A Hometown Christmas

From my sleep on your grandparents’ bed which your Aunt Miner has caused to be fixed and lacquered anew, I woke up to a cold and rainy Christmas morning like the ones I remember from when I was a boy.  With Christmas mornings in Buhi like this, I recall your grandfather saying that our hometown is probably situated right under the Gods’ shower room.   This year I did the grocery shopping with your Uncle Alvin at the Gaisano Mall in Legaspi and bought Yellow Cab 18” pizzas in Naga.  While your Auntie Marivic brought cake and boxes of fruits, your Uncle Junior did most of the cooking, a chore that has been his lot these Christmases past.  Your Lola Telia whom we requested to whip up her signature leche flan did the Christmas tree and the garland that decorated the stairs.

When we were children, Christmas was something we all looked forward to beginning September – the start of the “ber” months.  Back then, the gradual change in the weather, the added bite in the air that follow the monsoon rains, contributed to putting one in a holiday mood.  For your grandmother, September marked the gradual accretion of Christmas items on top of her monthly grocery purchases in Naga.  Gradually, the dining room shelves which doubled as pantry got stocked with boxes of pasta, tomato sauces, pickles, mayonnaise, baking flour and powder as well as cans of whipped cream, fruit cocktail and pineapple chunks. 

For our Christmas stockings, your grandmother would also start buying toys and chocolates on the sly.  She would keep them under lock and key in her cabinet, alongside the apples, chocolates and boxes of raisins she bought around the third week of December.  Not as readily available as they are now, apples were extra-special treats which we associated with Christmas back then.  As a boy, I used to sniff their divine scent through your grandmother’s cabinet and imagine my first juicy bite of the fruit come Christmas morn.  So special were apples my childhood friends and I used to dream of going to America and working as apple pickers, not so much for foreign currency earnings as for abundant access to the fruit to our hearts’ content.

Your grandmother was not one for store bought Christmas decorations, so your Auntie Marivic and Eva were very creative at making them from scratch.  Our Christmas trees were usually a clump of dried branches gathered into a pot and decorated with Christmas balls and cards, tinsel and tufts of cotton as snow.  More than the Christmas tree, however, special attention was given to our creche or belen which, through the years, my sisters assembled with old table tennis balls, thread cones, Japanese and art papers as well as glue and thumb tacks.

Santa Claus’ surreptitious visit was a yearly tradition that promised stocking treats for everyone, from your great grandmother Petra, to our Aunts, to our brood of seven and our maids.  Family lore has it that our Aunt Aida believed in Father Christmas well into adulthood.  Your grandfathers’ socks – the biggest in the house – came in handy and were hung on the balustrade of our old house.  As children, we all waited for Santa Claus’ incursion into the household up until the wee hours when we would inevitably succumb to sleep.  On Christmas morning, we would rush from our beds to find our allotted socks stuffed with an apple, a box of raisins, candies and chocolate that came in bars and rugby ball shape. A midrib usually accompanied these treats for us who were supposed to have landed on Santa Claus’ naughty list.

While your mother usually gifted us boys with a harmonica, from our uncle, Pay Antoy, came the toy guns, trumpets, drums and the dolls for the girls.  Christmas mornings were spent enjoying our treats and playing with our toys.  What pocket money we received – usually P1.00, a princely sum then – were usually handed over to your grandmother for safekeeping.

One Christmas, your Lola Telia made hams out of two pork hind legs which we consumed well into February.  I once volunteered to cook the pasta and spoiled everyone’s appetite with overcooked mush not even Tiyo Bildo, our rice mill machinist, could be prevailed upon to consume.  Ever precocious as a young boy, your Uncle Alvin used to make exploding bomb sounds every time someone played Nat King Cole’s “O Tannembaum” on our stereo.  In our teens, we went our separate ways attending the Misa de Gallo with our friends and returning home to partake the family’s Noche Buena.  These became very festive when your Aunt Marivic started working and, once and for all, assumed the role of Santa Claus for everyone.

Rest & Relaxation

Recently had a very good three-day vacation.  It was Boracay in the off-season so we had the beach less crowded than it normally gets.  I even learned to relax and float on my back, covering a bit of distance with lazy strokes and minimum leg movement, a no-mean feat for this non-swimmer. 

Enjoying the various cocktails which were half-priced, I remembered summers when I was a boy.  Our hometown is a haven for summer excursions, with its lake and a number of falls, rivers and brooks.  When she was younger, your grandmother always made sure we had a fill of these outings.  There was the nearby Sinilyaran which, at one time, I went to on my own, bringing along some bread and pancit that I cooked.  There was the Itbog Falls with its twin cascades, accessible by a one and a half-hour trek or a much shorter one, combined with a boat ride of about twenty minutes.  There was the multi-level Baybay Falls near your Lola Tonia’s landholding and the then clear waters of the lake bank close to Salvacion where the ever reliable and loyal Tiya Amparo lived.  In its heydays, the Meceda’s Buena Vista Resort – later renamed Maguindara – was a favorite for picnics.

We all looked forward to these excursions which gave us an opportunity to soak in our hometown’s cool waters till our fingers wrinkled like peanut shells.  Lunchtime and snacks were festive occasions for everyone but your grandfather who, I remember, usually complained about eating food from banana leaves.  It is a testament to your grandmother’s practical heart, however, that she always brought along the laundry for washing and/or made use of these outings as an opportunity to confer with a number of mortgagors who remitted a portion of their harvest as interest for the working capital she provided.  But for a few, these were unreliable transactions that brought on tales of misfortune which usually earned your grandmother’s forbearance of the agreed upon share at harvest time.

