my left foot would drag once every 4 or 5 steps. The doctor sent me to Beaumount to a neurologist and she asked me 30 questions.
I said that she should have just sent me a form and I could have ticked all the boxes.
No,No, I needed to see you she said.
I will have to refer you to another neurologist this one was costing me more than €200.
So on the appointed day at the appointed time of 10.30 I went to the clinic and waited. 11.30 still no one came or went, then at 12.45 he arrived. 
"Sorry for keeping you I had to stabilize a patient in the Blackrock clinic and the wind was very strong when I was coming back here on my bicycle.
I was raging and when it was my turn to meet him I let fly.
What kind of a person leaves a room full of patients waiting for for 3 hours whlike you ride a bicycle from Blackrock?
I did say I was sorry, he said.
Sorry is pathetic,a phone call to let us know, some people here had no breakfast to get here on time.
I do not like your attitude he said. This is not a job interview so get on with your job.
So he put a probe on my hand and it gave me a minor shock. 
It least you don't have multiple scleroses he said. or mumps said I under my breath.
29 questions later and he told me that I would have to be examined further, pay the girl outside.
My mind was working overtime and when I reached the desk I had a plan.I told her that my health insurance was paying for this. 
Yes she said. You must pay us and they pay you back. 
I didn't bring so much cash with me I said.
So I left and the next day I told a well dressed client in the taxi what had gone on.
"Did any of these learned people ask you what you do for a living?
Taxi driving is as stressful as flying an airplane.
20 decisions a minute, look here, look there.
I will ask you another question.
Did any of these people ask you if you have financial or health worries? NO
How many days a week do you work?
I work every day.
But when did you take a day off?
Around 5 weeks ago I took a day off.
What did you do on your day off ?
When I told him that I painted the living room I said as his yes looked to the sky.
Take 3 weeks off. Listen to music, walk the dog, play golf, cook a special meal.Relax .
No taxi driving.
After 4 days all the symptoms went away.
The arrogant neurologists bill came and I phoned his office I said I was not paying and I would question his ability to practice.
A further bill arrived with a threat from a debt collection agency.
My reply was that as this bill was in dispute and his attitude to his customers left much to be desired.
I told him I would see him in court and a judge might decide the merits of the situation and I hoped that the wind might not make him late for court.
 
That the last I ever heard of him.



 
I went to my doctor and said that I was sore all over.
Touch your forehead. Is it sore?
Ok touch you knee. Is that sore as well?
Then press down on you wrist 
That is sore as well.
 
I know what is wrong.. 
 
You have a broken finger. 
 
I  went to him suffering from wind
He gave me a kite and told me to enjoy myself 
 
It always good to know that you should get a second opinion when it comes to your health.
People will be asking you in 2030. 
"Grandad tell me about the big Covit plague" 
 
So I am still off the road since February I just have to get on with it
painting and fixing things. I phoned a friend of mine the other day who lives in Glasgow. He is a magician and he was telling me that he has had 50 or more shows cancelled between now and the new year.
Say £250 per show X 50. That is one big hit.
As one of the slogans goes "We are all in this together"  
 
I will have to go back to computer school. 
The layout of this template has me distracted. 
No Live clips and no photos.
 
I know that I can do better.
The stat counter is heading for 1 1/2 million hits now. 
I remember telling my son that it was nearing a million hits. 
He told me that I had changed the stat counter twice already so he reckoned that I must have had around 2 million back then.
Its really interesting to look at the followers by country.One of the trackers could tell me what street in Moscow my follower was watching me from.Big brother is really watching you.
I filmed sparrows feeding from the bird feeder and sent it to a few friends, suddenly something came on to my fone. 
"Would I like that video of the birds on the feeeder set to music?" 
I said yes and it came back with music added, it really is a bit unsettling. 
Someone invisible looking over your shoulder. 

Friday, October 30, 2020

The past haunts us all.

 Many years ago in Germany Jews Gypsies and others were rounded up and brought to death camps and many people turned their heads and denied that such a thing ever took place.

When the allied forces arrived they were numbed by the stench of death and the sight of starving people all around.

One of the first things they did was to round up al the people of the town (excluding children) and walk them through the death camp. 

They said "We didn't know"

Yet the stench of death could be smelled for miles around. 

I met German students around 20 years ago who told me that this never happened, it is only propaganda!


So on to dear old Ireland,nothing like this could never happen here, or anything like it, yet the mind set of the Irish was very warped by the church back then.

            Mother and baby homes.

The mother and baby homes is where girls who became pregnant were sent so as not to bring shame on the folks at home. They were worked by nuns in laundrys.

Then when the time came to give birth they would have to give birth without drugs to ease the pain. The nuns would say that it was a punishment from God for their sins. When the child was born it was taken away without the mother seeing it again.Because the baby did not get breast milk and formula milk was not as developed many of the babies died. Even though the state would pay for a proper funeral many of the dead children were thrown into a septic tank. No respect at all. Those who survived were put into nursing orphanages.

There was a huge inquiry into the Mother and Baby homes and at its conclusion the report is being sealed for 20 years.This is to protect the guilty, Sr.Bernadette, Mother Mary and all the others. If you were an orphan you could be granted under limited circumstances access to your file.

Like I say about my book The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

One really super guy that I met spent the early part of his life in an orphanage and he was on a quest to try and find out about his mother. He was adopted (Sold to) by a German couple and brought to the USA where he has made a lot of money, but he has this need inside to explore his past,I wish I had his email.

He said that he was never abused, though many were. I hope you never go through a period of your life where you are never loved. Not to ever told that you are special.Never hugged or kissed.

Something that was inside me helped me. 

The work ethic of the German and the sweet talking nature of the Irish got me through.

He has done very well and gave me £40 for a return trip to Guinness. 

So I Googled a story and I will give it here

If you have a weak disposition read no further.

 

Cavan Orphanage fire

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The Cavan Orphanage fire occurred on the night of 23 February 1943 at St Joseph's Orphanage in Cavan, Ireland. 35 children and 1 adult employee died as a result.[1] Much of the attention after the fire surrounded the role of the Poor Clares, the order of nuns who ran the orphanage, and the local fire service.[2]

The site of the orphanage today

History of the Orphanage

The Poor Clares, an enclosed contemplative order, founded a convent in Cavan in 1861 in a large premises on Main Street. In 1868 they opened an orphanage. At that time young petty criminals could be educated and learn a trade in a reformatory; however, orphaned and abandoned children were not accorded the same opportunity. The Industrial Schools Act 1868 sought to address this by the establishment of the Industrial school system. In 1869 a school, attached to the convent, was established and became known as the St. Joseph's Orphanage & Industrial School.[3]

Events of 24 February 1943

A fire started in the early morning hours of 24 February 1943 in the basement laundry and was not noticed until about 2 AM. The subsequent investigation attributed it to a faulty flue.[4] The sight of smoke coming out of the building alerted people on Main Street. They went to the front entrance and tried to gain entry. Eventually they were let in by one of the girls (Rosemary Caffrey) but not knowing the layout of the convent, they were unable to find the girls.

