Dugaruga
Between – going too far in the wrong direction and doing it just right
1. The wrong direction
It is not easy sifting through slightly differentiated grains of dirt. To do the work right, you have to narrow your pupil’s aperture to about the diameter of one sand particle. I did my best. But my best was all wrong. Because in minutes, I would be lost. Lost in France.
To be more specific, I would be lost on the walking trail to Lac D’Allos, the highest altitude lake in all of Europe. But that sort of detail did not matter. It did not matter, because I was ten-years-old. When you are ten-years-old and lost in a foreign country, you are not lost in any specific location, like the building or park or neighborhood that you are in. You are lost in the entire country. That’s just how it works. I was lost in France.
Just minutes earlier, I was with my family, and my family was with our French family-friends, the Grégoires. Altogether, we were four adults and eight children. It was only a matter of time before one of us was going to slip through the cracks. This is how it happened...
We were walking to the lake, and we took a five-minute break to rest on a nice-looking slope of grass. Sitting on that slope, I discovered sparkling grains of sand in the dirt, and was quickly convinced that they were diamonds. “I am going to be rich,” I thought, and I jumped at the chance to collect them.
But, like I said, sifting through slightly differentiated grains of dirt is not easy. It takes an absurd amount of concentration. So, just imagine how disoriented I was when, after ten minutes of hyper-focused sieving, I looked up from the palm of my dirty, dirty hand, and found that my family and the Grégoires were gone.
I ran back to the walking path. I looked left and I looked right. I saw no family or family-friend that was mine. This would not have been a problem, had I known which direction they went. I suppose I should have known which direction they went. I knew which direction we were going before we took the five-minute break. But neither my parents nor the Grégoires made exactly clear to me what our plan was that day. That or, perhaps a little more likely, I was a ten-year-old who did not pay attention. As far as my underdeveloped brain could assess, maybe the plan was to walk to the halfway point of the lake — about a quarter mile — take a quick five to bask in the grass, and then turn back to the parking lot.
I placed my bet. I headed toward the parking lot. No more than 30 seconds in, I was struck by a terrifying notion. “What if they didn’t go back to the parking lot?” Now, with every additional step I took toward the parking lot, I felt like I was getting twice as lost.
I turned around and started toward the lake, assuming that that would make my anxiety go away, until I was struck by another terrifying notion. “What if they did go back to the parking lot?” This thought made me just as afraid to take another step toward the lake. As I paced back and forth in the middle of that heavily trafficked French Alps walking path, I started to cry.
Two young men approached me. They said something in French. I did not speak French. Thankfully, my parents made me practice just what to say in a situation like this. “Speak English?” I blurted, red-nosed, without shame. Double-thankfully, they did speak English. Not only that, they were American. Specifically, they were students on a backpacking trip across Europe. American college kids. I never felt safer.
Between convulsing sobs, I explained to the gentlemen what kind of trouble I had gotten myself into. “Come,” they said, and we walked down the path in the direction of the lake. We passed the spot where I had looked for diamonds. Whatever happened to those diamonds, I wondered. It seemed like ages ago. At last, like a backlit silhouette in a red sun desert, I spotted my father walking up the path towards me. "That’s my dad!" I cried. Dad waved back at me, relieved. The college students handed me over to him. “Au revoir,” they said.
Dad put his hand around my shoulder and took me to a restaurant lodge that overlooked the lake. Inside, my family and the Grégoires were eating lunch. No one looked all that worried. It turns out everyone just assumed I would be fine. I sat down, a little embarrassed, but I was happy, because the world felt snug again. It fit me just right.
"Que désirez-vous?" asked the server.
I ordered a Coke. ■
2. Flirting with disaster
I have been told I am a flirt. I honestly do not think of myself as a flirt. I think of myself as someone who likes to connect with other people, and someone who other people like to connect with. Sometimes, that looks pretty flirty. But other times, it just looks like two people telling each other that they are great. Years ago, a new friend — who I thought was great — held my hand at a bar. We were both on this meet-up committee. She weaved her fingers through my fingers. She looked me straight in the eyes. “I can do this…” she announced to all of our fellow committee members watching, “because I am married.”
I knew immediately what she meant. She meant this. Because she was married, we could hold hands and it would not cause confusion. In other words, both of us knew that it was not going to go anywhere. She was married, we were friends. Friends who held hands. And I was very fine with that.
When I tell people this story, some people are not very fine with that. Some people think that we went too far. Europeans hold hands. Has Europe gone too far? It depends on who you ask. I can see it both ways, for myself and for Europe, but that does not help. One thing I know is certain. That friend of mine? She is great. ■
3. Compromise
I got into an argument with my mother last summer. It was over plastic forks. I was helping my parents organize the house, and we had way too many plastic forks. I am talking multiple large storage bins of disposable tableware. I wanted to throw the vast majority of the forks out. We were never going to use all of them, and they were taking up much needed space. But mom wanted to keep them. Our argument over it got pretty heated. “You don’t understand,” she finally said, her last line of defense.
