The Spy in the Sandwich

Sunday, August 24, 2025

9:00 AM | A Small Garden Party

There are days that unfurl so perfectly that you can only count them among the blessings that make life bearable, even luminous. They arrive like small benedictions, reminding you that there is still some sweetness in being alive, that there is still a feast to be had even in the shadows.

For me, that day arrived on the 17th of August this year, a surprisingly bright Sunday in the middle of a month known for its turbulent weather. But thank God for that sunny, breezy day, because I finally fulfilled a wish I had carried since I was a high schooler watching too many European films. Those films—you know the ones, where the camera lingers on a long table laden with fantastic dishes, under a tree, filled with people laughing or breaking bread, as if an eternity is contained in an afternoon—imprinted on me a vision of how a meal among friends can be a communion, a reminder that the good life is not about grand gestures, but about company, food, and the presence of trees. For decades, it was only that, a cinematic fantasy. At my age, alas I still do not have the sprawling villa, nor the terraced gardens with ancient stone, nor the long rustic table that had seen the weight of generations. I only had the wish and the fantasy.

But turning fifty has a way of rearranging your sense of what is possible. There is no more time for the “someday.” If not now, then when? If not in this life, then never. And so, with my significant other, Renz, I said: Why not now? And why not here, in the Maghanoy compound in Taclobo, that patch of memory and inheritance first secured by Renz’s grandfather in 1989?

A garden is still a garden, and a long table for a meal is only a matter of assembling chairs and flat surfaces and linen. And besides, isn’t that the point of dreams—that they don’t require perfection, only the courage to enact them in the form that life allows?

And so, we did it.

We borrowed the tables and the chairs and the linen from a good friend, Marikit Armogenia, who gave us not just furniture but a sense of welcome, a gesture of generosity that made the whole endeavor feel more grounded in community. We adorned them with the blossoms that have always meant happiness to me—the radiant yellow of the chrysanthemum. The bundles of flowers—a gift of my Manila-based friend Ted Regencia—sat in vases like bursts of small suns, uncomplicated but enough to light the air with cheer.

We laid out food that felt like home: escabeche from Lab-as, with its balance of tang and sweetness—facilitated by Tita Macrina Fuentes and my high school classmate Sande; smoky and tender lechon manok and liempo from Golden Roy’s—facilitated by my old high school teacher, Ma’am Cassion; and from Renz’s magic hands, chicken curry fragrant with spices, the [slightly] bitter honesty of ampalaya salad, and the earthy freshness of pako salad, a taste that spoke of mountains and streams—and the way my mother exactly prepared them for me when I was growing.

This spread of my favorite food [and flowers] made less for spectacle and more for satisfaction, the kind of presentation that doesn’t need to be fussed over because it already lives in the bloodstream of our memories. And then my people arrived—a carefully selected list of 15, agonizingly pared down from higher numbers I could not accommodate for logistics reasons. Ernest and Gayle Acar. Karl and Gail Villarmea. Hersley and Toulla Casero. Mohammed Malik and Finola Uy. Lyde Gerard Villanueva. Justine Megan Yu. Tara De Leon. Kaycee Melon. Warlito Caturay Jr. Alana Narciso. Khail Campos Santia. And Tita Melisa Maghanoy, Renz’s mom. People who represented aspects of me, barring those who could not come for some reason or other. Each one was a reminder that a life is not measured in what you’ve hoarded but in who has chosen to sit at your table. These fifteen guests filled the garden with laughter, with stories, with the heat of shared presence. A beautiful crowd for a beautiful day.

I called it a “literary lunch.” Because books and words have always been the meat of my life, and because it felt right to give the occasion a shape beyond food and fellowship. So I asked everyone to speak of gratitude—but with a rule: no mentioning of husbands or children, since they were already a given. Gratitude must be about the self, the singular joys, the quiet triumphs, the overlooked grace notes that make up one’s song. It was astonishing to hear the answers, little confessions of bliss that reminded me how textured life can be, how rich we all are if only we bothered to take inventory of our small joys.

Then I read to them “The 50 Gratitudes,” the essay I had written for and of myself for this occasion, a litany of thanks for the years and the loves and the accidents that have brought me here. I bundled it with two other pieces I had written for my birthday month [“The Confessions of Secondhand Rose” and “My Mother, The Muse”] and made a zine, my little giveaway for the day, because what is a birthday if not also a chance to give back the words that have sustained me? To see my friends leaf through those stapled pages, to hold in their hands my attempt at summing up half a century—it was my way of saying, “Here, take a piece of me with you, because you are already part of my story.”

Fifty as an age can a frightening number. You wake up to it and realize you have been on earth for half a century, that you are no longer the “young one” in the room, that your body creaks with the accumulation of time.

But I think fifty is also a tender number. It carries not just the weight of age, but the buoyancy of having survived, of having made it this far despite everything. It whispers: look around, you are still here. And what better way to mark it than to sit under the trees, at a long table, in the company of those who matter, and to say: thank you, thank you, thank you.

Because a good day is never just a day. It is a culmination of every choice, every act of courage, every hand extended to you in love. A good day is the flowering of roots you sometimes forget you planted. And a good life, if we are lucky, is only a constellation of such days, strung together until they shine enough to light the rest of the journey.

That August 17 Sunday was one such day. I think of it now with the certainty that whatever lies ahead, I have already known joy.