Niels Joaquin

We came up with an elaborate carpooling system out in the suburbs of South Texas. Two families, three kids plus two kids, ages zippering in sequence like two streams of traffic merging onto a highway: Jerome Muniz was the eldest, followed by Samantha Joaquin, my sister; then Stephanie Muniz, then me, and finally John Muniz. As each kid learned to drive—learner’s permit at 15, driver’s license at 16—the newly minted motorist carpooled the next younger person to high school, who a year later drove the next person, and so on, until the relay race of adolescence had finished and everyone had achieved the vehicular freedom of choosing how to spend those precious hours after school but before “It’s 10:00 PM. Do You Know Where Your Children Are?” For the record, my parents’ answer to that query was invariably yes: it had the airtight conclusiveness of a theorem. “Do You Know Wh—” “Yes, obviously. Next question.”

Before high school, though, there was a simpler carpool system, when the parents were the original drivers. My dad’s office was on the same street, South Alameda, as our elementary school; and Jerome, Steph, and John’s mom, whom I addressed as Ninang Juanita (“ninang” being the title of godmother in Tagalog), worked closer to our middle school. So when the kids started graduating to middle school and getting split between campuses, my dad would shepherd the youngest ones, and Ninang Juanita would rally the middle schoolers. Finally, when the split became middle school/high school, the baton hand-off of teenage drivers took full effect.

This intricate choreography of passengers was an unavoidable feature of school and work in the sprawl, where public transit wasn’t a viable option. But because life was organized with cars, some formative education also happened because of cars. In the era when Ninang Juanita took charge of the prepubescent gaggle, riding in her bulky white Chevy Suburban, she would occasionally squeeze in something fun for us before the first school bell clanged at 9:00 AM: she took us to a nearby diner to enjoy a quick breakfast. In my early childhood, I wasn’t used to having meals outside of Filipino households; restaurants were a luxury that only happened a few times a year. My parents had prized home cooking and the strict nightly ritual of the dinner-table quorum (minimum: everyone). I’d also thought of my non-school activities as either homework or primetime network television (Friends, The X-Files)—there was quite literally nothing else; that was the mutually exclusive categorization of the hours—so to me a routine-smashing trip to Sylvia’s Diner before school felt quite subversive, like I was furtively pilfering from the Tree of Knowledge.

The forbidden fruit in this case was breakfast tacos. The food was simple and satisfying: I’d get a breakfast taco with eggs and bacon wrapped in a flour tortilla (I never saw soft corn tortillas until adulthood); Ninang Juanita would get a taco filled with lengua, or beef tongue (You could do that?), and coffee with half and half (I’d never heard of such a thing—half and half of what and what?). I never expected these simple foods to be brunchified and marked up to decadent prices much later in my urban adulthood: the Tex-Mex breakfast taco is unusually rare in New York, especially in comparison to their ubiquity in my hometown. Similarly, when I see trendy Filipino restaurants pop up in my adopted home, it’s hard not to recall how my parents’ ethnic food was often skipped over by my classmates when I’d have to share something from my culture (“Where are you from?—No, I mean, where are your parents from?”) at a school potluck.

The diner trips became the first of several experiences I would have in my life where the power of sharing who you are over a meal took on increasing importance. Michael Pollan wrote in his concise book In Defense of Food that the “shared meal elevates eating from a mechanical process of fueling the body to a ritual of family and community, from the mere animal biology to an act of culture”—which maybe comes off as excessively rarefied, but I believe every word. Even now, while my memory strains to remember the outlines of any specific diner conversation I had with Ninang Juanita, the emotions that have persisted after all the details have fallen through the sieve of time clearly prove to me that Sylvia’s was never just about mechanical eating.