I had grown up a very stubborn child, and she had used this line on me a zillion times. I had not heard her use it in a long, long time. What this line always implied was that I had neither the years nor the perspective to understand that she was right and I was wrong. But this time, things were different. I was 38. I too had years and perspective on my side.
“You know what?” I said to mom. “I think you don’t understand.”
I remember the Earth shaking. Something felt categorically wrong about saying these words to your own mother. I had gone too far. I went downstairs to the basement, among the storage boxes and large containers of disposable tableware, and there among them, I broke down and cried.
We ended up tossing out most of the plastic forks. But we also ended up keeping way more plastic forks than I would ever wish on my worst enemy. And this compromise seemed to settle the matter, at least for the time being.
It seems to me that compromise keeps people from both going too far in the wrong direction and from doing things just right. As a result, it enables people to move forward. For us, I could move forward as mom’s stubborn son again, and mom could move forward as my all-knowing mother again.
It also seems to me that compromise shows how both parties can be right. But only in one specific way. When each party believes that the other does not really understand, compromise affirms that neither party really understands. Realizing this helped to put me and mom on the right track. And the fact that neither of us understands or will ever understand is something I am reminded of again and again — whenever I see a random plastic fork lying around my parents’ kitchen. Which is all the time. ■
4. For better or worse
My friend Trina and I went surfing last week. Thirty-five minutes in, she said, “are you having fun yet?” I said, “Yea!” She said, “Me too. Let’s turn in.”
Trina’s rule of thumb is to stop surfing when she realizes she is having a good time.
It may seem counterintuitive — to spend so much time trying to get to a good spot, and once you finally arrive there, leaving. Then again, what wisdom is not counterintuitive? It seems to me that the best wisdom is completely paradoxical. Take, for example, the saying that goes, “Too much of a good thing is bad for you.” There is also the inverse saying, coined by the great Mae West: “When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad, I’m better.” Va-va-voom!
We grow up learning that good and bad live on opposite sides of the spectrum. That they play for opposite teams. It turns out that all this time we have been watching the game, the two have been making out under the bleachers.
If I have learned anything in Adulthood, it is that the rules out here are completely different. Not only that, but they are constantly changing. What goes up must come down. Except, of course, when it accelerates up.
These evolving laws of what is good and what is bad, and when things are right and when things are too much… I obsess over it. The other day, in fact, I felt compelled to diagram it out. Below is the original artifact.
How do we predict which of the above outcomes any given scenario will be? Sometimes, we just have to take our chances. But the problem with probabilistic analysis is it dramatically complicates the entire decision-making matrix. For example, if someone persists in a given direction, there could be a 70% chance things will get better, but a 30% chance things will get absolutely awful…
No wonder humans take things too far. In a world this complicated, at least there is surfing. Even if it is just for a good thirty-five minutes. After Trina and I turned in, we walked back to the car feeling spritely. We dropped the boards off at her house and got lunch. ■
5. A tale of dugarugas
On a Monday last July, I decided to take brunch at The Greenwich Hotel in New York City. I was in town from Hawaii visiting friends and family. My aunt and uncle, Tita Chet and Uncle David, were also in town while their home in Brentwood, California was being renovated. They were staying at the hotel, and they invited me and mom, the two “retirees” without weekday jobs, to join them for coffee and omelets.
It is nice at the Greenwich Hotel. A concierge opens the door for you the instant you think to motion towards it. The lobby is dark and elegant, like a townhouse library. Across a leather-bound lounge are French doors built into Roman-style arches that open to a bright courtyard. Green vines climb brick pillars, and six stories of hotel room terraces, adorned with more French doors and guarded by black wrought iron fences, overlook the stone patio below.
The host led me and mom to the table where Tita Chet and Uncle David were sitting.
“What do you think of this name?” Tita Chet asked as my mom sat down next to her. She showed mom her phone.
“Doo-guh...roo-guh,” mom read out loud.
“Dugaruga!” Chet said.
Mom frowned.
Chet’s eyes flared. “What? I like it!”
“What is dugaruga?” Uncle David asked, folding up his newspaper.
“Dugaruga,” Chet said. “It means You’re doing great! Perfect!” She did the OK sign with her hand.
Mom squinted and shook her head. “No it doesn’t mean that. It means That’s bad! Enough already! " She did a finger-wag.
"Interesting," Uncle David said.
Tita Chet was trying to come up with a new name for the Facebook chat group she started for their sisters. There were eight sisters total. The group was a big deal, and not just because of the Olympian-level coordination required to get a handful of 70-to-80-year-olds to assemble in the same forum on a social media platform on their phones. It was a big deal because time is short.
All eight women – “the Rosal sisters” – were born in the Philippines. They immigrated to America in their 20s or so. In the decades since, they each built their own careers and started their own families, but the sisters managed to keep in touch with one another. Some years, they kept in touch a lot. When I was little, they planned big family parties regularly, especially in the summer at Tita Vir's house, where there was a pool and a volleyball net. All of the siblings and their spouses and their children would be there. At night, we stayed over. Imagine three dozen kids and a smattering of titas and uncles in sleeping bags covering every inch of both floors of the house. Bodies snored like frogs in a pond, and getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night was like trying to cross a minefield.
