By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

IT’S an expression that I could never really identify with. “It’s like riding a bike.”

Apparently, it means that once you’ve learned how to do a certain thing, you never forget. But what if you never learned to do it in the first place? As a bookish, skinny kid, I never learned to ride a bicycle. I remember sharing a tricycle with my siblings, but never going too fast because it made me dizzy. I actually remember riding an actual bike — but with training wheels — years later — in a spectacularly unsuccessful fashion. For some reason, I really could not keep the bike upright and in motion, this, even with the training wheels. I kept crashing into the subdivision’s foliage and getting scratches and bumps. I pretty much gave up trying to learn—and never did.

There are many things to take away from that little tidbit. For one thing, balance has never been my strong suit. Despite my best efforts, multi-tasking is not one of my strengths. I’m more like that memorable member of DC’s Legion of Super-Heroes, Jo Nah, better known as Ultra Boy (the Keith Giffen version). Ultra Boy, after all, had all of Superboy’s powers, but could only use them one at a time. Thus, I can really only do one activity at any given moment, as that one activity requires all my attention.

So, I never learned how to drive. When I had to steer, I kept forgetting how to shift gears. When I had to shift to second, I couldn’t figure out how to brake.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

LIKE a twist in one of his books, news of Michael Crichton’s demise arrived as a shock. No one knew the author was even sick, so finding out Crichton was really dead at 66 after a battle with cancer was truly startling.

What it also does is remove one of the few authors who really had a following after all these decades. Crichton was never the easiest author to read. His prose tended to be heavy with dense paragraphs of explanations, often moving at the speed of crawling magma. The movies adapted from his books essentially pared down his narrative to just action. He always considered explaining how these things happened as important as why.

What he never lacked was the big idea. This was partly because of his truly unique background. He moved from studying English at Harvard to studying medicine at Harvard, writing in his spare time before finally quitting med school. Most readers know Crichton hit the big time when his dinosaur-redux novel “Jurassic Park” gobbled up the competition on the shelves in 1990 and then the box office in 1993. That movie changed our idea of modern day monsters forever, launching a merchandising empire and making dinos cool again.

The real defining moment of Crichton’s writing, in my mind, came much earlier, in 1969, when he wrote “The Andromeda Strain.” That novel, plus the 1971 Robert Wise movie, came to define our idea of pandemic panic. Its claustrophobic setting became the definitive environment for any unseen bug that runs wild in a lab. That very same paranoia informs every single sickness movie today, from “Outbreak” to “28 Days Later.” Plus the stark, minimalist 1971 film is superior in every way to the slick but stunted, nearly unintelligible 2008 TV remake. He made us fear the biohazard symbol. It was then that Crichton hatched his idea that science can indeed be scary.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

OF all the relationships that end, it’s the ones we have with food which seem hardest to forget completely. Maybe it’s because food activates a sensory aspect, one that is more visceral and thus more difficult to simply erase. A sniff of a similar aroma will suddenly flood the senses with nostalgia.

The most poignant thing to lose is the favorite restaurant. It’s particularly difficult when the waiters know you, and even know what you without asking. “The usual.” Places move, chefs transfer, and customers will just have to accept the fact that their favorite haunt is gone. I have dealt with this particular situation twice. My first favorite restaurant was Café Intermezzo in Greenbelt. I would be there every Wednesday, and inevitably I would meet friends there because they knew I’d be there at that day every week. Their lamb chops were my regular meal and once Intermezzo left, replaced by a Burger King, I never found another place quite like it.

The second place I really liked going to was a friend’s joint. Clinton Palanca is both a wicked fictionist and an impressive chef. Prospero’s was his place, and I loved both its incarnations, in Katipunan and Greenbelt. The tenderloin was amazing and the iced tea remains the best anywhere. Clinton eventually decided to move on, Prospero’s gone with the tide, but its memories remain.

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