It’s always a sneaky older person who introduces you to new worlds, new rituals that wrest you from the limited past constructed by your parents. Sometimes it’s the rougher kid who’s just a few years older, and knows just a bit more about sex than you do; sometimes it’s the cool aunt who’s still fairly close in time to her own black-sheep years of rebellion, directly fomenting your own mutiny against your parents. Ninang Juanita fit into another category: I don’t think she was ever going for “I’m not like a regular mom; I’m a cool mom,” but I think when people reach for an expression like joie de vivre (first heard in the theme song to The Nanny—more teachings from TV) to describe someone’s essential character, that fits her pretty perfectly. She was full of radiant energy, and I think she just wanted to make sure that I put meat on my bones (My ribs were always showing through, and Filipino women are always trying to feed you something)—and that I was happy. She always welcomed my family into her home and insisted that my sister and I keep extra toothbrushes there in case we ever stayed overnight on a whim. The Muniz house truly felt like another home, and in adulthood I can think of no close equivalent within my city limits anymore, a sanctuary that’s always open with absolutely no repayment expected.

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My parents met Juanita and her husband, Jesse, when they were all in their twenties. All of them had immigrated from the Philippines in the 1970s, jumping through the hoops of earning American citizenship either through military service or nursing and engineering H-1B visas. A year after I was born, I was baptized into the Catholic Church (That’s as far as I got) and Juanita became my Ninang Juanita, the main sponsor of my baptism. It meant something deep back then. The common idea that your godparents would take over for your parents should something ever happen to them actually felt genuine and binding. Ninang Juanita was responsible for my spiritual education in some way, and although what I eventually took from it was not spiritual in a religious sense, for a while I’ve been reflecting back on that relationship and perceiving new dimensions on what it means to keep adult friendships.

My parents, reserved as they are, were incredibly good in their young adulthood at making friends—the kind who last a lifetime, the kind you raise your kids with. I’m coming to realize their artfulness for forming these alliances now, as I live far away from the state that brought them together, and as I’ve felt the famously paradoxical loneliness of New York, the city where outstanding connections are made in a dense urban area but where familial warmth may feel distant if you’re a transplant and didn’t happen to descend from Northeastern roots. As I get older, I’m absolutely fascinated by how easily my parents made friends. My childhood was overflowing with social gatherings and support; there was a birthday, baptism, first communion, wedding, cookout every week, filled with rowdy analog games of mahjong, dominos, hearts, charades, sardines in a can, white elephant, patintero. I was never lacking for civic community. It’s so hard for me now to conceive of a world where a village actually did raise the child, where multiple families closely co-planned their social lives, went on cross-country vacations together—so tightly had those families become intertwined in the success of raising all of the kids, not just their own, and forming their moral upbringing.

I remember driving with the Muniz family from South Texas to far-flung destinations: Orlando, D.C., New York, once all the way to Niagara Falls. In the early years, the Muniz had a van with a portable toilet (bucket), and when we went in a caravan of two or more cars, we communicated by CB radio to coordinate any off-ramp exits and to entertain each other. (The walkie-talkie is a kid-friendly means of communication: the necessity of saying over at the end of each transmission is as quaint as reading a telegram, stop, in your best screwball-comedy voice, stop.) Later as both families started making their way into the middle class, the long drives in the Chevy Suburban had a cubic CRT television powered by the cigarette-lighter socket, and we played the very first Mario Kart to pass the interminable hours between Texas and a destination like New Jersey.

I wonder now what my kids’ equivalent to this level of intimacy could ever be—as I delay the child-rearing decision perilously close to my forties, as I move through the professional world with no real assets, and as technology has fragmented how people choose to spend their leisure time. I have a completely unfounded theory that it’s all related to the fact that you don’t make unplanned in-person visits, or have unplanned voice calls anymore. (I’m sure I have to read up on my Robert Putnam and third places again.) It just feels like barriers have been erected: we can highly personalize what to do with our time and whom to spend it with; we can entertain ourselves endlessly with content; we screen and filter our experiences in a way that seems to run counter to intimacy.