Your grandmother was someone for whom relaxation was work.  Her hair already grey, I remember her telling me how she thought her life was “corny” as it was mostly about responsibility as far back as she could remember.  Those summer excursions when we were children were, I think, her way of teaching us what she herself found hard to enjoy – rest and relaxation.

Our Home

With Alvin and my sisters Marivic and Miner, I went home for your grandmother’s first year death anniversary last September 4.  While your Aunt Marivic arranged for a nine-day novena for the departed leading to the day commemorated, your Aunt Miner, with consummate foresight, asked one of her debtors to effect payment by raising the pig that was butchered for the occasion.   Alvin and I did the grocery shopping at SM Naga and Junior, with the help of the Naranjos, took charge of the food preparations.  For dessert, Auntie Telia whipped up her leche flan to supplement the fruit salad and panna cota prepared by your Aunt Marivic as well as the fruits Tiya Amparo brought. 

After the early morning mass, we visited your grandparent’s grave and went home for last minute preparations.  Lunch was a modest affair attended by relatives, neighbors and your grandmother’s friends and co-teachers.  A backward glance while leaving for Legaspi in the afternoon of the same day lodged the customary lump in my throat.  This never fails every time I find myself leaving home through the years. Home being the place where all seven of us grew up, I thought you should at least have an idea of its past.

Your grandparents started married life at the house we used to refer to as Kagranow, after the name of the Sitio on which it stood, in what is now Barangay Sta. Elena.  Right smack in the middle of the Buhi poblacion, with a lot area measuring 3,000 square meters, the property was the only inheritance your grandfather received from the estate of his adoptive father, Gregorio.  A sprawling one-storey wooden structure of nipa roof, the old house where your grandfather grew up had a porch, a sala, three bedrooms, a dining room, a big kitchen and, typical of houses then, a toilet/bathroom at the back.  I remember a big tamarind tree and bamboo at the backyard which was considerably wider than the frontage and spread out behind the neighboring houses, stretching way up the hill Busay.  It was at this place that your Aunt Marivic was born, followed by our stillborn brother, Juan.

Sharing a house with her husband’s then extended family did not, however, sit well with your grandmother who, as far as I gauged from the bits she let slip through the years, had difficulty adjusting to her in-laws.  While your grandfather always deferred to your grandmother for important family decisions, I can only imagine how the idea of moving out from your grandfather’s childhood home must have been an early but major test of wills for your grandparents.   Your grandmother was, however, the more decisive of the pair so, from there, your grandparents moved to San Roque, renting the ground floor of the two-storey Spanish house owned by Lola Cecing – Mrs. Cecilia Importante.  She was, in turn, the sister of Lola Eping, the matriarch of the rich Constancio family into whose service your grandfather found himself as a young lad.  

Although born at the Mediatrix Hospital in Iriga City on account of your grandmother’s previous caeasarian operation, your Auntie Eva, if memory serves, was conceived at this place.  Mementos from this stage of your grandparents’ life include a picture taken of your grandfather in his police uniform before the commodious sala of the house and another of your grandmother, cuddling your then bald Aunt Marivic, at the foot of its grand, tiled stairs. 

The family next rented the Sta. Elena abode of the widowed Tiya Nena Llorente, a mere stone’s throw away from the place where your grandparents eventually established our family home.  With your Auntie Eva a little over a year old, it was at this place where your Uncle Junior, myself and your Aunt Miner were brought home from the hospital in annual succession. 

Relatively small for an extended family that included your grandparents, your great grandmother Petra, our Aunts who were then studying, five children and three maids, this house is the situs of my earliest memories.  Those who could not be accommodated in its two bedrooms had to sleep on the floor of the sala and the small pasillo that led to the biggest part of the house – the dining room and kitchen.  The backyard had an outhouse in the shade of a big santol tree which bore sweet fruit in summertime. 

The one furniture I remember from this time is your grandmother’s narra aparador or cabinet – the very same one now placed at the room where she drew her last breath.   I’ve come to associate this fixture with the scent of the apples there secreted with the chocolates with which your grandmother annually filled our Christmas stockings in those years.  

As your grandparents both worked, household concerns were entrusted to our two househelps, Lydia and Maria, who were remembered for their dedicated service and good disposition long after they left to have families of their own.  I was, by all accounts, a troublesome infant and kept the household awake well into the small hours with my incessant crying.  For this reason, your grandparents engaged a young girl to attend to me, the only child in our brood of seven who had a kindly yaya of his own.  Appropriately named Caring, she was a generous helping hand during your grandmother’s wake.

The sale of the 150 square meter lot on which our house stands was reportedly brokered by Lola Justina, the wife of Lolo Garito who was, in turn, the brother of your grandfather’s adoptive father.    The entire lot was initially devoted to a large, wooden structure which housed the rice and corn mills your grandmother maintained to augment the family income.  From the Llorente’s house, we transferred to the nearby house of Tiyo Pedro and Tiya Daria Bernal in San Roque.  

By then the baby of the family, your Aunt Tingting maintained a lifelong closeness to this couple we all called by the endearments “Ido” and “Aying”.  With their only son, Salvador or Adong, already grown up and based in Manila, they practically considered Ting their daughter to such a proprietary point that she called the former Istambay on the rare occasion that he went home. 