By this time all of the girls had been moved into one Dormitory. At this stage it would have been possible to evacuate all of the children but instead the nuns persuaded the local people to attempt to put out the fire. It has been widely claimed that the reason the orphans were not evacuated was that the nuns did not think it "decent" for the girls to be seen in public in their nightgowns.[5][6][7][8]

Two men (John Kennedy and John McNally) went down to the laundry to try to put the fire out. The flames were now too intense for this to be possible and McNally only survived by being carried out by Kennedy.

By this point it was no longer possible for the girls to get out through the main entrance or the fire escape. The local fire brigade had then arrived but their equipment was not sufficient for this fire. Wooden ladders were not long enough to reach the dormitory windows. In the absence of any other solution girls were encouraged to jump. Three did so, though with injuries; however, most were too frightened to attempt it. By the time a local electricity worker, Mattie Hand, arrived with a long ladder, and a local man, Louis Blessing, brought five girls down. One child left by way of the interior staircase while it was still accessible. One child made it down the exterior fire escape. One child escaped by way of a small ladder held on the roof of the shed. The fire completely engulfed the dormitory and the remaining girls died.

Casualties

The following 35 children died:[9]

  • Mary and Nora Barrett (12-year-old twins from Dublin)
  • Mary Brady (7 years old from Ballinagh)
  • Josephine and Mary Carroll (10 and 12 years old, respectively, from Castlerahan)
  • Josephine and Mona Cassidy (15 and 11 years old, respectively, from Belfast)
  • Katherine and Margaret Chambers (9 and 7 years old, respectively, from Enniskillen)
  • Dorothy Daly (7 years old from Cootehill)
  • Bridget and Mary Galligan (17 and 18 years old, respectively, from Drumcassidy, Cavan)
  • Mary Harrison (15 years old from Dublin)
  • Elizabeth Heaphy (4 years old from Swords)
  • Mary Hughes (15 years old from Killeshandra)
  • Mary Ivers (12 years old from Kilcoole Wicklow)
  • Mary Kelly (10 years old from Ballinagh)
  • Frances and Kathleen Kiely (9 and 12 years old, respectively, from Virginia)
  • Mary Lowry (17 years old from Drumcrow, Cavan)
  • Margaret and Mary Lynch (10 years and 15 years, Cavan)
  • Ellen McHugh (15 years old from Blacklion)
  • Mary Elizabeth and Susan McKiernan (16 and 14 years old, respectively, from Dromard)
  • Ellen Morgan (10 years old from Virginia)
  • Mary O'Hara (7 years old from Kilnaleck)
  • Ellen and Harriet Payne (8 and 11 years old, respectively, from Dublin)
  • Philomena Regan (9 years old from Dublin)
  • Kathleen Reilly (14 years old from Butlersbridge)
  • Mary Roche (6 years old from Dublin)
  • Bernadette Serridge (5 years old from Dublin)
  • Teresa White (6 years old from Dublin)
  • Rose Wright (11 years old from Ballyjamesduff)

The one adult who died was 80-year-old Mary Smith, who was employed as a cook.

Aftermath and Inquiry

The grave containing the remains of the 36 victims.

Over concerns about the causes of the fire and the standard of care, a Public Inquiry was set up. The report's findings stated that the loss of life occurred due to faulty directions being given, lack of fire-fighting training, and an inadequate rescue and fire-fighting service. It also noted inadequate training of staff in fire safety and evacuation, both at the orphanage and local fire service.[4]

This finding has been disputed by many, including in a piece of verse (to be precise, a limerick) written by the secretary to the Inquiry Brian O'Nolan, better known as the author Flann O'Brien, and one of the counsel representing the Electricity Supply Board, Tom O'Higgins, later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and presidential candidate.[10]

In Cavan there was a great fire,

Judge McCarthy was sent to inquire,
It would be a shame,
If the nuns were to blame,

So it had to be caused by a wire.

— Flann O'Brien & Tom O'Higgins

 

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Where to ?

Where to? 

That question might just take you both to a destination, on the other hand it might take you on a trip of a lifetime.

He asked me what I was thinking about?

I said that a customer had told me that the worst thing that you could do in life is not to make a decision.

When you commit yourself to do something you could be wrong, or you could be right.

But you must decide ! Its not going to be easy.

God man. That is what has started me on the journey I am on now.

He said he worked for a NGO in Africa, things were really bad there.

I ran a school which had a clinic attached and some sleeping quarters.

Things were very tense when around 2am a screaming truck convoy pulled up and a friendly Wicklow voice called out into the night sky.. Express delivery! and he dumped 10 bags of grain on the forecourt and drove away.

We dragged the bags into a storeroom and the next day there was an air of expectation in the school.

We discussed how best to give out the grain, the time passed on and the pupils were getting very tense zbout the delsy, they needed the food.

Finally we decided to give each pupil around 2 kilos of grain each.

We opened the first sack and we were totally smitten by what we saw.

Weevils had turned the grain to dust.

All the grain had been wasted..

We burned the wasted grain and I threw myself at the mercy of my pupils.

I said how sorry I was and I swore to heaven that I would make it better for everyone somehow.

God had a bigger plan for me and now it is all coming to a head on this very week.


The organization that I worked for is corrupt and when I asked them to investigate themselves I was sacked.

But I asked other people to help me and though they told me that I was mad they helped.

There were doctors in charge of hospitals who would demand that female staff would have sex with them so that they could hold on to their jobs.

Others who would groom girls as young as 12 years old for sex.

Almost everyone I turned to refused to help, except for a few.

The gathering of the information was difficult yet piece by piece we got there.

Records of the NGO have been exposed where my requests for help were denied.

A Jewish law firm in New York joined the chase and got injunctions and managed to turn the big guns around from pointing at me me to point directly at them. 

God bless that Jewish man, he saw a parallel between what had happened to the Jews in WW2.

By the time it came to court we had truckloads of evidence.

The big celebrates who we had approached in the early days resigned with great haste

 "We had no idea that anything like that was happening" 

We had letters which showed that they had been unwilling to help us when asked.

Once there was a very heavy death toll in Goa and celebrities arrived to have a photo shoot. 

They stayed in a 5 star hotel and were brought to the camp for a photo shoot, after an hour they drove away in their air conditioned SUVs

And the conclusion of the trial?


Funding was withdrawn from the NGO.

Hundreds of $millions.

 

You see he turned that non decision back then and it gave him the courage for the hardest fight of his life.


Then he won his court case.

 

Google Oxfam loses funding!

Sunday, September 20, 2020

We are in lockdown.

 Things are not getting better here in Ireland and we are in total lockdown again.

I went to the trouble of getting my taxi licence passed out. 

But I cannot work because my wife is not well and my daughter in law is high risk.

Imagine what would happen if I brought home the virus ?