I only started making good friends in my mid-thirties, literally a few years ago. I was enormously shy for the first thirty years, and I feel like I’ve only just started to hit a groove in how to build fulfilling friendships with people who are kindred spirits in some way. Already, though, I’ve started to feel the inevitable friction of life-stage misalignments, often centered around children: I have friends who are actually younger but who were in a more stable position to already start that journey; at the other end, older friends with school-age children are in a wholly different mindset and understandably don’t have the time to be your best friend anymore, exploring bars and shows and hopping between Brooklyn and Manhattan and back again in one day like a TikToker curating a day-in-the-life video. Something as seemingly basic as friendship is actually a more sophisticated match than I’d ever thought: a sustaining friendship that will last for years requires so many factors to line up, while elusive lives are chaotically dispersing like particles in air.

I know it comes down to me. I just haven’t grown up, really; I’m obstinately retrogressing because I only just started to have fun and want to hang on to hedonism when I really can’t anymore. When he was 33, David Foster Wallace described the ineluctable contraction of your alternatives down to some final, convergent sum of your choices as the narrowing of “all life’s sumptuous branching complexity,” and the great squeeze is coming for me: “if I want to be any kind of grownup,” he writes (I intone to myself), “I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

Life is different now: the organization of communities, the social fabric, the objective function being optimized. The counterfactual is exactly that, a branch that cannot exist anymore. I won’t be able to untangle every factor to get a direct comparison to the family friends of my youth, because there isn’t one: the geographical differences alone are vast, and generations and trends and modes of communication have shifted so seismically. The so-called professional class’s deferral of their parenthood is definitely part of it. And New York is admittedly inimical to the Mi casa es su casa sharing of lives because mi casa is not actually a casa, nor is it really mi casa, nor can it house children and I’m too stressed at the end of the workweek that rent is up 40% year over year and I need to sleep this weekend.

But I honestly feel a true ache for deep friendship. It hurts and I don’t know how to control it. It’s become an almost daily feeling at this point, and the remembrance of simple joys from childhood invokes the pain, the -algia of nostalgia. I have nothing new to contribute to the literature of childhood reminiscence; Nabokov and Proust perfected that lyricism long ago, and I can only hesitantly affix my local detail. In Proust’s famous opening story of anxiously going to bed as a child, the narrator of Swann’s Way recalls the light from his father’s candle shining on the wall of a house that physically no longer survives:

This was many years ago. The staircase wall on which I saw the rising glimmer of his candle has long since ceased to exist. In me, too, many things have been destroyed that I thought were bound to last forever and new ones have formed that have given birth to new sorrows and joys which I could not have foreseen then, just as the old ones have become difficult for me to understand. […] The possibility of such hours will never be reborn for me.¹

I googled sylvia's corpus christi to see if that’s what it was even called, to see if the past could be touched again, and I didn’t know what to expect. A successful regional chain, or “Yelpers report this location has closed. Find a similar spot”? What could be “similar” to that singular location in space and time? Only an unrelated Sylvia’s Pastries came up. Just as the Proustian estate was already a ghost in the writer’s own lifetime, I could find no digital trace of the place I had known. My interiorized memory safeguards one of the last copies, feelings and not tangible contours, and it is too fragile, too close to falling through the sieve itself.

I miss the fellowship in learning what a lengua taco was from a joyful guide like Ninang Juanita, who has now passed on. I yearn for formative meals that happened so regularly that their cumulative impact could never be manifest until they were long gone. I miss watching, through a child’s gleaming eyes, a caravan of three or four immigrant families coordinate (sans smartphone—you had to be committed) to meet at the gas station on Kostoryz and South Padre Island Drive at 7:00 AM to start the walkie-talkie expedition to Six Flags or SeaWorld or Disney World. I’m jealous when I see it around me now. I’m jealous when I see people who’ve found their people, because I feel like I’m on the outside observing—because I know those human relationships take a lifetime of work, and building new ones this late feels so hard in a world that has crushed so many people in multiple crises.

But I want to make it work. It feels like a noble goal, since all you can really do is leave some impression on the people in your life. Your particles disperse but memory can endure. If life’s sumptuous branches must converge to some limit point for everyone, far away from all the forgone paths, I want to have lived so that I’ve cast candlelight on a staircase wall, glowing softly, quivering and flickering into new forms.