It was around this time that the structure for the rice and corn mills was torn down to give way to the construction of our first family home.  The construction of the two-storey house was primarily financed by a loan from the GSIS in the sum of P1,500.00.  It had a porch or balcon from which, upon opening the sliding door of wood and glass, one entered the sala which occupied about a third of the ground floor.  To the right was an L-shaped staircase to the second floor and the dining room which, in turn led into the kitchen.  From the left, the kitchen adjoined a bedroom and, from the right, the main toilet/bathroom.  

The backdoor opened into the concrete but smaller structure that housed the rice and corn mill tended by the diminutive but strong Tiyo Bildo as machinist and by Ido as overseer.  At a little space of about six square meters in between this structure and the house, your grandmother had a pigpen that customarily housed two pigs which were fattened with the family’s leftovers and later sold to augment the budget for our education.  Because of its proximity to the house, the pen and its inhabitants had to be kept meticulously clean – from Junior downwards, we all took our turn tending to this pen, scrubbing laundry soap suds over the pigs’ bodies with a plastic brush and hosing them down.  They became such pets your grandmother usually left the house whenever the time came for them to be inevitably sold or butchered.

Over the landing of the second floor was installed the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus – the very same icon now enthroned over the bookshelves your Aunt Miner caused to be built. To the left was the small pasillo which led into the balcony or azotea directly above the porch.   The place where we had our daily rosary in front of a wooden table on which stood the statue of the Sto. Nino and the Blessed Mother, the pasillo, with its direct ventilation from the azotea, was ideal for afternoon siesta and, later, for reading the books that your grandmother bought us.  

To the right of the pasillo were the boys’ and girls’ bedrooms and, slightly to the left, our parent’s bedroom and the second floor toilet.  Because of faulty plumbing, this spare toilet later became a storage room of sorts.  Weekends were spent housecleaning, with each one of us allotted our assigned areas under the supervision of our Aunt Telia.

To the right of the house was a paved walkway for the careta used to deliver the palay and corn to be milled.  Over it was a trellis for white squash, with what available soil planted with our Aunt Telia’s ornamental plants and your grandmother’s papaya trees.  Later, I helped Aunto Telia plant two mango trees, only one of which grew into maturity and bore abundant fruit of a variety best enjoyed when half-ripe.  Staying out late as teenagers, your Uncle Junior and Aunts Miner and Tingting used this tree to gain access to house thru the azotea, their curfew violations nevertheless detected by your watchful grandfather.

It was to this house that your Uncle Alvin was brought home from the hospital.  I used to sing him to sleep on a hammock tied to the wooden post which supported the pasillo and on which was installed the family pendulum clock that your grandfather customarily wound up.

The house was rebuilt after Typhoon Sining’s path of destruction in the early seventies reduced about 95% of the houses in Buhi roofless. With all of us taking refuge at the sturdy Gonzaga house, your grandfather stayed home and braved the worst of the calamity under our dining table. The construction defects of the first structure was painstaking corrected by Mr. San Pedro who was, for a long while, practically a member of our extended family.   

This house  saw most of us growing up, leaving to pursue our further education and returning during vacations.  It was where your grandfather hanged his shingles as a Notary Public after his retirement and where he eventually died. The only fixtures that remain from this house are the dining table in our current home, the bed and cabinet in what used to be your grandmother’s bedroom, Auntie Telia’s bed, dresser and cabinet and the queen size bed upstairs. 

With all of us employed elsewhere, the house became too big for your grandmother who, with her own retirement gratuity, decided to embark on her last major project.  The house was torn down and rebuilt to its current state under the supervision of your Aunt Marivic’s brother-in-law, Engr. Suelo Abano, your Auntie Eva and Uncle Alvin.  The improvements and narra fixtures you see there now are, on the other hand, the projects your Auntie Miner commissioned every time she went on vacation these last five years.  

After living most of her retirement years with your Aunt Marivic, your grandmother spent the last two years of her life in this house. 

With your grandmother gone, going home has, for the moment, lost its former appeal.  The house, to be sure, never fails to summon memories, but one feels the sense of emptiness your grandmother must have felt when we left to pursue our individual lives.  Having known no other home, however, I suspect that, in time, most of us will return to it.

At Play at the Dinner Table

Among many other things, your grandfather was an amateur actor when he was young.  So far as I can recall from snippets he recounted at the dinner table, he was stung by the acting bug in his adolescence, his first foray into this medium being thru the Moro-Moro, the traditional re-enactment of St. Helena’s quest for the True Cross which used to be staged during Holy Week.  A full-length production would require one week to stage and featured dialogue sung in verse, colorful costumes and an abundance of sword-and-dagger combats performed to a lively tune provided by a small band.  What role he played I can’t exactly remember, but he once recounted being hit for real by his supposed opponent in one crucial fight scene.  He recalled his teary-eyed adolescent self, valiantly sticking to his allotted lines and eschewing the rain of colorful language with which he was, in his lifetime, known to pepper his speech when agitated.

In college, he was active in the theater group of the University of Nueva Caceres (UNC) which staged plays by Shakespeare, Chekov and Rostand, among others.  Although good-looking, he said their Director usually cast him in character roles after auditioning for the leading man parts.  He was Luka, Elena Ivanovna Popova’s aged footman in Chekov’s “The Boor” and played Shylock in Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice”.  The only surviving mementos of this youthful pursuit, though, is a picture taken of the cast of Rostand’s “The Romancers” where he essayed the part of the scoundrel-for-pay, Straforel.