Many years ago I was in South Shields near Newcastle where I saw something really strange. 

There was groups of kids from 8 years old to 20 going around in gangs. 

No adults were questioning them, they just went on their own way.

Later in the pub I asked a man who was sitting there what was going on ?

"Their parents don't work, no one on the street where they live work. 

We are totally devastated here by the work recession, there is no work for any people in Newcastle. 

The only thing for anyone to do is to join the army and go to fight in Iraq"

He pointed down the bar and told me that they were once all employed in ship building but now the only one working was the lad at the end who was a postman.All the women are mad about him .

On the Monday as I was passing back to head for the airport I saw a young man aged around 18 coming out of the army recruitment office, you could see by his look what he had done. 

Job done. You could see it all by his expression. 

He had done it. He had joined the army.

I often think of him and hope that God kept an eye out for him.

I had a man in the car who was a wine salesman from Newcastle who was now living in France.

He had observed the same decline and had emigrated to a more stable society.

Often the signs are there except that you don't recognize them.

So I took the bus and tram in to join the Taxi protest last Tuesday.

Abbey St. O'Connell St area is a magnet for beggars, Junkies and down and outs.

Outside a shop sitting on the footpath  on Dublins main thoroughfare there was a young man aged around 16 with a girl aged only around 14 with loads of makeup on. I would say that she was no more than 15. 

A pal of the lad came up.

"Ah there ya are, Jesus she's lovely, I am nearly getting a hard on looking at her, you're going to make a fortune with her"

So there you have it! 

He was pimping this kid for drug money and the world closes a blind eye to it all.

We need a Police to Police the Police.

2 RCMP Canadian Police officers were in the taxi one of them was "Special investigations".

She would be brought into a precinct as a rookie on special assignment. Over time she would take information from the computers, tap the telephones and do a complete sweep of all the information, then she would vanish and the big brass would pounce.

She had one ace up her sleeve if she should need it, she had a very high rank, up to divisional commander. 

Some rookie !

They were lesbians and the RCMP had done their very best to split them up.

But now they were married. 

They gave me a bottle opener with the Canadian flag on it, which I still have.

 

 

A couple of thousand taxis turned up, a few speeches were made.

But our national broadcaster did not even mention it!

Censorship at its finest.

 

Once I saw a guy groping a mentally handicapped girl that he was escorting  back to her hostel on foot.

I tried to get help for her from the hospital, but was fobbed off, the Garda told me "Unless we actually see him do that, 2 garda see it there is nothing we can do!"You mean you can't even come down now" I said. "No"

They caught a person sexually abusing patients in a facility in Palmerstown last year, perhaps it was my man.

Still if one whiff of a sexual predator working in a hospital for mentally handicapped people came to my ear I would act straight away if I had the power.

I have a letter in my folder them the Garda commissioners office I asked them was it because she was mentally handicapped that they did not help?

The letter says that they would be contacting me about the matter. The letter is 3 months old.

You would love to be able to confront the people who are not doing their job and then when their boss says that they knew nothing about this that you could produce times dates and recorded conversations.

Last week I read in a news feed that  A garda superintendent, a sergeant and a garda were arrested for corruption, no newspapers or radio station reported it

Saturday, September 12, 2020

A modern day slave

There is a newsey thing which popped up on the computer and there was a story about a modern family in America who had a slave in the 60s.

She was given to the family by an uncle who had worked in the Philippians, the poor girl worked 7 days a week from dawn until dark .

She never had a day off and never got 1cent for herself, she even had to eat sub standard food.

When she died the author of the piece brought her ashes home to the Philippians and they did not seem to have any remorse for the poor girls wasted life.

I am going to paste and copy it.. 

My Family’s Slave

She lived with us for 56 years. She raised me and my siblings without pay. I was 11, a typical American kid, before I realized who she was.

The Atlantic

All photos courtesy of Alex Tizon and his family.

The ashes filled a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.

Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking into mine—my first memory. She was 18 years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.

To our American neighbors, we were model immigrants, a poster family. They told us so. My father had a law degree, my mother was on her way to becoming a doctor, and my siblings and I got good grades and always said “please” and “thank you.” We never talked about Lola. Our secret went to the core of who we were and, at least for us kids, who we wanted to be.

After my mother died of leukemia, in 1999, Lola came to live with me in a small town north of Seattle. I had a family, a career, a house in the suburbs—the American dream. And then I had a slave.

***

At baggage claim in Manila, I unzipped my suitcase to make sure Lola’s ashes were still there. Outside, I inhaled the familiar smell: a thick blend of exhaust and waste, of ocean and sweet fruit and sweat.

Early the next morning I found a driver, an affable middle-aged man who went by the nickname “Doods,” and we hit the road in his truck, weaving through traffic. The scene always stunned me. The sheer number of cars and motorcycles and jeepneys. The people weaving between them and moving on the sidewalks in great brown rivers. The street vendors in bare feet trotting alongside cars, hawking cigarettes and cough drops and sacks of boiled peanuts. The child beggars pressing their faces against the windows.

Doods and I were headed to the place where Lola’s story began, up north in the central plains: Tarlac province. Rice country. The home of a cigar-chomping army lieutenant named Tomas Asuncion, my grandfather. The family stories paint Lieutenant Tom as a formidable man given to eccentricity and dark moods, who had lots of land but little money and kept mistresses in separate houses on his property. His wife died giving birth to their only child, my mother. She was raised by a series of utusans, or “people who take commands.”

Slavery has a long history on the islands. Before the Spanish came, islanders enslaved other islanders, usually war captives, criminals, or debtors. Slaves came in different varieties, from warriors who could earn their freedom through valor to household servants who were regarded as property and could be bought and sold or traded. High-status slaves could own low-status slaves, and the low could own the lowliest. Some chose to enter servitude simply to survive: In exchange for their labor, they might be given food, shelter, and protection.

When the Spanish arrived, in the 1500s, they enslaved islanders and later brought African and Indian slaves. The Spanish Crown eventually began phasing out slavery at home and in its colonies, but parts of the Philippines were so far-flung that authorities couldn’t keep a close eye. Traditions persisted under different guises, even after the U.S. took control of the islands in 1898. Today even the poor can have utusans or katulongs (“helpers”) or kasambahays (“domestics”), as long as there are people even poorer. The pool is deep.

Lieutenant Tom had as many as three families of utusans living on his property. In the spring of 1943, with the islands under Japanese occupation, he brought home a girl from a village down the road. She was a cousin from a marginal side of the family, rice farmers. The lieutenant was shrewd—he saw that this girl was penniless, unschooled, and likely to be malleable. Her parents wanted her to marry a pig farmer twice her age, and she was desperately unhappy but had nowhere to go. Tom approached her with an offer: She could have food and shelter if she would commit to taking care of his daughter, who had just turned 12.

Lola agreed, not grasping that the deal was for life.

“She is my gift to you,” Lieutenant Tom told my mother.

“I don’t want her,” my mother said, knowing she had no choice.

