My Own Memory Playlist

Earlier this week, I chanced upon a post on Instagram that led me to an article written by Lucy Torres-Gomez in her newspaper column “Love Lucy”. This got me hooked and every morning since, I have been going through the archives as I sit on my 45 minute train ride to work.

Her short, sweet and poignant stories have inspired me to try writing again. In one article, she was talking about her memory playlist and posed this question to her readers- “When you’re old and gray, what would you like to have in your memory playlist?”

Lately, I noticed that I have become more forgetful and this has been cause of so much frustration not only for me but for the kids and Armand as well. It’s even worse at work where there is no real motivation to remember all the boring details of corporate finances.

So before my memory totally fail me, these are some of the things I’d like to remember…

• As a child, our family’s early morning trips to our bunsod on weekends followed by sutukil sessions and playtime at the beach with relatives and family friends till dusk.To this day though, I still don’t get why I haven’t learnt how to swim.

• Naughty little adventures with my classmates and childhood friends, sneaking out of school mid-day, going to An-an’s bakery to grab some bread and going on unauthorized picnics to Bukana and Aloha beach and to the highly restricted log pond. I’m glad I was born at a time when kids were allowed to play on the streets and walk their way to school.

• Summers at Nanay Ida’s little farm in Looc, learning how to plant and harvest cassava, picking sour starfruit, playing hide and seek with my cousins in that huge old house owned by a relative and locking ourselves out inside a humungous rice cavan. That one day when my cousin Pilo set an entire row of fruit-bearing banana trees on fire.  Classic!

• Weekends and summers at Lola Encay’s helping her run what I believed then was a massive store that practically has everything the locals needed. It always made me feel so grown up manning the till and making entries into the vale notebook. Lola was ever so generous. We were free to take anything we fancied. I remember looking forward to getting my fresh stash of pad paper and mongol pencils every week. She loved hearing us sing, recite a poem or break into dance that she’d pay us twenty-five cents for every number.

• That one night when Fran, Chiqui and I desperately tried to harmonize “Bridge Over Troubled Waters”. Don’t ask me why.

• Our rickety old jeep that has served us so well. On long road trips to visit relatives, me and Fran pulling each other’s hair at the backseat without our parents noticing. And that day when we crashed in Looc. It was scary but the memory of our pamutong with relatives before it happened was worth remembering.

• Trips to Dimaluna and Balintawak in May for the annual fiesta where we’d meet all cousins. Papa always reminded us that we were not there for the food but for us kids to meet and bond with the relatives. There were always hundreds of names to remember and I knew I was pretty good at tracing how each one is related to us. Until I moved to Australia...

• Bayle, diskoral or community dance at Tilyo’s in our elementary years. Papa would take us and let us dance before the event formally started. Aron dili makurat. However, this stopped when I became a teenager. I think the threat of us possibly meeting boys in these dances was becoming real to him.

The list goes on. This isn’t even half of my childhood memories, yet. Writing these down has brought me back to that particular time in my life when everything was much simpler. There were sad days, a lot of them. But looking back now, it’s only the good times that I actually remember vividly. The sad parts, maybe I have tried to bury them long ago. I’d say that is a good thing- to only keep happy memories.