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Related somehow: Real life in Java, Indonesia, during the late 1990's Panorama of a Javanese Neighborhood Ghostbusting For Dummies: Guide To/Out Of Personal Archæology Indonesian Educational System In Late 1980's The 17th Year: Essays About Me, written by some acquaintances in High School Javanese & Indonesian Food, Drinks, Fruits, Veggies, Snacks Javanese & Indonesian Languages Meanings of Javanese & Indonesian Names
FOOTNOTES
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But we rarely stole edibles with obvious market value like the star fruit and the mangoes. The kids sort of respected that because their parents also sold such crops to add to the wages, and I still had a hope that whatever could be gotten lawfully in the market might be within Grandma's or Mom's or my own financial reach. Sweet wild berries were the usual target, and it was a sin enough because the shrubs grew in someone's territory, though in this case we only robbed his kids. I tried, in bouts of goodness when the rare Carterist touch got me, to repay these by giving my former victims a treat using the money from the magazines. Eight times out of ten this honorable aspiration stayed on as an aspiration, because buying books was always sinfully urgent. I put those books for rent, too, and many had never came back, so it was ten percent or so justifiable to consider it a barter with the berries. Books have always been a rare species in the town. They were in the seventies, they were in the eighties, they were in the nineties, they are today. There are several universities, half a dozen of academies and other sorts of higher educational institutions - but everybody has to go forty miles away to get a meaningful browsing of new books - to the town I live in now. There were bookstores, actually, but the managers' notion of a bookstore is a store that sells notebooks. It never changed, and it didn't help that they burned the stores twice in two decades. In the eighties the biggest bookstore forty miles away from my town was a real heaven. People were allowed to read a book all day until the last dot without buying anything. As a result it was jammed on Sundays - our only days to go there on a public minibus that took two hours to arrive. I've never been a free-reading customer of any such joints - I've never even read the covers on sight. This totally unwise but inborn (I guess so) and stubborn (I'm sure so) habit had left me inundated by the worst books (clothes, videos, knickknacks, men) in the history of mankind, but I still do it - it's a delicious mystery to open the book for the first time at home, in bed, alone, just it and me. So I only looked around and picked up one or two books (or anything) to go out of the shop (or anywhere) with, and the ones I more than glanced at were the ones I didn't want to go home with. The limited sum allocated for shopping was hellish, but maybe it enhanced the significance. To have one dollar and bring home something sold to us for ninety cents is blissful; to spend a hundred bucks out of a thousand on thirty books feels tasteless - if you know what I mean. Those were the days when my lifelong idea of a good time was to materialize; things and actions that are good to me are the ones that give immediate satisfaction and a meaning in themselves - not derivative - if you catch my drift. This goes amiably with the unmistakable urge to get impulsive. Derivatives are accidental side-effects, not aims. The books I lent for a cent each in two days' time were mostly comic books, adventures, and kung-fu stories. So there were two separate libraries - my private one wasn't for anyone else to see. My first book that I bought using a money-order from a publisher was the New Testament. It was a small book with a better binding than today's in prussian blue plastic covers - and as if this wasn't bizarre enough, I actually read it from cover to cover - I thought this was imperative before I read everybody else's bibles, which I later on did. If religious affliction is compulsory and I'd get burnt on a stake for none, the minimum to be left of the foregone freedom to make it bearable is that I wouldn't let anyone else to decide my direction. That was nineteen eighty. I'd been getting a few dollars that way since three years before, but I spent them all on other stuff and to be thrown away in repentance of my social sins. The house was quite full with books, a bicycle, and a sewing-machine Mom bought for mysterious reasons (it had never been used but for keeping things in its drawers). My sanctuary was the kitchen. I kept a diary there to say what I did not. I learned to use the old typewriter so I could write directly in a salable form, and didn't have to get headaches from typos and misreadings of my cryptic handwriting by Mom. It was the grumpiest machine that narrowly edged out Grandma's radio. Both got broken at the wrongest of time, both seemed to love the interval of dysfunctionalism, both were better for none of their uses - the radio killed roaches perfectly, and the typewriter was the best bed for a cat to nap on. I and the typewriter were only partners in crime, so naturally we didn't spend more time together than necessary until the deed was done. But Grandma and the radio were everlasting honeymooners. She kept it until she died more than twenty years later. Yet even the lovestruck got stuck somewhere along the way. When the radio acted up, Grandma got a pedicab and went to visit somebody. A ride on a pedicab costs more than a cab, because it is purely human muscles we must pay for. Those days of the seventies and