When our family first arrived in Baguio City in 1967, I was barely five years old. A couple more years later, I was in the Grade One class of Mrs. Pastora G. Reyes in Baguio Central School. The school principal was Mr. Jose Pablo. The city mayor was Luis L. Lardizabal.
Policemen wore khaki uniforms topped off with Pershing caps (that traditional “ship captain’s hat” similar to what Gen. Douglas McArthur wore).
The premier luxury transportation was Pines Taxi cab—oh, but you had to CALL the garage to request a pickup. But that was easy enough to do, because you easily remembered their telephone number which consisted of only four digits. A white Vauxhall Victor sedan came up to your front steps, driven by a man in a crisp long-sleeved grey cotton jacket--not quite a tuxedo but very neat and formal. And he wore a pair of leather shoes.
At six o’clock pm, the vintage World War II air-raid siren at the City Hall’s “belfry” tower sounded the “Angelus.” Police halted traffic, pedestrians stopped without being told by anyone.
It was a long siren blast—a full minute—long enough to make the sign of the cross and softly whisper the Lord’s Prayer. You could actually finish the whole prayer.
As the siren’s wailing sound slowly decayed (you could faintly HEAR the whole decrescendo!), every child (no matter where he was) took the hand of the nearest adult (no matter who it was) and politely placed that adult’s hand (backside facing child’s face) up to his forehead and said, “mano po…!”
It was Baguio during the genteel era.
My mother brought my sister Lavlina, 8, and me, 5, up to Baguio to start a new life. She and my father had struggled to make ends meet in Manila where he worked as an electrician.
My mother’s “aunt” (they weren’t even related by blood, they just happened to have the same maiden name “Rodriguez” so the “aunt” took a special liking for my mother) owned a vacation house in Upper Rock Quarry, a stone’s throw away from the Lourdes grotto. She offered to make my mother caretaker of the house.
She would get no salary—but we would get to live in a big house in Baguio City rent-free. None of us have even ever been to Baguio before.
Against my father’s protestations in behalf of his wounded pride, Mama grabbed the offer and borrowed P12 pesos from a friend to buy ONE one-way Dangwa Tranco bus ticket to Baguio. Since my sister and I were both under 3 and a half feet tall, we did not have to pay the bus fare.
Because the caretaking job was a non-paying one, the first thing Mama did, as soon as we had settled in the big house, was to go around and get to know the neighbors—and collect all their dirty laundry.
This meant that because the sun shone bright all morning the following day, she had laundry-washing earnings by the afternoon—all of TEN PESOS, enough to buy two gantas of rice, a small pile of smoked fish (“tinapa”), a small pack of sugar, a small can of evaporated milk, and a 10-bag carton of Ceylon tea (half the price of Lipton).
Why tea? Because unlike instant coffee, a teabag could be reused five times—the last time it gave a cup of hot water an almost imperceptible faint yellow stain that SUGGESTED tea.
To be sure, there were going to be cloudy days, too. So my father understood that he needed to send Mama some money whenever he can, whatever he could spare.
At the appointed time, often coinciding with a full moon, Papa sent Mama a coded telegram message: “GET.”
It must only be one word because telegram wasn’t cheap: 25-centavos a word. So between the one-word message and the 3-word house address (“48 Lourdes Subd”) a whole ONE-PESO gets blown. At least the service was lightning fast—your message gets delivered the FOLLOWING day.
Why “48 Lourdes Subd” when the house is actually in Upper Rock Quarry? Well, because the number 48 will lead the mailman to the right house if he just follows the numbering sequence, and “Lourdes Subd” gets him close enough to the area to note the sequence—but it’s only TWO WORDS!
As soon as she gets the code, Mama would drag me along up to the top of Session Road—where the old (old now, new then) Post Office building was. The money was a postal money order (a government check) because it was illegal to put cash in an ordinary mail envelop.