Quite incidentally, “The Romancers” is one of those plays I enjoyed reading as a young boy from a thick brown literature tome lying about in our old house.  I don’t remember the title of the collection as its spine was already cracked and the cloth covering faded and frayed from age.  “The Romancers” is a comedy about Percinet and Sylvette, a young couple who, imagining themselves star-crossed in the grand manner of Romeo and Juliet, were totally unaware that their fathers favored their eventual union.  To humor their children’s romantic sensibilities, the fathers pretend to hate each other and hire the rake, Straforel, for a fake abduction.  While all, needless to state, ends well in the play, surprising my father with familiarity of the play he was talking about was one of those small but proud moments for both of us, I think.

Your grandfather’s abiding interest in the theater is evident from a couple of drafts of plays I found among his effects.  Written in pencil and often revised in his distinctive, angular longhand, they were abandoned as, I imagine, the business of daily life took over.  He did write “Kasaysayan Kan Kampana Sa Pamuntugan”, a four-act pageant in the Bicol vernacular about the legend of the golden bell of Pamuntugan, a tale dear to the Buhi-non heart I have  earlier tried retelling on this blog.  With him as narrator, the pageant was staged by the Good Shepherd Sisters of St. Bridget’s School in the early 70’s at our Hometown’s Social Hall.  Featuring elaborate dances and tableaux performed by Bridgetines and members of a local farm cooperative, the production was, after months of preparation, quite well-received.

Of his children, only my sister Eva showed interest in acting when she was in High School, playing the title character in “Daragang Magayon”, an avant garde take on the legendary maiden from whose grave supposedly rose Mt. Mayon.  Her search for her lover, Ulap, bookmarks three stories - that of a relationship torn asunder by patriotic duty, a woman's resolve to turn a new leaf mocked by her old, sordid self and a third one I can't quite remember.  If memory serves, Daragang Magayon is later tried by a tribunal and sentenced for, among others, irrelevance.

I also pursued some interest in the theater when I was in College and had a part in the formation of the Teatro Dumalayan at the College of Arts and Sciences of the Bicol University.   Despite attending a workshop facilitated by a PETA veteran, I was, however, a big ham even then, appropriately consigned to such behind-the-scenes’ concerns like publicity and production design.  Worse thespian fate befell Tingting, though, in a college classroom re-enactment of the short story "How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife".  I still remember her hysterical laughter when she asked me to guess her role which, at first try, I correctly identified to be that of the carabao.

We may not have much by way of material things when we were growing up – I used to tell my friends – but we sure had bits of Shakespeare at the dinner table, courtesy of your grandfather. Try to think of him when you or children start developing interest in the theater.   It’s his birthday today, so I thought I should write you about these memories.

Memor Mater

As children, we all start off egocentric and unable to recognize our parents as persons by and in their own right.    For a long while, they’re simply our providers, the soothers of fevered brows, the suppliers of answers to the conundrums that beset our minds, the authority figures we, time and again, test our wills against.  To my mind, our myopic visions of our parents are testaments to their complete surrender to these roles at the expense of themselves.

For example, I always thought your grandmother never cared for clothes.  Her spartan frugality when I was growing up left no room for vanity and the accoutrements it demanded.  Good food on the table and education for her seven children - her priorities always seemed clear and completely displaced all other concerns. Looking at her pictures as a young teacher, however, one is immediately struck by how she was always smartly dressed in the ultra-feminine fashion of those decades.  A cousin of hers once told me that your grandmother’s clothes were always prized hand-me-downs for their fine style and material.  Firmly but politely declining your Lolo Antoy’s offer to design her gown as a young bride, she went to Naga City and commissioned one fashioned after that worn by Armi Kuusela, the first ever Miss Universe, who went on to marry the Filipino businessman, Virgilio Hilario.  This is a far cry from the mother I knew who, when not dressed in those severe public school teachers’ uniforms, always seemed to favor shapeless sundresses or dusters, as she determinedly went about those household tasks she endlessly performed throughout the day.

With the objectivity that hindsight brings, I can now say that we would have grown up under very different circumstances had your grandfather possessed even half the ambition of your grandmother.  I have come to view her personal drive as a product of the fact that she was the third child and the eldest daughter of a brood of eleven.  With very little prospect for further education during the post-war years, she overcame her compunctions and asked her maternal grandfather, Leon, to support her.  She told me that she always wanted to be a doctor but faltered when he asked her what course she intended to pursue and how she thought she could help her.  Although a landowner, your great great grandfather had little predilection for education and was known for his parsimony.  Made diffident by knowledge of these traits, she downgraded her ambition and told him she intended to become a teacher and would make do with a can of milled rice for monthly support.  With this and the allowance provided by her brothers Fortunato and Salvador who were then G.I.’s in Guam, your grandmother went on to earn her teaching degree from the Daughters of Charity of the Collegio de Sta. Isabel in Naga City.  Throughout her life, she wondered how her grandfather - who could very well afford to send her through medical school - would have reacted had she stuck to her original intentions.

Your grandmother spent most of her life as a teacher it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine her as a student.  I was told, however, that she was very competitive, literally burning the midnight oil preparing for her classes the following day.  At the 40^th reunion of the Mabini High School graduating class to which she belonged, a classmate of hers told me that she was always in the top-five, vying for better grades with classmates whose parents were professionals.  She was supposed to be quick with her retort and was, for said reason, generally perceived to be quite the “suplada”.  When words failed her, she gave others this look that left no doubt about her reproof and the depths one has sunk in her estimation.  If she appeared hard on others, however, I know for a fact that your grandmother was hardest on herself.  She deferred to your grandfather’s superior intelligence, categorized herself as average and, for this reason, always strived to improve herself.  