Lieutenant Tom went off to fight the Japanese, leaving Mom behind with Lola in his creaky house in the provinces. Lola fed, groomed, and dressed my mother. When they walked to the market, Lola held an umbrella to shield her from the sun. At night, when Lola’s other tasks were done—feeding the dogs, sweeping the floors, folding the laundry that she had washed by hand in the Camiling River—she sat at the edge of my mother’s bed and fanned her to sleep.

Lola Pulido (shown on the left at age 18) came from a poor family in a rural part of the Philippines. The author’s grandfather “gave” her to his daughter as a gift.

One day during the war Lieutenant Tom came home and caught my mother in a lie—something to do with a boy she wasn’t supposed to talk to. Tom, furious, ordered her to “stand at the table.” Mom cowered with Lola in a corner. Then, in a quivering voice, she told her father that Lola would take her punishment. Lola looked at Mom pleadingly, then without a word walked to the dining table and held on to the edge. Tom raised the belt and delivered 12 lashes, punctuating each one with a word. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. Lola made no sound.

My mother, in recounting this story late in her life, delighted in the outrageousness of it, her tone seeming to say, Can you believe I did that? When I brought it up with Lola, she asked to hear Mom’s version. She listened intently, eyes lowered, and afterward she looked at me with sadness and said simply, “Yes. It was like that.”

Seven years later, in 1950, Mom married my father and moved to Manila, bringing Lola along. Lieutenant Tom had long been haunted by demons, and in 1951 he silenced them with a .32‑caliber slug to his temple. Mom almost never talked about it. She had his temperament—moody, imperial, secretly fragile—and she took his lessons to heart, among them the proper way to be a provincial matrona: You must embrace your role as the giver of commands. You must keep those beneath you in their place at all times, for their own good and the good of the household. They might cry and complain, but their souls will thank you. They will love you for helping them be what God intended.

Lola at age 27 with Arthur, the author’s older brother, before coming to the U.S.

My brother Arthur was born in 1951. I came next, followed by three more siblings in rapid succession. My parents expected Lola to be as devoted to us kids as she was to them. While she looked after us, my parents went to school and earned advanced degrees, joining the ranks of so many others with fancy diplomas but no jobs. Then the big break: Dad was offered a job in Foreign Affairs as a commercial analyst. The salary would be meager, but the position was in America—a place he and Mom had grown up dreaming of, where everything they hoped for could come true.

Dad was allowed to bring his family and one domestic. Figuring they would both have to work, my parents needed Lola to care for the kids and the house. My mother informed Lola, and to her great irritation, Lola didn’t immediately acquiesce. Years later Lola told me she was terrified. “It was too far,” she said. “Maybe your Mom and Dad won’t let me go home.”

In the end what convinced Lola was my father’s promise that things would be different in America. He told her that as soon as he and Mom got on their feet, they’d give her an “allowance.” Lola could send money to her parents, to all her relations in the village. Her parents lived in a hut with a dirt floor. Lola could build them a concrete house, could change their lives forever. Imagine.

We landed in Los Angeles on May 12, 1964, all our belongings in cardboard boxes tied with rope. Lola had been with my mother for 21 years by then. In many ways she was more of a parent to me than either my mother or my father. Hers was the first face I saw in the morning and the last one I saw at night. As a baby, I uttered Lola’s name (which I first pronounced “Oh-ah”) long before I learned to say “Mom” or “Dad.” As a toddler, I refused to go to sleep unless Lola was holding me, or at least nearby.

I was 4 years old when we arrived in the U.S.—too young to question Lola’s place in our family. But as my siblings and I grew up on this other shore, we came to see the world differently. The leap across the ocean brought about a leap in consciousness that Mom and Dad couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make.

***

Lola never got that allowance. She asked my parents about it in a roundabout way a couple of years into our life in America. Her mother had fallen ill (with what I would later learn was dysentery), and her family couldn’t afford the medicine she needed. “Pwede ba?” she said to my parents. Is it possible? Mom let out a sigh. “How could you even ask?,” Dad responded in Tagalog. “You see how hard up we are. Don’t you have any shame?”

My parents had borrowed money for the move to the U.S., and then borrowed more in order to stay. My father was transferred from the consulate general in L.A. to the Philippine consulate in Seattle. He was paid $5,600 a year. He took a second job cleaning trailers, and a third as a debt collector. Mom got work as a technician in a couple of medical labs. We barely saw them, and when we did they were often exhausted and snappish.

Mom would come home and upbraid Lola for not cleaning the house well enough or for forgetting to bring in the mail. “Didn’t I tell you I want the letters here when I come home?” she would say in Tagalog, her voice venomous. “It’s not hard naman! An idiot could remember.” Then my father would arrive and take his turn. When Dad raised his voice, everyone in the house shrank. Sometimes my parents would team up until Lola broke down crying, almost as though that was their goal.

It confused me: My parents were good to my siblings and me, and we loved them. But they’d be affectionate to us kids one moment and vile to Lola the next. I was 11 or 12 when I began to see Lola’s situation clearly. By then Arthur, eight years my senior, had been seething for a long time. He was the one who introduced the word slave into my understanding of what Lola was. Before he said it I’d thought of her as just an unfortunate member of the household. I hated when my parents yelled at her, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they—and the whole arrangement—could be immoral.

L: Lola raised the author (left) and his siblings, and was sometimes the only adult at home for days at a time. R: The author (second from the left) with his parents, siblings, and Lola five years after they arrived in the U.S.

“Do you know anybody treated the way she’s treated?,” Arthur said. “Who lives the way she lives?” He summed up Lola’s reality: Wasn’t paid. Toiled every day. Was tongue-lashed for sitting too long or falling asleep too early. Was struck for talking back. Wore hand-me-downs. Ate scraps and leftovers by herself in the kitchen. Rarely left the house. Had no friends or hobbies outside the family. Had no private quarters. (Her designated place to sleep in each house we lived in was always whatever was left—a couch or storage area or corner in my sisters’ bedroom. She often slept among piles of laundry.)

We couldn’t identify a parallel anywhere except in slave characters on TV and in the movies. I remember watching a Western called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. John Wayne plays Tom Doniphon, a gunslinging rancher who barks orders at his servant, Pompey, whom he calls his “boy.” Pick him up, Pompey. Pompey, go find the doctor. Get on back to work, Pompey! Docile and obedient, Pompey calls his master “Mistah Tom.” They have a complex relationship. Tom forbids Pompey from attending school but opens the way for Pompey to drink in a whites-only saloon. Near the end, Pompey saves his master from a fire. It’s clear Pompey both fears and loves Tom, and he mourns when Tom dies. All of this is peripheral to the main story of Tom’s showdown with bad guy Liberty Valance, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Pompey. I remember thinking: Lola is Pompey, Pompey is Lola.

