When my sister Loida and her family visited us here in Las Vegas recently, we caught up at the Goldilocks Restaurant on Maryland Parkway. She really loved the chicharon bulaklak, the crispy-fried pusit, the sisig and the lumpiang sariwa.
Loida suddenly remembered our mother's lumpiang sariwa, which is probably the best lumpiang sariwa that all of us siblings have ever had in our lives. Loida then proceeded to talk about Mom's cooking. "One beef-in-tomato-sauce our mom cooks very well is...is...is..." Loida was going through a TOT (tip of the tongue) phenomenon. I offered, apritada? No, Loida said, not apritada. Paulita offered caldereta? Is it menudo? We went through a litany of dishes that are made with beef and tomato sauce. "No, that's not it," Loida rejected them all.
So she called our sister Linda on her cell phone. Linda immediately said, "michado." Yes, that's right, my mom's michado was the favorite dish that we Lumba kids grew up on.
Luckily for all of us Lumbas, our TOT is not a precursor to Alzheimer's. My mom is 96, very lucid, still handing out nuggets of wisdom to her 20+ grandchildren, whose names she can still remember. On our father's side, no one has ever come down with Alzheimer's. Of course, no one in our father's family has lived long enough to have Alzheimer's.
My mother is the mother lode of all Lumba TOTs. I remember Mom visiting my and Paulita's South Orange, New Jersey home and having lots of conversations at the kitchen table.
In one such conversation, Mom told us about her favorite granddaughter's activities aside from tennis. Mom told us that she took Jeri to a dance school twice a week when Jeri was six all the way to her early teens.
"What did she study at the school?" asked Paulita.
"She danced, twirled and jumped.," said Mom.
"Oh, did she study modern dance?" "No," said Mom, "what do you call that dance where the dancers have special shoes?"
"Oh, she must have studied tap-dancing," offered Paulita. "No," said Mom, "it's very common, a lot of little girls study that dance."
"Jazz, hip-hop, break dancing?" Paulita was clearly into this, like a Scotland Yard sleuth trying to solve a mystery.
They went on and on until, exhausted, both gave up.
After a couple of hours or so, Mom came back down to the kitchen and announced to Paulita, who was cleaning up after feeding Paul: "Ballet."
I got a call once from a brother who asked me for the right word to use. He described the word as subjunctive, not actual. It was at the tip of his tongue, he said. I asked him, "Is it hypothetical?"
"That's the word," he said, and hung up.
During that lunch Paulita and I had with Loida, we talked about our siblings and complained to each other about how some of our siblings had calcified in their philosophies and mindsets. We talked about a brother of ours who clearly is now a member of the ultra-conservative religious wing of the Republican Party.
"How did our brother become like that?" Loida asked.
I said, "Well, all his lifetime friends are like that. They're all conservative Clinton-hating, Obama-baiting stalwarts of the extreme right wing of the Republican Party. Many of them are former, if not still current members of...." I stopped, having my own TOT experience.
I struggled and struggled and couldn't find the word. I offered a hint, "You know, the club referred to in The Da Vinci Code?"
Paulita said, "you mean the Priory of Sion?"
No, I said, it was the organization on the other side. We searched and scoured our memory baskets, and all was in vain.
When I finally opened the door of the car after parking it in the Self-Parking garage of Harrah's casino on the Strip, I remembered.
"Opus Dei," I said.