She was what was once called a wide-reader, your grandmother, and it is from her that I have inherited love for books and an almost compulsive habit of correcting other people’s spoken and written words.  At a formal function where the emcee and the speakers kept bungling their tenses, I heard Auntie Pina mumbling how fortunate they were that your grandmother wasn’t there. I’ve been told that, in her spare time as a young girl, your grandmother always had a book within reach.  As a typical middle child forever demanding notice, I discovered early on that the surest way to command her attention was to ask her about the meaning of an unfamiliar word.  While your grandfather may have been the writer in the family, your grandmother’s reading habits and retentive memory made her the better storyteller during those long-drawn blackouts in the 1970’s.

Your grandmother was pious but never superstitious.  Not for her were the devotional practices and nostrums housewives of her generation were known to resort to when confronted with a child in the sickbed.  Although poor, your grandmother told me that they had a family physician upon whom she was always sent on an errand to call whenever a younger brother or sister was sick.  Born out of her experience as a young girl, however, her one concession to superstition was the belief in “aswang”.   Studying by the light of the moon while tending to the caldroun of coconut milk she was tasked to slowly cook into oil, she told me that she suddenly became aware of her immediate surroundings getting dark and the air filled with the flapping of a great wing span.  Summoned to take refuge in their house by her frantic Aunt Ramona, your grandmother never forgot and tired of telling her one close encounter with this dreaded supernatural creature of Filipino folklore.

Your grandmother was contemptuous of showing her emotions in public to the point that she was completely dry-eyed during the wake and internment of your grandfather.  The one indication of the extent of her grief was her stubborn insistence on a necrological service befitting, according to her exacting standards, of one who spent the greater part of his life as a public servant.  Even years afterwards though, she had great difficulty letting go of the memory of our father.  Finding your grandmother awake early one morning, your Lola Telia remembers her blurting out out of nowhere that she’d rather take care of people forever than have them die on her. She was, by then, already struggling with Parkinson’s disease and had taken care of our ailing father for more than ten years while practically scraping the bottom to see us through our college education.

The one emotion she had very little control over was merriment, though. Your grandmother had a very distinctive laugh, similar to that of your great grandmother Petra and, on occasion, your Aunt Tingting: a high pitched, prolonged “huy” that is, more often than not, accompanied by tears in the eyes.  Once, I tried to con your Aunt Tingting and Uncle Alvin, who were reading the forbidden Tagalog comics at the second floor of our old house, into believing that our mother was on her way up.  Asked to do her usual spiel while I tried to duplicate the sound of her steps on the wooden stairs, our mother all but rendered the absurd project impossible with her uncontrolled mirth whenever she tried her agreed-upon voice over.  Among the things I was very pleased with myself about was the ability to make her laugh.  

For all her ideas of what is prim and proper, your grandmother also had a wicked sense of humor.  This is sort of hard to imagine since, as the more hands-on parent, she had to be stern as the disciplinarian by default.  Already nearing her retirement and exasperated by all the dares for her to dance at a party, she stood up and awkwardly swayed to the music while slowly raising the hem of her dress, executing what could only be described as her estimation of a striptease.  So unexpected and out of character was the stunt that your grandmother reportedly reduced the room to the great hilarity that became the high point of the evening.

These are just a few of my vivid recollections of your grandmother that I hope to be able to share to you.  Tomorrow, July 22, is her birthday, the feast day of Mary the Magdalene after whom she was named by your great grandparents.  She would have been 84.

Caro Taro

We just finished the last of the laing – taro leaves cooked in coconut milk – your uncle Alvin prepared the other day. Enjoyed with steamed rice and pork sinigang in kalamansi , it is a dish that transforms an ordinary meal into one that is distinctly bicolano.  With the oily aftertaste of the coconut milk counterbalanced by the subtle sourness of the sinigang broth, repast of this sort was your grandfather’s favorite. 

 

In our hometown, the taro leaf is called katnga and, when cooked in coconut milk to the point of oily goodness, is called ti-ne-te.  Your grandfather taught us that the secret is in the choice of the leaves – small thin ones that, dried in the sun to crispy strips before cooking, assures you of the chewy consistency beloved by the bicolano heart.  With bigger and thicker leaves, you end up with the unappetizing mush foodcourts pass off as ginataang laing that no self-respecting member of our family would condescend to sample.

The preparation of the dish was a family undertaking.  As kids, we helped in tearing the leaves to thin strips which we later placed on a winnower to dry in the yard.  Back in the days when electric graters were not yet in use, coconut meat had to be manually grated off its shell with the kakabgan, a low wooden contraption on which one sat astride and rubbed the coconut flesh on the sharp teeth of the iron tongue attached to its fore.  The resultant grated coconut meat is later wrung to extract the coconut milk with which the taro leaves will be cooked.

Again, the choice of the coconut is of vital importance.  One struck the shell with the coin with which you’ve been sent on an errand to purchase the fruit.  Where a thin sound meant that the coconut is still young and would not yield much milk, a low one is supposed to indicate galando, a fruit already old that is bound to produce the same result.  In between was the sound you were looking for, per the specific instructions of our father who was finicky with matters of this sort.

