Swing, Memory Swing

Memories of childhood bliss and atrocious hairdos on the ubiquitous swing in Calasio; circa 1970.


2nd Cycle: 1969 to 1975, Calasiao


I ONLY HAVE hazy recollection of my first seven years in Calasiao—either traumatic and joyful memories that stuck like back-up files in my brain’s RAM. I remember our old two-storey house with a huge (relative to my size as a toddler, of course) front lawn, my favorite swinging iron benches, dad’s nicotine-reeking Mercedes Benz, the rusty steel-matted fence under an enormous guava tree, the space consuming National turn-table scratchily playing Lennon-McCartney’s “She loves you, yeah, yeah yeah!” in the morning even before breakfast was served and aunts and uncles from somewhere visiting us.

Nothing to do with our hometown’s seat of power; mere aesthetic. (foto from a US-based kabaleyan)

Our home had all sorts of merriment, parties with important-looking people, Christmases and New Year’s Eve revelries where liquor flowed, food was plentiful, toys and presents abound. My obscure recollection of these gatherings looks like they came out from mom’s collection of sepia colored pictures where men’s locks glistened with Tancho and women’s hairdos defied gravity.

I remember the dreaded storeroom under the stairs where my disciplinarian sister Josephine introduced us to the misery of solitary confinement. She also taught us that lye—an inedible ingredient of soap—purifies juvenile tongues from cuss words and makes us polite and well-mannered. My other sister Trinidad’s petulance was also a cause of panic to us although I especially remember how she cuddled me and introduced me to her weird cheek-pinching friends.

All I remember about my big brothers Roman and Conrado were that, well, they were big and were always making it a point to look at the dining room mirror whenever they pass to flex their muscles or ensure themselves that they look like what they want to be. I remember my studious brother Edilberto either writing something or reading while my other brother Eric was a quiet Boy Scout and that stuck to my head. Benedict, who was two years older than me, bullied me every time we play and he would always insist on playing the cop or the good guy while my youngest brother Manolito and I would always play as villains.

The music of Fab4 from Liverpool were some of my first influences.

Now that I got my memory juggled, I feel like Calasiao was a surreal time and space and event all lumped into one everlasting recall sensor in my head. I remember being lucky to go to a big Catholic school where nuns teach. I was all the more lucky than the Brosas kid next door because we were drove to and fro school in no less than an Bat Mobile-inspired Mercedez Benz. I had a mop top hair and I was quite plump and my cheek was a favorite pinching object of grown-ups I meet, which annoyed me no end. I wasn’t a gawky looking kid at all but I always had the misfortune of tripping or stumbling in the playground, hallway or inside a room.

During summer, siesta was strictly enforced. My brothers Benedict and Mano and I should have sued our elders for child labor for forcing us to take a nap since it absolutely took a great deal of labor faking sleep while, every five minutes or so, a guardian would peek in our room to check whether we were deep in slumber or just about to pillow-fight. Although there wasn’t much to do in the house—no PC, no DVDs or PS2, there wasn’t even a phone for crying out loud!—why oblige us to sleep instead of—uhmmm well, letting us read the encyclopedia, for instance? Okay, okay. Actually, what we sorely missed during imposed siestas were times playing backyard basketball, hanging around the swing, rolling marbles, converging with dirt and navigating improvised little boats made of cigarette wrapper floating on Patring’s murky laundry lagoon.

On second thought, maybe siesta—fake or actual—was the most effective way to restrain us or it truly gave us more heft and height. Or zimberguenza, maybe my folks just took pride to our purported Kastileloy ancestry.

One day in kindergarten, I poo-pooed in my pants and our classroom teacher—Sister Margaret, I think—who seemed accustomed to shitting toddlers patiently held my hand, walked me along the corridor in full stinking view of everyone and brought me to the toilet for an overhaul. I don’t remember where or how I got a new pair of pants after that but now I think Sister Margaret ought to be canonized as Patron Saint of Caregivers.

I also remember our daily trip to the school canteen—we had to have lunch together, it was dad’s commandment—where our daily provisions of either omelet or hotdogs were placed in a huge circular white Tupperware with a funny-looking holder resembling Yoda’s ear. The canteen was full of diners, crisscrossing our corner and buzzing with animated conversation while our table was unusually quiet while we ate like we were androids programmed to sit prepare consume pack leave.

For Wushu Toto's family, it was cardinal rule to recite the Angelus daily, say the Novena on Wednesdays, hear Mass on Sundays and kiss the hands of his siblings, with or without presents for us.

We went to the beach once when I was around five or six years old. I joined my brother Conrado with his friends and our cousins or uncles—around 10 or 12 in all—in one big floating rubber interior afloat the sea. As the smallest in the circular raft, I clung and tightly hugged its girth while enjoying to my heart’s content huge waves heaving us afloat. Without warning, my hands slipped from where I gripped and all I could recall was having tasted brine and being surrounded by the ghostlike silence of the deep as I slowly descended.

I imagined I was that big-eyed fish in my coloring book who was calm and seemingly unafraid of drowning. In spite of my delusion, I recited the Lord’s Prayer from beginning to end—not minding whether I missed a word or a line­­—because dad said it was also a prayer for fishes. Just as I asked to be delivered from evil, amen, I felt a hand hauling me upward to break the surface and gasped at the Lord’s oxygen like it was all that mattered. By this time I learned that it was Conrado who bailed me out from drowning. It would have been a heartwarming Kodak moment for us brothers except that I felt woozy and nauseous from brine and all I wanted was to get back to the shore, run to our hut and gulp a bottle of ice-cold Coca-Cola.

If Josephine enlightened our young minds with the concept of responsibility and good-manners, my other sister Trinidad introduced us to the wonders of microchip processors. Arriving home one late afternoon, she brought out a big box, emptied its contents and plugged several wires to our black-and-white television. Voila! In real time, we had a game of lawn tennis and ping-pong and some other Atari favorites right there in the living room. Shortly after, however, she broke our hearts after telling us that the device was just borrowed and had to be sold elsewhere.