‘She didn’t have designer ones but she had good friends who were good dressmakers, and once in a while, she would have one made.’
I think I inherited my taste for the “good life” from my mother, who, to be clear, lived a simple life on the salary of a UP professor of Nursing. She really didn’t have the means to splurge on branded stuff as often as I know she would have liked.
Once she bought these Dior sunglasses and I think she would have hoped we didn’t have the rainy season ever. Another time, I gifted her with an Omega wristwatch on her birthday and she kept saying she’d only wear it on special occasions. She died two months after that so she never got to wear it.
She knew what good life looked like – her parents had sent her in the 1950s to the then-College of the Holy Spirit – but when she was an adult, she was happy with the cards she had been dealt from the deck of life. I used to joke that had she married one of the UP law guys who were courting her, rather than the UP medicine student who was a “promdi,” maybe she would have lived in far more luxury than she ever did.
One of her small “lujo” was dresses. She didn’t have designer ones but she had good friends who were good dressmakers, and once in a while, she would have one made. So much so that when she passed away, she had a whole wardrobe of dresses that depressed my father whenever he’d see them – but he also couldn’t bear to give them away lest, he said, he met someone wearing one of the dresses and then he’d get depressed again! (I was the one who took them all one day and made sure my dad never saw them again.)
One evening in March of 1993, I found myself at Rustan’s Makati with an assignment from my father to get my mom a good dress to wear. Me being me, I ignored the designer stuff and headed to the Filipiniana section and started going through all the options they had, but I didn’t know what to get.
A nice sales clerk came to help. After asking me what I was looking for (a nice Filipiniana dress for my mom) and her size (I shrugged and looked around and pointed to one lady), she picked up two options and said, maybe your mom would look good in one of these.
Actually, she chose well, but I was struggling. What about the fit?
But she was helpful: since you want to surprise your mom, don’t lose the receipt. If it doesn’t fit, bring it back with the receipt and we can change it. Truly hearing that was such a relief for me. So I paid for the dress and drove home. At home, I showed my dad my choice and he said, “Your mom will like that.”
He also said he was sure the fit wouldn’t be an issue.
And that’s how I chose the last dress my mother ever wore. I found out later that at the mortuary, they cut the dress in the back and just tucked in the sides underneath the body of the deceased, so yes, fit wasn’t much of an issue. The idea of heading back to Rustan’s with the receipt and a dress cut in the back amused me then and still amuses me now. But heck, I had no intention of telling that all so helpful salesclerk of Rustan’s that the dress I was looking for was one that my mother, unfortunately, would never have the chance to appreciate herself.
Thirty-two years later, though, I still appreciate her help on that difficult March night when I had to choose the dress in which we buried my mom.