On a medium deep pan, one next placed the other ingredients of the dish – crushed garlic cloves and ginger, diced pork with slivers of fat, balaw, a native delicacy of fresh krill preserved in salt, and sliced green peppers with the seeds removed for aroma.  The coconut milk is strained into the pan and, with constant stirring, cooked on a medium fire to avoid curdling.   About ten minutes after the mixture has been brought to a boil, the dried taro leaves are added and cooked until almost dry and the oil starting to show.  Once the leaves are added, stirring is reduced to a minimum to avoid the itchy aftertaste on the palate that the dish would otherwise impart.   

With the coconut milk thoroughly cooked, the dish kept for days – an important consideration back in the days when refrigerators were not yet standard fixtures in Filipino homes. Others cook taro leaves with diluted coconut milk, adding kakang gata or the milk from the first press towards the end.  Aside from ensuring easy spoilage, this practice, however, is cullinary heresy for those who come from a coconut-rich region like ours.  For true-blue Bicolano spice, our father would mix his portion of the dish with crushed siling labuyo, small red peppers that invariably bring tears to the eyes of the uninitiated.

I still remember the almost Zen calm of your grandfather's face whenever he took over cooking this humble yet tasty dish.  He followed no exact recipe so one learned by observing and helping out in the preparation. Of our brood of seven, Manay Ivic, Ting and Alvin have come up with their versions but it is the one which Junior whips up by which dishes cooked outside the family are judged and usually found wanting.

An Affair We Remember

Your Uncle Alvin and I have just watched the movie “Hugo”, Martin Scorsese’s paean to the magic of movies.  Elsewhere in my readings, I came across an account of the audience’s startled reaction to the image of an onrushing train during the early days of this art form.  Its depiction in the movie brought back pleasant memories about our family’s long-standing love affair with the movies.

Like most people of the post-war generation, your grandparents were avid moviegoers, a trait they passed-on to us, their children.  Watching movies was a part of their monthly sojourn to Naga City for “dry goods” – grocery items considered necessary to supplement our mother’s quotidian purchases at the Buhi public market on Tuesdays and Fridays as well as her weekend trips to nearby Iriga City for beef, seafood and Baguio vegetables.  The two-hour trip to Naga City was always a special treat to whoever was chosen to tag along, usually the two youngest in our brood of seven or as reward for good behavior.

Your grandfather was a creature of habit so our experience of these excursions was, more or less, similar.  Upon arrival in Naga City, we would invariably go to the now defunct Cosmos Restaurant where we would take our snacks of siopao or marcasotes, a cakelike item on the menu served in diamond-shaped servings, finished off with a bottle of soda.  Coming from a household where calamansi juice was the norm on account of your grandmother’s economy and insistence on our natural Vitamin C infusions, soda was a rare treat we only got to enjoy on these trips, during our town fiesta and from what was usually left of that served to guests at home.

Thereafter, our parents would part ways – our father would go about his business, usually a visit to the Napolcom, the provincial police headquarters.  With us, children, tagging along, our mother would methodically go through her checklist: canned goods at a grocery owned by Indian nationals, noodles from another place owned by a Chinese family, clothing materials from establishments of her choice, medical supplies from the South Star Drugstore and the occasional hardware items for home use.  Around lunch time, we would meet our father at the New England Restaurant fronting the Plaza Elias Angeles where, along with meat and vegetable items on the menu, they would invariably order the special pancit canton, a dish by which all others of the same kind in other places were judged and usually found wanting.

With the main reasons for the trip already accomplished, the afternoons were, without fail, spent at the movie theatres in the city – Emily, Bicharra, El Rey, El Vic, Jade and Albe – whichever featured the double program which suited our parents’ eclectic taste.  With our parents and your Uncle Junior, I remember watching Charlie Chaplin shorts, the James Bond movies in the Seventies, a good number of sand and sandal epics churned out by Cinecitta, Biblical extravaganzas, the instalments of the Tarzan franchise, various Disney features including the David Crockett and Blackbeard films, movie musicals like the Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, the Sinbad series, countless police/crime flicks and, in those pre-political correctness times, the occasional blaxploitation title.  At sundown, shortly before the commute home, a visit to the Quality Bakeshop for a bag of pan legaspi would complete the experience.

Our family lore is peppered with stories at the movies.  There’s your Aunt Marivic’s unfortunate first movie experience where, unable to get over her fright of Leo, the MGM lion, she spent the entire theatre time slung over our father’s shoulder.  Horrified by the animal stampede in one of the aforesaid Tarzan flicks, I was supposed to have ducked and reduced our maternal grandmother Petra to uncontrolled mirth when I disappeared under her tapis or ankle length skirt.  Not knowing what it was all about, your Aunt Miner cried herself to sleep when our parents refused to allow her to watch “Uhaw”, one of those local Bomba or flesh films that proliferated before the imposition of Martial Law.  To our mother’s consternation at our father, your Uncle Alvin was haunted for a very long time by the murder spree in an obscure massacre film called “The Town that Dreaded Sundown”. 

In a particularly suspenseful moment at the movies, on the other hand, your Aunt Tingting memorably popped open a Coke bottle, to the general amusement of the rest of the audience.  I remember your Uncle Junior growling and replicating Bruce Lee’s martial arts posturings for a whole week after viewing “Enter the Dragon”. Watching “Jesus Christ Superstar” as a High School student at St. Bridget’s School, your Aunt Eva and her classmates swooned over Ted Neely, a crush no doubt renewed everytime songs from the movie were sung at mass – usually during communion – back when miniskirts and bell bottoms were the order of the day.  In her teens, your Aunt Marivic never missed those Nora Aunor Films where dialogue was drowned-out by screaming Noranians of which she was a diehard member.