One night when Dad found out that my sister Ling, who was then 9, had missed dinner, he barked at Lola for being lazy. “I tried to feed her,” Lola said, as Dad stood over her and glared. Her feeble defense only made him angrier, and he punched her just below the shoulder. Lola ran out of the room and I could hear her wailing, an animal cry.

“Ling said she wasn’t hungry,” I said.

My parents turned to look at me. They seemed startled. I felt the twitching in my face that usually preceded tears, but I wouldn’t cry this time. In Mom’s eyes was a shadow of something I hadn’t seen before. Jealousy?

“Are you defending your Lola?,” Dad said. “Is that what you’re doing?”

“Ling said she wasn’t hungry,” I said again, almost in a whisper.

I was 13. It was my first attempt to stick up for the woman who spent her days watching over me. The woman who used to hum Tagalog melodies as she rocked me to sleep, and when I got older would dress and feed me and walk me to school in the mornings and pick me up in the afternoons. Once, when I was sick for a long time and too weak to eat, she chewed my food for me and put the small pieces in my mouth to swallow. One summer when I had plaster casts on both legs (I had problem joints), she bathed me with a washcloth, brought medicine in the middle of the night, and helped me through months of rehabilitation. I was cranky through it all. She didn’t complain or lose patience, ever.

To now hear her wailing made me crazy.

***

In the old country, my parents felt no need to hide their treatment of Lola. In America, they treated her worse but took pains to conceal it. When guests came over, my parents would either ignore her or, if questioned, lie and quickly change the subject. For five years in North Seattle, we lived across the street from the Misslers, a rambunctious family of eight who introduced us to things like mustard, salmon fishing, and mowing the lawn. Football on TV. Yelling during football. Lola would come out to serve food and drinks during games, and my parents would smile and thank her before she quickly disappeared. “Who’s that little lady you keep in the kitchen?,” Big Jim, the Missler patriarch, once asked. A relative from back home, Dad said. Very shy.

Billy Missler, my best friend, didn’t buy it. He spent enough time at our house, whole weekends sometimes, to catch glimpses of my family’s secret. He once overheard my mother yelling in the kitchen, and when he barged in to investigate found Mom red-faced and glaring at Lola, who was quaking in a corner. I came in a few seconds later. The look on Billy’s face was a mix of embarrassment and perplexity. What was that? I waved it off and told him to forget it.

I think Billy felt sorry for Lola. He’d rave about her cooking, and make her laugh like I’d never seen. During sleepovers, she’d make his favorite Filipino dish, beef tapa over white rice. Cooking was Lola’s only eloquence. I could tell by what she served whether she was merely feeding us or saying she loved us.

When I once referred to Lola as a distant aunt, Billy reminded me that when we’d first met I’d said she was my grandmother.

“Well, she’s kind of both,” I said mysteriously.

“Why is she always working?”

“She likes to work,” I said.

“Your dad and mom—why do they yell at her?”

“Her hearing isn’t so good …”

Admitting the truth would have meant exposing us all. We spent our first decade in the country learning the ways of the new land and trying to fit in. Having a slave did not fit. Having a slave gave me grave doubts about what kind of people we were, what kind of place we came from. Whether we deserved to be accepted. I was ashamed of it all, including my complicity. Didn’t I eat the food she cooked, and wear the clothes she washed and ironed and hung in the closet? But losing her would have been devastating.

There was another reason for secrecy: Lola’s travel papers had expired in 1969, five years after we arrived in the U.S. She’d come on a special passport linked to my father’s job. After a series of fallings-out with his superiors, Dad quit the consulate and declared his intent to stay in the United States. He arranged for permanent-resident status for his family, but Lola wasn’t eligible. He was supposed to send her back.

Lola at age 51, in 1976. Her mother died a few years before this picture was taken; her father a few years after. Both times, she wanted desperately to go home.

Lola’s mother, Fermina, died in 1973; her father, Hilario, in 1979. Both times she wanted desperately to go home. Both times my parents said “Sorry.” No money, no time. The kids needed her. My parents also feared for themselves, they admitted to me later. If the authorities had found out about Lola, as they surely would have if she’d tried to leave, my parents could have gotten into trouble, possibly even been deported. They couldn’t risk it. Lola’s legal status became what Filipinos call tago nang tago, or TNT—“on the run.” She stayed TNT for almost 20 years.

After each of her parents died, Lola was sullen and silent for months. She barely responded when my parents badgered her. But the badgering never let up. Lola kept her head down and did her work.

***

My father’s resignation started a turbulent period. Money got tighter, and my parents turned on each other. They uprooted the family again and again—Seattle to Honolulu back to Seattle to the southeast Bronx and finally to the truck-stop town of Umatilla, Oregon, population 750. During all this moving around, Mom often worked 24-hour shifts, first as a medical intern and then as a resident, and Dad would disappear for days, working odd jobs but also (we’d later learn) womanizing and who knows what else. Once, he came home and told us that he’d lost our new station wagon playing blackjack.

For days in a row Lola would be the only adult in the house. She got to know the details of our lives in a way that my parents never had the mental space for. We brought friends home, and she’d listen to us talk about school and girls and boys and whatever else was on our minds. Just from conversations she overheard, she could list the first name of every girl I had a crush on from sixth grade through high school.

When I was 15, Dad left the family for good. I didn’t want to believe it at the time, but the fact was that he deserted us kids and abandoned Mom after 25 years of marriage. She wouldn’t become a licensed physician for another year, and her specialty—internal medicine—wasn’t especially lucrative. Dad didn’t pay child support, so money was always a struggle.

My mom kept herself together enough to go to work, but at night she’d crumble in self-pity and despair. Her main source of comfort during this time: Lola. As Mom snapped at her over small things, Lola attended to her even more—cooking Mom’s favorite meals, cleaning her bedroom with extra care. I’d find the two of them late at night at the kitchen counter, griping and telling stories about Dad, sometimes laughing wickedly, other times working themselves into a fury over his transgressions. They barely noticed us kids flitting in and out.

One night I heard Mom weeping and ran into the living room to find her slumped in Lola’s arms. Lola was talking softly to her, the way she used to with my siblings and me when we were young. I lingered, then went back to my room, scared for my mom and awed by Lola.

***

Doods was humming. I’d dozed for what felt like a minute and awoke to his happy melody. “Two hours more,” he said. I checked the plastic box in the tote bag by my side—still there—and looked up to see open road. The MacArthur Highway. I glanced at the time. “Hey, you said ‘two hours’ two hours ago,” I said. Doods just hummed.

His not knowing anything about the purpose of my journey was a relief. I had enough interior dialogue going on. I was no better than my parents. I could have done more to free Lola. To make her life better. Why didn’t I? I could have turned in my parents, I suppose. It would have blown up my family in an instant. Instead, my siblings and I kept everything to ourselves, and rather than blowing up in an instant, my family broke apart slowly.

Doods and I passed through beautiful country. Not travel-brochure beautiful but real and alive and, compared with the city, elegantly spare. Mountains ran parallel to the highway on each side, the Zambales Mountains to the west, the Sierra Madre Range to the east. From ridge to ridge, west to east, I could see every shade of green all the way to almost black.

