I rarely remember my dreams, but when I do they are fantastical. My dreams are exceptionally vivid or banal but somehow revelatory. Sometimes I dream of my late parents and I choose to believe that they are letting me know they are keeping an eye on things. 

While working for decades as a server/bartender, my sleep cycle regularly included a specific stress dream. Unwelcome and unpleasant, my colleagues called it a “waitermare.” Typically this dream would feature a scenario wherein I navigate spectacular obstacles to complete a service-related task. For example, I attempt to cross a busy multi-lane highway with a tray full of drinks or I am made to snake through an enormous, pulsing crowd with hot plates piled up and down both arms, searching for my section. Serving is taxing work which calls for physical and social hardiness over long hours. In all work, as most of us know, the strain of full-time hours can bleed into even the sanctuary of REM.

For a long time I reflexively understood the word “service” to mean meal time. 

Breakfast service, brunch service, lunch service, dinner service. 

“Have a great service!” staff members wish one another before the rush.

Of course the term carries more expansive meanings. Alongside its applications in tennis, religious ceremonies and bicycle repair, service can also mean an act of assistance, a favour, a kindness, a helping hand.

For too many reasons, the past few years have trained my attention to this last definition of service, to collective care, to mutual aid. “How can I help?” is a question that I pose in my dreams. I have tried to find answers through my artistic practice.

. . . 

The last project I produced was a gathering called MERYENDA, commissioned by the Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) at the Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre (CDDC). We planned a tea party in the centre’s garden for three afternoons this past summer, open to the public and free of charge. While researching the CDCC archives, we were inspired by documentation going back almost 100 years of the United Church Women group activities, whose local operations are headquartered on location. They fundraised through hospitality events; socials, luncheons, bake sales, and tea parties. They allocated the funds to the maintenance of the site and to help members in need from the surrounding downtown community.

Meryenda is the Filipino ritual of an afternoon snack, so we served locally grown mint tea, cedar tea, salabat (Filipino ginger tea), bibingka (a Filipino rice cake), and cookies based on a recipe from the archives. The CUAG staff, a few friends and I welcomed everyone who walked into the garden, offered them a seat and served them what we had prepared. A small act of (tea) service. 

. . . 

I visited my father’s hometown in the southern Philippines twice in the last two years. My dad was born and raised in the family house that his father built, located two blocks from the beach along Dapitan Bay which opens up into the West Philippine Sea (or the South China Sea depending on who you ask). I have rich childhood memories of staying there while visiting my grand-parents and sprawling extended family. I remember strolling out the front door in the evening with my cousins, before the neighbourhood was connected to the electrical grid, to look at the star-filled sky. I remember attending my Grandpa Eter’s novena (a nine day wake) when the home was filled with guests eating all manner of rice cakes, drinking bottles of San Miguel beer and cups of Tanduay rum. People were clustered around the verdant yard on plastic lawn chairs, smoking cigarettes, playing mahjong, betting on card games, and gossiping into the night. 

On a recent visit I walked by the property and remarked that the house was a faded pale blue and looked run down. There was a vinyl banner strung across the front gate advertising fried chicken. When I asked my Tita Dulce about the sign, she informed me that  “the tenants make fried chicken and sell it.”

No one in my family lives there anymore, they rent it out for a very modest sum.

. . . 

Here is the seed of another kind of dream: to host an artist residency in my family’s ancestral home in Dapitan City, Zamboanga del Norte, Philippines. I am having trouble making art right now, during this chaotic and cruel chapter of history. It’s been a challenge to reconcile my old aspirations of exhibiting work in institutions that are revealing their soft underbellies. I struggle to keep my footing on the pathway to my practice. The way forward might be service.

I am imagining a cohort of culture workers gathered at the site of my family origins; sweeping the yard, painting a fresh coat of baby blue to the exterior, cooking together in the kitchen, snacking on bananacue while watching the sunset, making art in the backyard beside the shrine to the Virgin Mary, eating mangos beneath the guava tree, singing karaoke at the beach shacks along Sunset Boulevard, shopping for fresh crabs at Bagting fish market. 

I am dreaming that small acts of hospitality will bring us succour in tender times. 

I am dreaming that being together is an antidote.

“We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.” —Audre Lorde