Nostalgia

Do You Remember When?


whenever I shape the first word of my poem

I see you opening a memory

which means a body of water opens

and we both drink from it

the way knowing hunger seeks itself in the dark

-fragment of a poem unwritten by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana

Nostalgia, oh such longing for the past romanticized, contained by the senses like a fragile flame, a kind of burning visceral, almost like a disease enough to discharge and send home a soldier in the 17th century. Drive any Juan mad. Or render a post-millennium writer wanting of opinion, lost in a maze of memoirs inside a newly-opened museum on a Wednesday evening.

The latter happens to be my case. Yes, it was in the middle of last week when the Dizon-Ramos Museum unlocked its doors along one of Bacolod’s busiest streets, Burgos. And while passersby might have dismissed the ceremony as one of those lavish dinners held in the city’s balay dakus where they were not invited, I found myself in another country, in another time, listening to a vinyl of “Do You Remember When?” by a certain Mcguire Sisters playing 33-and-a-third rounds per minute.

And I made my own rounds of the ancestral home “built in 1950 and (that) reflects the architecture of post-war Bacolod.” While the second floor displays how Raymundo L. Dizon and Hermelinda V. Ramos and their family “actually lived,” the ground floor tries to capture Bacolod’s history as told through reproductions of the Dizon-Ramos family’s photos, from 1937 when “Munding and Ermy” were wed up to the present. The collection gives the viewer like me a sneak peek “into the noble past of a City and a family.”

Among the many rooms, including one that showcases the family’s set of crystals -- luminous reminders of their travels—what stood out like a sore thumb was the servant’s quarter, complete with the uniforms. How the Dizons and the Ramoses contributed to “tearing down the walls of social injustice and division, and building a city and a Nation truly united, free, just, harmonious, and prosperous” is a subject I dare not touch, but what I would love to sink my teeth into is the story of the occupant of that corner by the kitchen.

What are her thoughts on the new lifestyle museum? I also would have wanted to ask her: “Why open a museum in this time of laptops becoming the new cellular phones? Why not build a new I.T. hub? Why walk down memory lane by looking at pictures when you can surf the net and zoom yourself right into yesterday’s future simply called Now?”

These are the very same questions I could have asked the curator, the foundation chairman, another museum owner, a historian, a museum director, the usher, but I really wanted to share a tasa of native coffee with that lady who wore those uniforms. I could start the conversation by asking, “Do you remember when?”

Memory is such a very potent element, and perhaps one could say that almost every museum banks on reminiscence, even if experienced vicariously, as its biggest come-on, the promise of transporting you into another place and time, in this case, the 1950s. Being in the museum that Wednesday, nostalgia did kiss a scar open anew, and memories came bleeding crimson and thick, and per un momento, I stood before the ruins of ancient Rome again. I can still remember how I marveled upon Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in a museum in Florence, or got lost in the streets of Venice and ended up in an open square of pigeons. The mere thought of eating gelato on a Tuscan summer one more time is enough to melt you down, weaken your knees.

It is such a pity that some Italians take these grand manifestations of beauty so casually. Exactly the same sentiment I have for some who would not even bother to ask what this house at #42 Burgos St. is for. The Museums Association says: “Museums enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment.”

If the Dizon-Ramos Museum gives you that is something you have to experience yourself. Should you stumble upon that lady, please do inform me. Not only would I give you your P30 back, I’d also pay for the coffee. Don’t come on a Monday though.