Four Days Before Tess's Birthday, I Found This
Four Days Before Tess's Birthday, I Found This
Twenty-four years ago today, my late wife Tess held onto our not-quite-two-year-old at a Chuck E. Cheese in Fairfield. In four days, it would have been her thirtieth birthday.
Twenty-four years ago at 12:30 PM, I had a digital camera in my hand and documenting my family and building my archive as always. My daughter Veronica — Nica — is sitting on a yellow-and-black coin-operated motorcycle at a Chuck E. Cheese in Fairfield, California, gripping the handlebars like she means it. She is 1 year, 10 months, and 4 days old still a couple of months from her second birthday. Standing right next to her, one hand steady on her back, is Tess.
We were there for a nephew's birthday — Ethan's — and the place was doing what those places do: buzzing lights, arcade noise, cousins scattering between rides. Somebody off-camera calls out for Nica to look up. She does, wide-eyed, for a second, then goes right back to steering. Thirty seconds of nothing important happening. I've watched it a dozen times this week.
PinoyBuilt archive footage · Recorded August 12, 2002 · Olympus C-3000 Zoom
In the early 2000s, a digital camera like the Olympus C-3000 Zoom was still a luxury in a lot of Filipino-American households — which is exactly why so many of our earliest family videos come from birthday parties, baptisms, and pizza-arcade Saturdays: the occasions worth the batteries. For the diaspora, home video was never just home video. It was proof, later, that a life was actually lived the way memory says it was. Thirty seconds of a toddler on a coin-operated motorcycle doesn't feel like an archive when you're shooting it. It only becomes one when the person standing next to her is gone, and the video is one of the last places she still moves.
Alaala ah-lah-AH-lah
Meaning: Memory; remembrance; a keepsake held onto on purpose.
"Ang bawat larawan ay isang alaala na hindi dapat malimutan."
("Every photo is a memory that should not be forgotten.")
Alaala isn't passive the way "memory" can sound in English. It carries the sense of something you actively hold onto — the reason a father keeps a camcorder rolling on a Tuesday afternoon that seems to matter to no one else in the building.
Chuck E. Cheese, Fairfield — August 12, 2002
Nica had turned two two months out. She was at the age where a coin-operated motorcycle is the entire universe — climb up, grip the bars, feel it rock a little when the quarter kicks in, look for the adult who's supposed to be impressed. Tess is that adult, standing close, one hand on her back the whole time, half spotting her and half just wanting to be touching her. Cousins move in and out of frame — other rides, the ball pit, the arcade lights — the ordinary chaos of a Fil-Am kid's birthday party in the Bay Area suburbs in 2002.
Our second child, JianCarlo, wasn't in the video. He'd been born that January 14 — not yet seven months old that August — and my best guess, watching this back, is that he stayed home that day with Mama Helen. Tess's mother, Elenita Baluyut Garcia, had flown in months before to help her bunso take care of her newborn. We would also be flying to Chicago of August 2002 to attend my cousin Jun's & Bernadette's wedding.
Four Days From Thirty
Tess was born August 16, 1972. That makes this video, dated August 12, 2002, exactly four days before she turned thirty — a fact I did not have in my head when I filmed it and only found doing the math this week. She shares that birthday, August 16, with her own mother, Mama Helen. Two generations of women in this family, born on the same date, and one of them is standing in this video four days out from the milestone.
Tess passed away December 29, 2020, from COVID-19, before vaccines were available to us. I'm not going to turn her birthday into a grief piece — that's not what this is, and it's not what she'd want out of a home video from a pizza parlor. But I'd be lying if I said watching her hand on our daughter's back, four days before a thirtieth birthday she'd go on to have eighteen more of, doesn't sit differently than it used to.
What Twenty-Two Months Looks Like
Nica is 25 now — twenty-four years past a birthday she doesn't remember, and a mother she has fewer and fewer video seconds of by the year. That's the real reason this piece exists before I've even pulled a single still photo — the video is the whole essay right now, and the photos that follow will just be the footnotes. Someday my granddaughter is going to watch this same thirty seconds. She won't know Fairfield, or Chuck E. Cheese, or Ethan's party, or what an Olympus C-3000 Zoom was. She'll know that her lola once put a hand on a toddler's back and made sure she didn't fall off a coin-operated motorcycle. That's the whole archive, honestly. Everything else is footnotes.
- PinoyBuilt family video archive — "Nica on her first motorcycle - August 12, 2002" (Olympus C-3000 Zoom)
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J.F. (Jonjo) left the Philippines at age nine, spending a lifetime bridging the gap between his Marikina roots and his Chicago/Vallejo upbringing. A proud Hogan Spartan from East Vallejo and resident of LA/SF, he founded PinoyBuilt not just as a digital archive, but as a cultural compass for his three children to navigate their heritage, language, and identity with Pinoy Pride.
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