eighties cabs were rumors - they didn't exist in metal in our town. But we always use pedicabs until today when Mercedes taxis are everywhere anyway - the pedicab drivers are usually our own neighbors, so it's sort of private, it outrules haggling about the fare, and it saves a lot of energy otherwise being used on navigation. A pedicab could take all of us at once in the seventies; the length of its customary seat is around twenty-four inches. It became impossible for more than two of us in the eighties, so the allocation for travelling doubled up. Anywhere we lived we had some persons referred to (outside the family) as 'ours', who were pedicab drivers. Each one of us had her own preference here; mine was, at the time, a man built like Evander Holyfield ; Grandma's was the bespectacled senior driver who shared every traffic-related fear she had (which meant the traffic); a short, staunchy, talkative driver had taken my sister to elementary school and he was still the one who drove her to high school eleven years later. Mom was the exception. She didn't care who the driver was as long as he did exactly what she told him to - she was the driver, the driver was a pair of legs. When we didn't go out to visit anyone, then it was to shop. There was no such a thing as a shopping mall those days. Only two or three shops to go to riding the pedicab. I love old shops; the dusty stuff they keep, that nobody had ever wanted for the past fifty years, is to me as great to behold as the 'New Arrival' sign on certain boutiques' counters is to my sister. There are still such shops now but I'm sure their place is to be in memory soon. The shops at the time were not, of course, old; but as regards the way to shop we had never seen any other way to manage retail outlets so we had no comparison for them by then and considered the winding route normal. The shops opened at nine a.m. and were positively closed at nine p.m., just like today's mall, but the mall is continuously open in between while old shops got a break of dissociation from customers in the afternoon. But the salespersons were continually busy and didn't have time to trade rumors and dirty jokes via cellphones like they do now, even if there were such a thing as the unimaginable cellphones. They stood behind counters of glass, they got to fetch anything anyone asked them to, they got to write receipts and take the money to the cashier and back to the customers and wrap the thing and at the time there were already some others waiting for the same kind of service. In one of the shops they only gave us the bills and we plunged into a queue in front of the cashier ourselves; but nobody had ever heard of self-service. As late as the mid-eighties the populace whose houses didn't have phone lines still had to go to the phone company's office to ask someone to dial the number for them in a long-distance call. But the shops those days were governed by sensibility. They were places to shop in, and social purposes were served accidentally; today's malls cater to the social needs and shopping there is accidental. That's where the indoor fountains and garden seats came from, to disable the pushing of carts to the parking lot since they are infested by non-shoppers; and it was the origin of all the Idul Fitri and Christmas decorations that jam the elevator doors. Traditional markets are even noisier and get bigger crowds any time. The uncertain worth of every sort of merchandise makes everyone linger a long time to negotiate, and this is maddening to the busy. To me at the time the markets were independent worlds - and I got lost there more than once, even when I was fifteen; the vendors filled up every space and this included the doors. There was always a man carrying a gigantic kettle full of boiling tea to scatter people about, coolies that already developed today's airport carriers' attitude, and pickpockets. Grandma hated crowds, but she loved traditional markets - these had never been reconciled. My maternal side of pedigree is a big, tall, old hypochondria. Ill or not ill people there had been swallowing every kind of placebo and real but in those cases entirely useless remedies. The most fascinating store that Grandma used to drag me into was a Chinese medicinal establishment, just like the ones we can see in Hong Kong movies, where seemingly thousands of wooden drawers bearing Chinese inscriptions were lining up a wallful of space and a succession of identical glass jars were filling up what's left. I didn't know what she purchased there, and didn't care; but this store had given me the vivid imagery of serial killers and sinister cabalistic rites. I had mixed it up with medieval Europe to produce some self-service nightmare-inducers. The most amazing piece in the store was a large glass jar with a metal lid, where a baby deer was preserved in a few liters of whatever that was. From time to time the medicine man and apothecarian took a bit of the liquid substance out of the jar and into a small plastic container and gave it to a customer. I asked Grandma to buy some, but she declined, saying that she had no idea what to do with it. What a disappointing act. A true-blue hypochondriac should have found a use of anything medicinal. With Mom, places to go to seemed to waver between three definite places. One was a small shop where anytime something might (though never did) fall on your head since boxes that looked like had been there earlier than the Dutch were piled up on top of chairs, tables and cupboards. This shop sold feminine stuff like necklaces made of plastic beads thoughtfully dipped in certain colors to sport the look of precious gems