Doods pointed to a shadowy outline in the distance. Mount Pinatubo. I’d come here in 1991 to report on the aftermath of its eruption, the second-largest of the 20th century. Volcanic mudflows called lahars continued for more than a decade, burying ancient villages, filling in rivers and valleys, and wiping out entire ecosystems. The lahars reached deep into the foothills of Tarlac province, where Lola’s parents had spent their entire lives, and where she and my mother had once lived together. So much of our family record had been lost in wars and floods, and now parts were buried under 20 feet of mud.

Life here is routinely visited by cataclysm. Killer typhoons that strike several times a year. Bandit insurgencies that never end. Somnolent mountains that one day decide to wake up. The Philippines isn’t like China or Brazil, whose mass might absorb the trauma. This is a nation of scattered rocks in the sea. When disaster hits, the place goes under for a while. Then it resurfaces and life proceeds, and you can behold a scene like the one Doods and I were driving through, and the simple fact that it’s still there makes it beautiful.

Rice fields in Mayantoc, near where Lola was born.

***

A couple of years after my parents split, my mother remarried and demanded Lola’s fealty to her new husband, a Croatian immigrant named Ivan, whom she had met through a friend. Ivan had never finished high school. He’d been married four times and was an inveterate gambler who enjoyed being supported by my mother and attended to by Lola.

Ivan brought out a side of Lola I’d never seen. His marriage to my mother was volatile from the start, and money—especially his use of her money—was the main issue. Once, during an argument in which Mom was crying and Ivan was yelling, Lola walked over and stood between them. She turned to Ivan and firmly said his name. He looked at Lola, blinked, and sat down.

My sister Inday and I were floored. Ivan was about 250 pounds, and his baritone could shake the walls. Lola put him in his place with a single word. I saw this happen a few other times, but for the most part Lola served Ivan unquestioningly, just as Mom wanted her to. I had a hard time watching Lola vassalize herself to another person, especially someone like Ivan. But what set the stage for my blowup with Mom was something more mundane.

She used to get angry whenever Lola felt ill. She didn’t want to deal with the disruption and the expense, and would accuse Lola of faking or failing to take care of herself. Mom chose the second tack when, in the late 1970s, Lola’s teeth started falling out. She’d been saying for months that her mouth hurt.

“That’s what happens when you don’t brush properly,” Mom told her.

I said that Lola needed to see a dentist. She was in her 50s and had never been to one. I was attending college an hour away, and I brought it up again and again on my frequent trips home. A year went by, then two. Lola took aspirin every day for the pain, and her teeth looked like a crumbling Stonehenge. One night, after watching her chew bread on the side of her mouth that still had a few good molars, I lost it.

Mom and I argued into the night, each of us sobbing at different points. She said she was tired of working her fingers to the bone supporting everybody, and sick of her children always taking Lola’s side, and why didn’t we just take our goddamn Lola, she’d never wanted her in the first place, and she wished to God she hadn’t given birth to an arrogant, sanctimonious phony like me.

I let her words sink in. Then I came back at her, saying she would know all about being a phony, her whole life was a masquerade, and if she stopped feeling sorry for herself for one minute she’d see that Lola could barely eat because her goddamn teeth were rotting out of her goddamn head, and couldn’t she think of her just this once as a real person instead of a slave kept alive to serve her?

“A slave,” Mom said, weighing the word. “A slave?”

The night ended when she declared that I would never understand her relationship with Lola. Never. Her voice was so guttural and pained that thinking of it even now, so many years later, feels like a punch to the stomach. It’s a terrible thing to hate your own mother, and that night I did. The look in her eyes made clear that she felt the same way about me.

The fight only fed Mom’s fear that Lola had stolen the kids from her, and she made Lola pay for it. Mom drove her harder. Tormented her by saying, “I hope you’re happy now that your kids hate me.” When we helped Lola with housework, Mom would fume. “You’d better go to sleep now, Lola,” she’d say sarcastically. “You’ve been working too hard. Your kids are worried about you.” Later she’d take Lola into a bedroom for a talk, and Lola would walk out with puffy eyes.

Lola finally begged us to stop trying to help her.

Why do you stay? we asked.

“Who will cook?” she said, which I took to mean, Who would do everything? Who would take care of us? Of Mom? Another time she said, “Where will I go?” This struck me as closer to a real answer. Coming to America had been a mad dash, and before we caught a breath a decade had gone by. We turned around, and a second decade was closing out. Lola’s hair had turned gray. She’d heard that relatives back home who hadn’t received the promised support were wondering what had happened to her. She was ashamed to return.

She had no contacts in America, and no facility for getting around. Phones puzzled her. Mechanical things—ATMs, intercoms, vending machines, anything with a keyboard—made her panic. Fast-talking people left her speechless, and her own broken English did the same to them. She couldn’t make an appointment, arrange a trip, fill out a form, or order a meal without help.

I got Lola an ATM card linked to my bank account and taught her how to use it. She succeeded once, but the second time she got flustered, and she never tried again. She kept the card because she considered it a gift from me.

I also tried to teach her to drive. She dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand, but I picked her up and carried her to the car and planted her in the driver’s seat, both of us laughing. I spent 20 minutes going over the controls and gauges. Her eyes went from mirthful to terrified. When I turned on the ignition and the dashboard lit up, she was out of the car and in the house before I could say another word. I tried a couple more times.

I thought driving could change her life. She could go places. And if things ever got unbearable with Mom, she could drive away forever.

***

Four lanes became two, pavement turned to gravel. Tricycle drivers wove between cars and water buffalo pulling loads of bamboo. An occasional dog or goat sprinted across the road in front of our truck, almost grazing the bumper. Doods never eased up. Whatever didn’t make it across would be stew today instead of tomorrow—the rule of the road in the provinces.

I took out a map and traced the route to the village of Mayantoc, our destination. Out the window, in the distance, tiny figures folded at the waist like so many bent nails. People harvesting rice, the same way they had for thousands of years. We were getting close.

I tapped the cheap plastic box and regretted not buying a real urn, made of porcelain or rosewood. What would Lola’s people think? Not that many were left. Only one sibling remained in the area, Gregoria, 98 years old, and I was told her memory was failing. Relatives said that whenever she heard Lola’s name, she’d burst out crying and then quickly forget why.

L: Lola and the author in 2008. R: The author with Lola’s sister Gregoria.

I’d been in touch with one of Lola’s nieces. She had the day planned: When I arrived, a low-key memorial, then a prayer, followed by the lowering of the ashes into a plot at the Mayantoc Eternal Bliss Memorial Park. It had been five years since Lola died, but I hadn’t yet said the final goodbye that I knew was about to happen. All day I had been feeling intense grief and resisting the urge to let it out, not wanting to wail in front of Doods. More than the shame I felt for the way my family had treated Lola, more than my anxiety about how her relatives in Mayantoc would treat me, I felt the terrible heaviness of losing her, as if she had died only the day before.

