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.
