Cinematic

When our first dog, Dimples died, my brother and I cried a river. She didn't actually have any dimple, what dog would, but my brother has this anti-conformity attitude wherein he doesn't want to name the dog according to its most obvious features, like Whitey or Spotty. He'd take the opposite direction perhaps, unknowkingly, to make a statement against predictability. (Yes, the anti-cute attitude runs in the family). And so we named her Dimples. We had one dog named Beauty, and she was no raving beauty. In fact, she was all ready to chase the early-morning pan de sal vendors. I'm digressing.

Anyway, when Dimples died, we were supposedly bound by tradition to bury the pet preferably under a banana tree. And so my father dug a deep hole under a banana tree while we were crying our hearts out. Hey, I was eight years old.

Weeks earlier, we watched a Tagalog movie starring Vilma Santos. One particular burial scene struck me: she picked fistfuls of dirt and threw it slowly to the lowered coffin, before the grave diggers took over and covered the entire thing with a mound of earth.

And very much like that Vilma Santos scene, my brother slowly picked up fistfuls of earth, in a very cinematic fashion, and showered and covered Dimple's body with it, while I gave him a look which says that I knew exactly from which movie he got his idea from.

I always remind him of this, which of course makes him mad. He now admits that it was corny.