IN MY COLLEGE DAYS, circa mid-1960s, I had the reputation of being a ‘crammer’. I was notorious for writing up term papers ‘the night before’. I had one teacher who was bothered by this quirk and who would nag me at the start of the semester to get going on my paper. What she could not understand was that I was not ‘cramming’. I had actually thought about the subject for a long time and, in a manner of speaking, had written the paper in my mind. It was only the physical act of putting the story to paper that took place ‘the night before’. That was how my mind worked then and, I am afraid, how it still works now.

The possibility that my mind worked very differently from my husband’s (and very possibly, from other people’s too) was brought home vividly to me when Norman (my husband) and I did this exercise on writing up our versions of the same event. The event was his detention as an activist in 1974 – during the Marcos years. This was an unpleasant memory for the both of us and something we never talked about, which made it doubly interesting for me because there was no “rehearsal” for the memory. This would be our first time to talk about the event.

Norman’s version was a logical, properly sequenced, detailed narrative. He went through the events of the period, documenting all the while what he was feeling and what was going on in his mind. He traced our ordeal from the moment Fred told us that Andy and a few other friends had been arrested, to our flight to Baguio, to my return to Manila and being contacted by the military through my former boss and, eventually, to our decision that he “face the music.” He then went on to write of his detention, again detailing the events, his interrogation and the routine that he and the other detainees followed.

I marveled at the wealth of detail in Norman’s version and at the accuracy and logic of its flow but it did not surprise me at all. He had always been an excellent story teller. I remember a time before we were married, when we were both teaching, he in Manila and I in Dumaguete, a university town in central Philippines. He would write me about the movies he had seen and his accounts would be so complete that I would feel I had seen the movie myself. For my part, I can recall scenes from a movie but I can never tell the story from beginning to end. Neither can I do that with a book I have read. Norman, however, is good both at recounting the plots of the movies he has seen and the books he has read.

My recollection of the flight-and-detention period is contextual. First, I situate it in what was going on in my life, in Norman’s life and in the world at large at the time. I am certain that the event happened sometime between May and August of 1974. I was 26, Norman was 29, our son Leon was 3. We had been married for almost 6 years. I had quit my job at the Chamber of Agriculture and Natural Resources in March and started a publishing outfit, Masagana Publications, the same month. We were in the process of producing the second issue of an agribusiness magazine I had started called Farming Today. We were renting a house in Roxas District that I can only think of now as bleak and gray but which had a phone. (We did not have a phone in the apartment that we had earlier rented in the Cubao area.)

Unlike Norman, I could not remember the proper sequence of events. I remembered scenes mostly. I recalled a scene in the Roxas house (when Norman was already in detention) where our son Leon was standing on a doorstep. He had a book in hand and he was wearing one of Norman’s old eyeglass frames without the lenses. He looked terribly precocious. I can also recall a day we spent at the Asin Falls near Baguio when Norman and I played with Leon in the pool and we forgot for a while that we were the objects of a manhunt.

The most vivid memory of all was a trip I made to Manila from Baguio where I had the sensation of being “tailed” the whole time. I remembered being in a high anxiety, hyper-arousal state, feeling disoriented, walking along Avenida Rizal near midnight. I kept looking behind my back to check if anyone was following me. I did what I thought I could never do: sleep over at an officemate’s place even though I knew I wasn’t welcome. I remembered lying awake on a sofa in their living room, unable to get any sleep. This particular night easily qualifies as one of the worst nights of my life.

Aside from the way we organized our recollections, our accounts were different in other ways. One difference in our accounts was the period in which we situated the events. Norman remembered that it was raining everyday in Baguio so he dated the period from August to November. I remembered, however, that it happened shortly after I had set up my communications outfit, so I knew it was in May. I also remembered that Norman was released on August 8, Philippine Constabulary day.

We also had different recollections of the first indication of trouble. I could not recall Fred’s breaking out the news to us at all. What I remembered was a phone call from Tricia, Andy’s wife, telling us Andy had been arrested and that there were people looking for Norman. Norman has no memory of this phone call at all.

Our most vivid memories of the ordeal are also different from one another. Mine was the trip to Manila I made by myself to scope for information. Norman’s was the night we all came back to Manila and he first me with the ‘intelligence’ guys.

THE DIFFERENCE in the way Norman and I think comes to the fore when we have to rearrange the furniture or buy things for the house. He does not like it when I start rearranging furniture and I don’t show him a proposed layout. He can’t see it in his mind – he has to see something on paper. When we buy things for the house, I don’t need swatches to be able to match colors. He can’t take my word for it though. He is more comfortable literally looking at something.

My ‘gestalt’ mode of thinking is perhaps best indicated by the way I write. I don’t know how I ever managed to write before the advent of the computer because I can’t write without moving words or paragraphs around. I often start out an article by writing the ending. Then the beginning. Then I will write the lead sentences of the body and finally come up with the finished product. I don’t follow the dictum ‘begin at the beginning and end at the end.’ The only time when I can write an essay from start to finish is when I have thought it through and written it in my mind.

Norman says I am ‘gestalt’ where he is ‘linear’. He thinks I would do well in combinatorics (I consider this a compliment, coming from a man who is a trained mathematician). We each tried solving the “Donald + Gerald = Robert” problem (http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/~vocal/public_info/seminar_notes/node62.html) and I came up with the answer ahead of him. He used his math algorithm and I used pure oido. I was, however, able to use the assumptions he arrived at. His conclusion: it is possible to use algorithms, up to a point, beyond which you are strictly on your own. The problem is: how do you know when you’ve reached that point? For me, I think I start out at the point – being strictly on my own – simply because I have a very weak background in math.

One of the things which confounds Norman about me is how I can read several books at the same time, meaning I can shift from one book to another, going through as many as seven books at a time. He usually reads one book at a time, meaning he has to finish reading one before he can start on another. I think of my mind as the conductor of an orchestra. I love to orchestrate things, one reason why I was a congress organizer for so many years. I am fascinated by the way events happen simultaneously. If I played chess, I would probably enjoy playing several games at the same time.

My husband is a war freak and has seen more movies and read more books on wars than anyone I know. In my case, I only became interested in the Second World War when I read the “love story” of Dwight Eisenhower and his aide-driver. I read all of Michael Crichton’s books after I had read his autobiographical Travels. I became interested in Paul Theroux’s books after I saw his picture on the jacket of one of his books. He then became real to me. I guess these are indicators that I have difficulty dealing with the abstract and can appreciate better ‘flesh-and-blood’ accounts. If I like an author or a psychologist or an actor, I have to know something about him and how he lived before I can get interested in his work.

You may ask how having reflected a bit on how our minds work has been helpful to us, as a couple. It has certainly made us more tolerant of our differences and appreciative of the ways we do complement each other.