The Rules

Rating:	★★★★★
Category:	Other

This was published in September 2003 in Sun.Star Weekend as a Crossline. Happy Father's Day not just to the fathers out there but to all who know the joys (and frustrations) of having a father ;P

NB At that time, I had really short hair. Look here to see what I mean.

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My father came over last month for a visit on his birthday. He said he wanted to see my new boarding house and office. Of course, the fact that The Boyfriend (whom he refuses to refer to as anything but ang iyong amígo) had just moved to Cebu must have provided some amount of motivation.

We’re not really the type to talk. I always thought he was too engrossed in his private world to be interested in anything I said, while he thought I was too opinionated. But when I live at home, he sometimes sits on my bed when I wake up and talks to me about The Rules.

“Don’t you know it’s a New York Times bestseller?” he would say on so many mornings. He has this bad habit of forgetting he has told me things he deems important.

“That’s why tradition has lasted this long—because it works!”

He was indeed referring to The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right, a book I had snickered at when I first saw it at a college dormmate’s desk a few years back. I couldn’t believe my father was advocating a book that gave detailed instructions on how to get a man.

“Never call him first,” he would quote, hinting at my cellphone bill. Instead of telling him about gender equality and risk getting into a long-winded argument so early in the morning, I would put the blanket over my head and pretend to go back to sleep.

But in my excitement to show him around Cebu, I took him to a used books store where we at last came face to face with—horrors!—The Rules. He insisted on buying it, the first book he has ever given me. I guess I should consider it a historic event.

“This is the continuation of ‘Dad’s Little Instruction Book’,” he said. That was a book I gave years ago that I thought he had junked. For a moment, I was touched.

“I’ll read it tonight so I can give it to you before I leave tomorrow.”

I didn’t think it was any way to spend the night of his birthday, but hey, who was I to tell him what to do?

Soon after, I took a vacation. “PLS BRNG THE RULES” was his last text before I left for home. He carried the book around the whole time I was there, with the goal of finally finishing—or perhaps memorizing—the 35 commandments.

Periodically, at the grocery, on the street, at the parlor where he took me for a haircut, he would point a woman out to me and say, “That’s a Rule breaker,” like a student practicing to be a connoisseur of proper behavior. I would look at him, incredulous.

“Don’t stare at a man,” he would recite, by way of explanation.

“Why, were those women staring at you?” I would counter.

He handed back the book as he drove me to the airport at the end of my vacation. “The only thing I don’t approve of is how they don’t say anything against premarital….” He still couldn’t say the word. He looked disappointed, as if he had bought a gadget that didn’t function as expected.

“Well it’s about finding a husband, not about any moral stand,” I said, “The only thing I can’t take is how they say you can’t have short hair.”

He laughed. We settled into an easy kind of quiet. I smiled at the afternoon wind trying to ruffle my hair. Somewhere on the way to capturing Mr. Right, I had discovered the rules for capturing my father’s heart.