But there were also years the Rosal sisters did not keep in touch enough at all. More recently, it has been hard to, because their children were now grown up and scattered across the country, many with families of their own. It has been hard enough for the sisters to keep up with their own grandchildren.
As for mom and Tita Chet, two of the youngest, they didn’t have grandchildren yet. But the two had always connected with each other, really. It started early. When all of their siblings and parents moved to America, mom and Tita Chet chose not to leave the Philippines. They stayed behind. They lived in an apartment building that their father built, and collected rent from the tenants. When a new tenant came around, he would be confused to find two girls collecting the rent money. “I want to talk to your father,” he would say. “You’re going to have to talk to us,” they would reply.
Surviving alone meant taking care of themselves and not adhering to traditional hierarchies. It meant being more independent and opinionated than women were expected to be. For mom and Tita Chet, going too far against the grain was doing it just right. They may have grown up Catholic, but their Bible was the crossword puzzle in the morning paper, and their priest was Astrud Gilberto on the turntable.
It only lasted a couple years. They fled to the United States when President Ferdinand Marcos placed the entire country under martial law. You can say it is ironic, though perhaps not surprising, that mom and Tita Chet, the last two sisters to leave the Philippines, were the only sisters not to marry Filipino men. Both married white American men. Both raised mixed-race, multicultural families. And both went a little rogue. Mom converted from Catholicism to Judaism and kept a kosher household. Tita Chet moved from the family’s east coast base to Los Angeles and bought a vacation home in Malibu.
It still takes a lot of effort for mom and Tita Chet to see each other. But just imagine trying to get all eight sisters in a row. The Facebook chat group was one attempt. But there was not going to be any Facebook chat group if they could not decide on a name.
“Dugaruga! You’re doing great! Perfect!” Tita Chet kept insisting.
“Dugaruga! That’s bad! Enough already!” Mom held her ground.
Uncle David and I knew not to intervene, unless we could be diplomatic about it. I suggested we all look it up on our phones, and so, we all did separate Google searches for the word dugaruga, but the task was not easy. Tagalog is the Philippine’s national language, but dugaruga is not a Tagalog word. It is Pangasinense, an Austronesian language regional to a Filipino province called Pangasinan. My mom’s parents grew up in Pangasinan. Every summer, mom and her siblings would visit their family’s home there. The older ones learned Pangasinense as children, but the younger ones not very much. Enough to know some words, yes. Not enough to avoid arguments over what those words meant.
The only website on the entire World Wide Web that offered any insight at all was Glosbe, which is sort of like a dictionary meets Wikipedia meets Google Translate. It did not have any official definitions for dugaruga, but it did have several English translations of Pangasinense passages that included the word, from which, the site generated a few potential definitions. We read them out loud: Especially fitting and Just right were a couple. So were: Prohibited and That is enough.
“It is possible,” said Uncle David, very carefully, “that both of you are right.”
There is a term for words that mean two opposite things at the same time. In fact, there are several terms for it, confusingly and fittingly: Janus words, contronyms, antagonyms, and auto-antonyms. Here are a few English ones:
Clip — to fasten; to detach
Oversight — Monitoring; failing to oversee
Sanction — Approve; boycott
I get that words can naturally evolve to have two opposite meanings. What I do not get is why society decides to keep both meanings around. Perhaps we all suffer from some sort of sociolinguistic condition where we do not believe we deserve the semiotic clarity that we desperately seek. Then again, what if the lack of clarity is a good thing? What if, somehow, a word meaning two opposite things gets us closer to the truth?
Or maybe, it is this. We keep both meanings around because at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter. Just right, too much, never quite enough... At least we are not static. We are in motion, and that is good. Even if at some point, we are forced to turn around.
The Rosal sisters’ coming-of-age story was leaving their childhood home and dispersing on the opposite side of the globe. Like the vines of a rose, they have branched outward and tangled back inward and bloomed new buds and dug new roots and branched out again. Decades have passed since it all started. And it is a miracle. It is a miracle that now, in their 70s and 80s, they were even making the attempt to see each other more regularly. It is a miracle that my mom and Tita Chet, once a couple of teenage landlords alone in the Philippines, were now retired in a completely different country. One on the east coast, one on the west, and both getting brunch on a Monday at the Greenwich Hotel. It is also a miracle that I could be there to join them.
There is a zen story my dad likes to tell me. A version of it goes like this.
Two monks were arguing about a flag flapping in the wind. “It is the WIND flapping the flag,” stated the first one. “No, it is the FLAG flapping in the wind,” contended the second. A Zen master, who happened to be walking by, overheard the debate and interrupted them. “The answer is neither the flag nor the wind,” the Zen master said, “It is the HEART that flaps.”
Right now, if you ask Tita Chet what dugaruga means, she will say: “You’re doing great! Perfect!” If you ask my mom, she will say, “That’s bad! Enough already!” Perhaps dugaruga is neither great nor bad. It is always perfect, and it is always too much. It is never and forever enough...
It is the heart that dugarugas. ■