Rarely a creature of impulse, your grandmother once left her groceries with our Naga City-based Uncle Ayo and Aunt Sisa and, with me tagging along, went looking for the theatre showing “Gone With the Wind”, the ne plus ultra moviegoing experience of their generation.  I have since memorialized this incident with a framed movie poster of this legendary David O’Selznick production at my home in Fairview.  Coming home from Naga at another time, she decided to stay overnight with our Uncle Jorge and Auntie Salve in Iriga City just so she can take me and your Uncle Junior to watch “The Fall of the Roman Empire” at the nearby Allan Theater.  When the same moviehouse featured Cecil B. De Mille’s “The Ten Commandments”, your grandmother took all seven of us to the movies, along our two housemaids who lugged a big native basket of family-sized coke bottles and a whole batch of balisoso, a delicacy of ground rice, young coconut meat and sugar wrapped in banana leaf, laboriously prepared the day before.

Those years were certainly innocent and magical times.  With TV yet to attain a foothold in households, movie technology had the power to completely amaze.  As a boy, I thought real people fought behind the movie screens and mistook the audience illuminated by the red fire exit signs as bloodied actors resting in between the action.  I even remember getting quite frustrated trying and failing to run in slow motion.  As kids, we tried to make our own movies with cut-out figures illuminated by a kerosene lamp behind a white cloth, charging coconut shells as the price of admission.  For days, we would talk about movies we watched – from the free ones shown at the town plaza by manufacturers promoting new products to the features enjoyed in the dark of the theatre.

Lake Buhi at Dusk

On the news the other week was a report of volcanic activity and fissures on the crater of Mount Asog or Iriga.  This is the very same mountain that you will see to your left when you step out of the gate of our home in Buhi.  On our side of the mountain, the crater had been totally blown off by its eruption in the sixth century which reportedly caused the formation of the Buhi Lake.  The pictures I have posted were taken when I was home for your grandmother's wake and burial in September 2011.

A Hometown Holy Week

For the past few years, I have devoted the Holy Week Vacation to house cleaning, brushing the dust off the books crammed in our five floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I used to watch the Lenten and Easter observances on TV,  but stopped even that after finding myself increasingly repulsed by what passes off for the spiritual these days.  The closest I now come to a Lenten observance every year is watching “Jesus Christ Superstar”, the Gospel according to Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, so to speak. 

My Holy Week activities are a far cry from those I remember from childhood and would probably earn your grandmother’s opprobrium.  Our hometown, Buhi, Camarines Sur, had plenty of Holy Week customs and traditions that, as a former boy sacristan with your father/uncle Junior, I remember as redolent with the smell of burning candle wax and incense wafting from a thurible.   We were active in the church-sponsored activities which, after Ash Wednesday, included the Via Crucis or Stations of the Cross at the patio or churchyard.  Our neighbors, the Buenaventes/Aileses maintained the Nazarene caro or float used for the occasion, borne on the shoulders of volunteers.  To emphasize responsibility with devotion, your grandmother used to fetch the Nazarine’s crown of thorns and silver rays for me to polish with the wax your grandfather used to shine his belt buckle.

Except for the fact that the Palms the faithful brought home were supposed to ward off dangers from lightnings during storms, I have very little recollection of Palm Sundays. On Holy Wednesday, however, there was an evening procession featuring about twenty caros or floats which started with the one of St. Peter and the rooster and ended with the melancholy figure of the Mater Dolorosa.   Among the caros which featured tableaus from the The Passion of Christ - from the Agony in the Garden to the Three Marys or Tres Marias visiting the Tomb – my favorites included the Interrogation of the Christ called “Pasencia” and the Pieta caro, known by the townfolks as “Angustia”. On Good Friday evening, another procession was held, this time featuring the Santo Intierro/Hinulid or the entombed Christ.  Later in the evening, there was another procession called the “Soledad”, with people accompanying the caros/floats of the Tres Marias and the Blessed Mother from the opposite direction of the earlier procession.

As elsewhere, there was the Seven Last Word or Siete Palabras on Good Friday and I remember your grandfather, a member of the Holy Name Society,  being once asked to deliver his reflections on the words “I Thirst”.  One year and the succeeding ones after that, in attendance at the service were the Sayos, wraithlike women clad in black ankle-length garments, their faces obscured by sheer black veils and their feet protected only by black socks.  Joining the processions holding poles bearing tokens from the Passion, the Sayos was a penitential practice that was revived, if memory serves, by the Lavapie sisters, Tiya Puring, Clemen, Rayning and Flora.  

In homes all over town, there were “Pabasa” or chanting of the Passion in the Bicol vernacular.  There were brief re-enactments of Mary’s sorrow over her son’s plight  called the “Senakulo”, a variation of which was once staged by the Good Shepherd Sisters, with your grandfather writing the Blessed Mother’s lament.  Family pledges for various intentions also gave rise to the staging of the “Tanggal” – productions depicting highlights from the Old Testament before going into a detailed portrayal of the life and times of the Christ , from birth to his resurrection.  Television had not yet attained its current ubiquity, so these spectacles – going on for days and with three or four productions sometimes being staged across town – served as devotional diversion for the townfolk.  The actors also sung their lines in the Bicol vernacular, with the narrative flow maintained by a chorus that broke into keening at what seemed like spontaneous intervals. With her high singing pitch, your great grandmother Nicasia sometimes joined these choruses that, late at night and from a distance, mustered what sounded like sung lamentations, both primal and primeval.        

