A Pantry Painted
Updated: Oct 23
For this one, we're stepping away — just for now — from the usual topics we write and talk about here, the same topics we've lately started turning into videos on our YouTube channel (shameless plug). Something else caught our eye instead: something striking from a distant past.
It was a lazy Sunday afternoon, the kind made for aimless scrolling. Bad news had already arrived before noon — Alex Eala dropped a heartbreaker in three sets and three hours, the kind of loss that stings precisely because she made you believe until the very last game. I closed that tab the way you close a door on a room you don't want to sit in. And kept scrolling.
That's how I found the video — a short Instagram clip, nothing more.
Sentro Filipino, the Filipino cultural center on Mission Street in San Francisco, had put up a window exhibit. There, grinning at the camera and holding a painting of Nagaraya cracker nuts, was Tricia.
I have known Tricia since the mid-1980s. We've kept in touch across decades and time zones the way old friends do — in fits and starts, then more steadily than either of us expected. For the past five years, we've prayed the rosary together every night, a small, quiet devotion to Our Lady that neither of us advertises much. It has become one of the sturdier threads in my week. So to stumble across her, mid-scroll, on a Sunday, in a gallery window three thousand miles from home — that felt less like an algorithm doing its job and more like one of those small nudges you don't argue with.
Tricia moved to the Bay Area as a young teen in 1984. What she's painted since — what she only recently discovered she could paint — is everything she carried with her that doesn't fit in a suitcase.
Not landscapes. Not portraits, but labels. Choc-Nut. Leslie's Clover Chips. Chippy and those chocolate-covered pretzels from Jack 'n Jill. Ricoa Curly Tops. Ding Dong mixed nuts. Cow Label preserved beef and the spiced vinegar that accompanied it. Glass bottles of Mello Yello, Mirinda, and RC Cola — painted with the specific, loving stubbornness of someone who remembers exactly what the light looked like through them. Displayed in a grid in the gallery window, the effect sits somewhere between a museum case and a sari-sari store. Commercial packaging is turned into something closer to relics, which, for anyone who grew up with these on a kitchen shelf, is exactly what they are. And that's really the point. Every one of these items existed in a time in Tricia's past — in all of our pasts, really, which feels fitting for a blog named the way this one is. That same stretch of time is also when I'd bump into Tricia at her high school, Burlingame High, and later at the same parties, where the music was always Depeche Mode and all our favorites, The Real Thing, and whatever else new wave had going that year. A time in the past. But a time definitely never forgotten.
A second round of photos from the exhibit widened the shelf considerably. A whole board devoted to the full Nagaraya flavor lineup. Knorr Seasoning. Milo. Boy Bawang, Jack and Jill's Chiz Curls. Haw flakes in their little paper discs. A jar of Good Shepherd's Mountain Maid strawberry jam, the one from Baguio, the one every Filipino household seems to have owned at least once.
Then come the staples that aren't snacks at all but somehow carry just as much weight: Silver Swan soy sauce, Star margarine, Libby's Vienna sausage, a can of Spam, a can of Purefoods corned beef, as it always does, standing in for something closer to comfort than food.
The text overlays running through the video didn't overreach. They didn't need to. The taste of home. The memories they bring back. Family gatherings, friendships, school days, the simple joys of childhood. Four short lines, doing the work that a much longer essay would only get in the way of.
What stays with me isn't just the subject matter. It's the timing. Tricia found this painting only recently — not as a child prodigy, not as a career pivot in her twenties, but as something that arrived when it did, and she let it in anyway. There's a lesson in there I don't think needs underlining: it is never too late to go looking for where you come from. Sometimes the place you find it is a can of preserved beef.
A San Francisco storefront window, for one exhibit, became a walk down a street that no longer exists, except in a few thousand memories, all painted in the bright, unapologetic colors of the packaging that raised us.
And then, a few weeks ago, I got the real thing. The last time I saw Tricia in person was here in the Philippines, and it was such a thrill. She was with her husband, the debonair Johnny Santos, and seeing her again brought back a flood of memories from the eighties. Distance has never put a dent in that friendship. Watching her now — turning these small, ordinary things into art that carries this much sentimental weight — is genuinely priceless. Not in the way people toss that word around, but literally: there's no number you could put on it. That's how it feels every time I see her after time apart. The memories alone are worth more than anything I could name.
All of this, by the way, came from that one Instagram video — a handful of photo snippets and a script beneath it, nothing more to go on than that. Sometimes that's all a story needs.
Here's the thing, though. This quiet afternoon, interrupted by a video, didn't just stir up memories — it moved me. That same day, I found myself at the grocery store, filling a basket with a small, unplanned haul: Clover Chips, Dino Dong mixed nuts, a bar of King Choc-Nut, and Nagaraya cracker nuts in both original and barbecue flavors. Standing in the aisle, I realized I wasn't just buying snacks. I was buying back a little piece of childhood and a little piece of a friendship that has quietly outlasted forty years, an ocean, and everything in between.
These things are timeless — not just as snacks or memories, but as proof that some friendships don't fade. They just wait for the right afternoon to surface again. Thank you, Tricia, for the paintings that started all this, for the surprise stroll down memory lane, and for a friendship I don't think I've ever properly thanked you for. Salamat, my friend. Truly.
Tonight's rosary is going to feel a little fuller.
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