and which got the actual looks of dipped plastic beads intended to mimic precious gems, fake gold earrings of the size of impostors, innocent slippers brutally smitten by laces, zirconium-laden tiaras, and the like. The second was a tailor's, a place one and a half meter square or so - too small to accomodate anything but the tailor herself, a very tiny Tionghoan, no more than four foot six (exact height, because I irreverently asked), a goddess of her trade. She knew what Mom wanted even before she told her about it - maybe even before she got the idea to get there in the first place. Mom was unfathomable those days, in any way and any subject, including tailoring; but this woman had only measured her once in nineteen sixty-six and modified it according to sight ever after - the system still works in the year two thousand and two. My knowledge, garmentwise, is always mediocre, and I wasn't interested in tailoring at all. But right in front of this place was the third and best of all Mom's destinations, even better because it was a side-effect; Brother Jon's palace of iced drinks. It was a multicolored hut with sugar palm fiber roof, typical of a place people want to present as the manifestation of the idea of a tropical idyll. In it were several tables tightly clad in plastic sheets nailed at four sides, raw wooden seats, huge tin jars of chips, bottles of sauce, and mottoes and notices in a bold handwriting, such as "Eat & Drink For Free Yesterday" and "Don't Worry, Last Year's Bill Was On Me". The hut was doorless and open to the narrow road. Anyone could and anyone did sell such drinks. But Brother Jon was Bacchus himself if those were wine. He had his way across every variety of fruit and was in a constant search of new formulas - the triumph would immediately enter the menu nailed on the wooden wall in bright markers and it was as good as it was claimed as. Avocado, durian, lychee and everything got the new and suspiciously true flavor after his tinkering with them. He also served his version of the good old noodle and meatball soup, not only the meatballs were better than most but they were ten times the average size, too. He arrived at that gradually, from 'ping-pong meatballs' to 'tennis meatballs' - if he didn't die at the end of the eighties he would have given us the 'basketball'. Sometimes we went to Grandma's eldest sister's house, a familial duty I liked for one reason - she owned a cashew tree in her front yard. I loved both the cashew and its fruit that nobody else ate. At home I would piss Grandma off by messing up with her coal stove - I always used too much kerosene - to roast the cashew nuts. I did it in secret - no way I was going to share the unaffordable snack with anyone dead or alive. The eldest grandma's place was as bold and peculiar as the old lady herself - no matter what others said, she was my favorite. While Grandma was ironic, this sister of hers was decidedly sarcastic and only once in a blue moon cynical; she didn't like anybody except perhaps Grandma and their youngest sibling, a grandpa who was perpetually ill, and proclaimed so. When their parents passed away some years before the Independence, she had to leave school, being the surrogate parent for ten (Great Grandparents were really extravagant) younger kids - caring for them was no pastime activity for sure. Managing what was left behind by the departing parents wasn't enough, since the branch of pedigree always tends to leave nothing but a hazy philosophy to their offspring, so she married a much older man who was sufficiently in love with her to take in all the ten additional baggage, and that was how Grandma and others could continue their schooling. Devoid entirely of illusions, the eldest sister who at the time had already been acid had grown old gracefully abrasive - age and history had got her immune against any mushy notion of parenthood and such that got Grandma to try, once every few mistakes, to persuade her to be less autocratic and less scary and more humane. The death of the husband left her some boundless freedom and four kids. She had been a penny-pincher out of circumstances, and she was smart enough to find the right reason to consider any circumstance as necessitating penny-pinching, so in the mid-nineties when she died she had broken the sacred tradition of moneyless death in the family and left a huge fortune to her kids. "She was so stingy, it was hurting her to have to pee," said the eldest aunt - who was one of the benefitted parties of this tightfisting policy upon the death. Notions of parental obligations and children's duties were pursed by everyone in the family tree without much to show in actual deeds. Maybe the eldest grandma realised this and whipped her household to do what it said it believed in; as a result she was totally unloved, a fact that she openly acknowledged in rude jesting tones. She didn't mind that. Her target was being respected (i.e. terrifying), not loved. I, though, liked her more than she ever knew. The lack of formal education had left her mind on its own, and this produced some homemade pedagogy, and in time elicited nonsense. Of course there were some wholly ignorant remarks and entirely alarming opinions - wise or unwise, she delivered them in an equally loud bang - and she shut everyone up in a wedding once by remarking that if she were Hitler the first thing to do was to eliminate himself. Her suggestions of how to proceed with this task had beaten Dorothy Parker and would have shamed Joseph Mengele - they had, at any rate, ruined the bride's most important day in her life.
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