In the “Tanggal”, the Christ figure was usually portrayed by a penitent or someone fulfilling a pledge.  As a boy, I was told that the actors playing the Roman Soldiers should inflict actual pain on the Christ figure or end up feeling the pain themselves.  The Roman Soldiers were called the Hudyo – a misnomer that echoes the supposed blood curse on the Jews and, to this day, serves as a reminder of the anti-semitism that still clings to the Catholic faith.  Fearsome creatures in their traditional regalia, these Roman Soldiers sometimes went around begging for funds, frightening neighborhood kids in the process.  Family lore has it that, as a young boy, Junior once went home pale and unable to speak after encountering one of these Roman Soldiers on the street.   
 

Staged after the Tanggal, my personal favorite was the Moro-Moro, a re-enactment of St. Helena’s search for the true cross.  With the dialogue likewise delivered in song, the Christian contingent engaged their Muslim foes in sword and dagger fights timed to a lively 2/2 tune provided by a small band playing guitar, tambourine, trumpet and horn.  To the amusement of the crowd, the proceedings were enlivened by a bobo or fool who, while repeating the lines of the main protagonists, would deliberately flub the words to great comedic effect.  I once watched a full scale production of the Moro-Moro that went on for days, where the actors, clad in much grander costumes, used wrought iron swords and daggers instead of the customary wooden ones.  My playmates and I used to re-enact these Christian-Muslim encounters with half-remembered lines and bamboo sticks for swords and daggers.

On Easter eve, there was the Balo – a dress-rehearsal for the angelitos/angelitas who, by a popularity contest that involved selling tickets for the Parish’s fund raising activity, had the high honor of removing the mourning veil from the Blessed Mother, as she encountered the risen Christ.  Before the construction of the concrete one at the Churchyard, the Castillo or tower at which the angelitos/angelitas were lowered from a great height were annual projects made of bamboo, anahaw and coconut leaves.  Emerging from an inverse pyramid contraption which, when opened, resembled a star, the lead angelito/angelita sung his/her lines in Latin before performing the assigned task.  The Balo was a crowd-drawer, if only for the spectacle of reluctant angels screaming in fright or, on one occasion, wetting herself at the very outset of her contrived celestial descent.   

At Easter dawn, the faithful gathered at the Castillo for the actual re-enactment before repairing for the mass, the message of regeneration and rebirth fresh in their minds and hearts.

Grief

It’s been 202 days since your grandmother passed away and my last entry on this blog. She is always in my thoughts, what she would probably think a constant factor in everything that I do. I miss her a lot. I still dream of her regularly and wake up in the small hours crying out to her.

The dreams vary.  At times, I see her in the sad state she was in prior to her leaving us, a faint shadow of her vibrant self.  Other times, I see myself lying down next to her as was my custom during the early stages of her ailment that slowly but surely drained her vitality over the years.  I used to make her tell me stories of her younger days.  We would sometimes mull over and laugh at her own dreams which were made vivid by Sinemet, her maintenance medication for Parkinson’s Disease.  She would always ask me to pray the Rosary with her before she slept, a ritual that was later rendered impossible by the impairment of her speech and memory.

The happiest dream of her I’ve had so far harks back to my second year in the minor seminary, at that year’s celebration of Parents’ Day.  Accompanied by your grandfather in his polo barong and beige pants, your grandmother was at the receiving area, dressed in a floor length dress of varying sizes and shades of green and brown paisley.  As was her custom, she had no make-up on – lipstick was her only concession to vanity, her sole adornment a pair of golden camachile earring similar to what your great-grandmother, Petra, wore in her lifetime.  I was going down the stairs when she spotted me, smiled and waved amidst the crush of seminarians welcoming their parents.  I kissed her on the cheek and, in the blush of her subtle floral perfume, told her, for the first time, how beautiful she was.  She rewarded me with a smile that lingers in my memory to this very day.  That’s where my dream ended, but I remember how your grandparents won one of the games devised for the parents that day.  The fathers were asked to go up the stage with their wives’ purses and were asked to produce items from the emcee’s checklist.  Your grandparents won because your grandma’s bag contained almost all the novenas asked from the competitors.

You’re never really an adult until you become a parent or lose both of yours.  You go through the motions of work and duty entailed by maturity but there’s nothing like responsibility for another life and your very own in forcing you to face up to reality.  With your grandmother, I always took comfort in the thought that there’s always someone I could come home to if all else failed, who would always accept me for what I am, no matter what. One would suppose that your grandma’s protracted ailment would have already prepared me for her passing, but it still feels like getting the rug pulled off your feet. 

Unlike the time your grandfather passed away, I was mostly dry-eyed when we finally laid your grandmother to rest.  Grief, it seems, has many faces and about as many ways of appointment.   Most times it is a dull, persistent ache you almost miss when it goes away, other times it's a predator lying in wait when you turn a corner completely unaware of its menace.  After striking a note so faint you have to strain to hear, it becomes a demanding child who regards itself the center of a universe. The public variety you go through with the ones you love is mostly ritual, the rest that is legion you have to confront on your own, behind a happy mask you wear for the day and the day after that.