The first time around, the only ID Mama had on her was an old COMELEC voter’s ID and it wasn’t in very good shape. Worse, it indicated that she was a Manila resident which, compounded with the fact that she spoke pure Tagalog (with a thick Visayan accent)—not a single word of Ilocano—made the decidedly-cruel postal clerk motion her aside and interrogate her for about 20 minutes before finally releasing her check.
I still don’t know why.
Now she had to go to ANOTHER window to encash it. The clerk in the first window must not be on speaking terms with the clerk in the second one, because he had communicated nothing to him about Mama’s predicament.
If I had any inkling about legal concepts back then, I swear I would said, “O, God, if I ever become a lawyer someday, I promise to admit certain trivial stipulations without resistance!”
Another 20 minutes later, Mama was clutching THIRTY PESOS in her hand and (I thought) wiping her eyes dry. She yanked me out of the post office building and we hurriedly crossed the street, heading to the Baguio Cathedral up the hill.
I asked her where we were going. She said (translating from Tagalog), “We are going to church and we’re going pray and thank God for this money.”
I said, “Can we include in our prayer that He send those two men to hell?”
I felt a sharp tug in my right earlobe and heard her say, “Don’t ever say anything like that again, do you understand?”
I said, “No.”
I thought my right earlobe would just come off anytime, so I was happy when we stepped into the cathedral—it seemed to drain all the violence out from Mama.
We were late, a mass had already started a few minutes earlier. But, at least, we made it to offertory. When the collection plate passed by Mama’s lap, I saw her put a green paper bill in it—which I would later learn to be FIVE PESOS.
I was glad I was too young to know math, because not knowing how much my mother gave spared me from understanding how much it must have hurt. It would be years before I would realize that she had exceeded even the biblical tithe. You wouldn't know it from the way she smiled as she gave her offering to God.
The first few years were a constant struggle for Mama, who learned other trades to make up for more cloudy days. She learned to work the sewing machine and sewed bundles of round industrial rug wipes for a local cottage industry four houses down the block.
And SELLING—Mama learned to make almost any “kakanin” (native snacks) and sold them every place: in school, in the park, at neighborhood birthday parties—but she couldn’t sell in the market. She still couldn’t speak the dialect.
That’s how my sister and I grew up, watching our mother live her values for us to copy. It doesn’t matter how little money you make, so long as you worked for it even if it didn’t come easy.
Because if you earned the money and offer some of it back to God, you’re not returning money to God--you’re returning PROOF of the strength He gave you to earn it.
Mama was not a doctor, lawyer, nurse or anything like that. She was a high school graduate who could do an occasional hair perm and a manicure.
I remember in Grade 3, we did this lame thing in class on Mother's Day where we took turns saying something about our mothers--what they did, etc. My mother picked me up after school that day, as usual, and had a light banter with my teacher after class.
She was unusually quiet--in fact, very civil--for the short jeepney ride home. But as soon as we got inside the house, her fingers and my earlobes had another reunion.
"How could you tell your classmates I was a teacher??" she was quietly mad--but I think more pained than angry that her little boy had lied.
I said, "Mama, I'm so sorry, I don't know, I wasn't thinking, I was winging it....!" I could see that the harder I tried, the more pained she looked. Finally, I decided to just come clean about it and, between sobs, I said, "I guess I just wanted people to respect you."
She pulled me close and hugged me tight, "Anak, they might respect me if you had just told them the truth."
In other words, I was RIGHT. Mama WAS a TEACHER--and on that tearful evening she taught me WHY I should not lie. I think she cried to herself longer than I did the rest of the evening--and I finally realized the real effect that lying has on OTHER people, not even really to ourselves.
Mama was very physical with her teaching, both my earlobes and my provocative little bottom will attest. But when she spoke, she had a soft and gentle countenance about her--especially when she was selling anything. You would buy whatever she was selling even if you didn't need it or already have one. You'd just love to be nice to her. She could sell ice to an Eskimo.
It’s from Mama that l learned never to be too embarassed to sell anything—EXCEPT your INTEGRITY.*
No comments:
Post a Comment