Doods veered northwest on the Romulo Highway, then took a sharp left at Camiling, the town Mom and Lieutenant Tom came from. Two lanes became one, then gravel turned to dirt. The path ran along the Camiling River, clusters of bamboo houses off to the side, green hills ahead. The homestretch.

***

I gave the eulogy at Mom’s funeral, and everything I said was true. That she was brave and spirited. That she’d drawn some short straws, but had done the best she could. That she was radiant when she was happy. That she adored her children, and gave us a real home—in Salem, Oregon—that through the ’80s and ’90s became the permanent base we’d never had before. That I wished we could thank her one more time. That we all loved her.

I didn’t talk about Lola. Just as I had selectively blocked Lola out of my mind when I was with Mom during her last years. Loving my mother required that kind of mental surgery. It was the only way we could be mother and son—which I wanted, especially after her health started to decline, in the mid‑’90s. Diabetes. Breast cancer. Acute myelogenous leukemia, a fast-growing cancer of the blood and bone marrow. She went from robust to frail seemingly overnight.

After the big fight, I mostly avoided going home, and at age 23 I moved to Seattle. When I did visit I saw a change. Mom was still Mom, but not as relentlessly. She got Lola a fine set of dentures and let her have her own bedroom. She cooperated when my siblings and I set out to change Lola’s TNT status. Ronald Reagan’s landmark immigration bill of 1986 made millions of illegal immigrants eligible for amnesty. It was a long process, but Lola became a citizen in October 1998, four months after my mother was diagnosed with leukemia. Mom lived another year.

During that time, she and Ivan took trips to Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast, and sometimes brought Lola along. Lola loved the ocean. On the other side were the islands she dreamed of returning to. And Lola was never happier than when Mom relaxed around her. An afternoon at the coast or just 15 minutes in the kitchen reminiscing about the old days in the province, and Lola would seem to forget years of torment.

I couldn’t forget so easily. But I did come to see Mom in a different light. Before she died, she gave me her journals, two steamer trunks’ full. Leafing through them as she slept a few feet away, I glimpsed slices of her life that I’d refused to see for years. She’d gone to medical school when not many women did. She’d come to America and fought for respect as both a woman and an immigrant physician. She’d worked for two decades at Fairview Training Center, in Salem, a state institution for the developmentally disabled. The irony: She tended to underdogs most of her professional life. They worshipped her. Female colleagues became close friends. They did silly, girly things together—shoe shopping, throwing dress-up parties at one another’s homes, exchanging gag gifts like penis-shaped soaps and calendars of half-naked men, all while laughing hysterically. Looking through their party pictures reminded me that Mom had a life and an identity apart from the family and Lola. Of course.

Mom wrote in great detail about each of her kids, and how she felt about us on a given day—proud or loving or resentful. And she devoted volumes to her husbands, trying to grasp them as complex characters in her story. We were all persons of consequence. Lola was incidental. When she was mentioned at all, she was a bit character in someone else’s story. “Lola walked my beloved Alex to his new school this morning. I hope he makes new friends quickly so he doesn’t feel so sad about moving again …” There might be two more pages about me, and no other mention of Lola.

The day before Mom died, a Catholic priest came to the house to perform last rites. Lola sat next to my mother’s bed, holding a cup with a straw, poised to raise it to Mom’s mouth. She had become extra attentive to my mother, and extra kind. She could have taken advantage of Mom in her feebleness, even exacted revenge, but she did the opposite.

The priest asked Mom whether there was anything she wanted to forgive or be forgiven for. She scanned the room with heavy-lidded eyes, said nothing. Then, without looking at Lola, she reached over and placed an open hand on her head. She didn’t say a word.

***

Lola was 75 when she came to stay with me. I was married with two young daughters, living in a cozy house on a wooded lot. From the second story, we could see Puget Sound. We gave Lola a bedroom and license to do whatever she wanted: sleep in, watch soaps, do nothing all day. She could relax—and be free—for the first time in her life. I should have known it wouldn’t be that simple.

I’d forgotten about all the things Lola did that drove me a little crazy. She was always telling me to put on a sweater so I wouldn’t catch a cold (I was in my 40s). She groused incessantly about Dad and Ivan: My father was lazy, Ivan was a leech. I learned to tune her out. Harder to ignore was her fanatical thriftiness. She threw nothing out. And she used to go through the trash to make sure that the rest of us hadn’t thrown out anything useful. She washed and reused paper towels again and again until they disintegrated in her hands. (No one else would go near them.) The kitchen became glutted with grocery bags, yogurt containers, and pickle jars, and parts of our house turned into storage for—there’s no other word for it—garbage.

She cooked breakfast even though none of us ate more than a banana or a granola bar in the morning, usually while we were running out the door. She made our beds and did our laundry. She cleaned the house. I found myself saying to her, nicely at first, “Lola, you don’t have to do that.” “Lola, we’ll do it ourselves.” “Lola, that’s the girls’ job.” Okay, she’d say, but keep right on doing it.

It irritated me to catch her eating meals standing in the kitchen, or see her tense up and start cleaning when I walked into the room. One day, after several months, I sat her down.

“I’m not Dad. You’re not a slave here,” I said, and went through a long list of slavelike things she’d been doing. When I realized she was startled, I took a deep breath and cupped her face, that elfin face now looking at me searchingly. I kissed her forehead. “This is your house now,” I said. “You’re not here to serve us. You can relax, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. And went back to cleaning.

She didn’t know any other way to be. I realized I had to take my own advice and relax. If she wanted to make dinner, let her. Thank her and do the dishes. I had to remind myself constantly: Let her be.

One night I came home to find her sitting on the couch doing a word puzzle, her feet up, the TV on. Next to her, a cup of tea. She glanced at me, smiled sheepishly with those perfect white dentures, and went back to the puzzle. Progress, I thought.

She planted a garden in the backyard—roses and tulips and every kind of orchid—and spent whole afternoons tending it. She took walks around the neighborhood. At about 80, her arthritis got bad and she began walking with a cane. In the kitchen she went from being a fry cook to a kind of artisanal chef who created only when the spirit moved her. She made lavish meals and grinned with pleasure as we devoured them.

Passing the door of Lola’s bedroom, I’d often hear her listening to a cassette of Filipino folk songs. The same tape over and over. I knew she’d been sending almost all her money—my wife and I gave her $200 a week—to relatives back home. One afternoon, I found her sitting on the back deck gazing at a snapshot someone had sent of her village.

“You want to go home, Lola?”

She turned the photograph over and traced her finger across the inscription, then flipped it back and seemed to study a single detail.

“Yes,” she said.

Just after her 83rd birthday, I paid her airfare to go home. I’d follow a month later to bring her back to the U.S.—if she wanted to return. The unspoken purpose of her trip was to see whether the place she had spent so many years longing for could still feel like home.

She found her answer.

“Everything was not the same,” she told me as we walked around Mayantoc. The old farms were gone. Her house was gone. Her parents and most of her siblings were gone. Childhood friends, the ones still alive, were like strangers. It was nice to see them, but … everything was not the same. She’d still like to spend her last years here, she said, but she wasn’t ready yet.

“You’re ready to go back to your garden,” I said.

“Yes. Let’s go home.”

L: Lola returned to the Philippines for an extended visit after her 83rd birthday. R: Lola with her sister Juliana, reunited after 65 years.

***

Lola was as devoted to my daughters as she’d been to my siblings and me when we were young. After school, she’d listen to their stories and make them something to eat. And unlike my wife and me (especially me), Lola enjoyed every minute of every school event and performance. She couldn’t get enough of them. She sat up front, kept the programs as mementos.

It was so easy to make Lola happy. We took her on family vacations, but she was as excited to go to the farmer’s market down the hill. She became a wide-eyed kid on a field trip: “Look at those zucchinis!” The first thing she did every morning was open all the blinds in the house, and at each window she’d pause to look outside.

And she taught herself to read. It was remarkable. Over the years, she’d somehow learned to sound out letters. She did those puzzles where you find and circle words within a block of letters. Her room had stacks of word-puzzle booklets, thousands of words circled in pencil. Every day she watched the news and listened for words she recognized. She triangulated them with words in the newspaper, and figured out the meanings. She came to read the paper every day, front to back. Dad used to say she was simple. I wondered what she could have been if, instead of working the rice fields at age 8, she had learned to read and write.

Lola at age 82.

During the 12 years she lived in our house, I asked her questions about herself, trying to piece together her life story, a habit she found curious. To my inquiries she would often respond first with “Why?” Why did I want to know about her childhood? About how she met Lieutenant Tom?

I tried to get my sister Ling to ask Lola about her love life, thinking Lola would be more comfortable with her. Ling cackled, which was her way of saying I was on my own. One day, while Lola and I were putting away groceries, I just blurted it out: “Lola, have you ever been romantic with anyone?” She smiled, and then she told me the story of the only time she’d come close. She was about 15, and there was a handsome boy named Pedro from a nearby farm. For several months they harvested rice together side by side. One time, she dropped her bolo—a cutting implement—and he quickly picked it up and handed it back to her. “I liked him,” she said.

Silence.

“And?”

“Then he moved away,” she said.

“And?”

“That’s all.”

“Lola, have you ever had sex?,” I heard myself saying.

“No,” she said.

She wasn’t accustomed to being asked personal questions. “Katulong lang ako,” she’d say. I’m only a servant. She often gave one- or two-word answers, and teasing out even the simplest story was a game of 20 questions that could last days or weeks.

Some of what I learned: She was mad at Mom for being so cruel all those years, but she nevertheless missed her. Sometimes, when Lola was young, she’d felt so lonely that all she could do was cry. I knew there were years when she’d dreamed of being with a man. I saw it in the way she wrapped herself around one large pillow at night. But what she told me in her old age was that living with Mom’s husbands made her think being alone wasn’t so bad. She didn’t miss those two at all. Maybe her life would have been better if she’d stayed in Mayantoc, gotten married, and had a family like her siblings. But maybe it would have been worse. Two younger sisters, Francisca and Zepriana, got sick and died. A brother, Claudio, was killed. What’s the point of wondering about it now? she asked. Bahala na was her guiding principle. Come what may. What came her way was another kind of family. In that family, she had eight children: Mom, my four siblings and me, and now my two daughters. The eight of us, she said, made her life worth living.

None of us was prepared for her to die so suddenly.

Her heart attack started in the kitchen while she was making dinner and I was running an errand. When I returned she was in the middle of it. A couple of hours later at the hospital, before I could grasp what was happening, she was gone—10:56 p.m. All the kids and grandkids noted, but were unsure how to take, that she died on November 7, the same day as Mom. Twelve years apart.

Lola made it to 86. I can still see her on the gurney. I remember looking at the medics standing above this brown woman no bigger than a child and thinking that they had no idea of the life she had lived. She’d had none of the self-serving ambition that drives most of us, and her willingness to give up everything for the people around her won her our love and utter loyalty. She’s become a hallowed figure in my extended family.

Going through her boxes in the attic took me months. I found recipes she had cut out of magazines in the 1970s for when she would someday learn to read. Photo albums with pictures of my mom. Awards my siblings and I had won from grade school on, most of which we had thrown away and she had “saved.” I almost lost it one night when at the bottom of a box I found a stack of yellowed newspaper articles I’d written and long ago forgotten about. She couldn’t read back then, but she’d kept them anyway.

The site of Lola’s childhood home.

***

Doods’s truck pulled up to a small concrete house in the middle of a cluster of homes mostly made of bamboo and plank wood. Surrounding the pod of houses: rice fields, green and seemingly endless. Before I even got out of the truck, people started coming outside.

Doods reclined his seat to take a nap. I hung my tote bag on my shoulder, took a breath, and opened the door.

“This way,” a soft voice said, and I was led up a short walkway to the concrete house. Following close behind was a line of about 20 people, young and old, but mostly old. Once we were all inside, they sat down on chairs and benches arranged along the walls, leaving the middle of the room empty except for me. I remained standing, waiting to meet my host. It was a small room, and dark. People glanced at me expectantly.

“Where is Lola?” A voice from another room. The next moment, a middle-aged woman in a housedress sauntered in with a smile. Ebia, Lola’s niece. This was her house. She gave me a hug and said again, “Where is Lola?”

Lola’s grave site.

I slid the tote bag from my shoulder and handed it to her. She looked into my face, still smiling, gently grasped the bag, and walked over to a wooden bench and sat down. She reached inside and pulled out the box and looked at every side. “Where is Lola?” she said softly. People in these parts don’t often get their loved ones cremated. I don’t think she knew what to expect. She set the box on her lap and bent over so her forehead rested on top of it, and at first I thought she was laughing (out of joy) but I quickly realized she was crying. Her shoulders began to heave, and then she was wailing—a deep, mournful, animal howl, like I once heard coming from Lola.

I hadn’t come sooner to deliver Lola’s ashes in part because I wasn’t sure anyone here cared that much about her. I hadn’t expected this kind of grief. Before I could comfort Ebia, a woman walked in from the kitchen and wrapped her arms around her, and then she began wailing. The next thing I knew, the room erupted with sound. The old people—one of them blind, several with no teeth—were all crying and not holding anything back. It lasted about 10 minutes. I was so fascinated that I barely noticed the tears running down my own face. The sobs died down, and then it was quiet again.

Ebia sniffled and said it was time to eat. Everybody started filing into the kitchen, puffy-eyed but suddenly lighter and ready to tell stories. I glanced at the empty tote bag on the bench, and knew it was right to bring Lola back to the place where she’d been born.

Alex Tizon passed away in March 2017. He was a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and the author of Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self. For more about Alex, please see this editor’s note from The Atlantic.