We're not 'developing' Baguio, we're 'resto-modding' it

love watching "Jay Leno’s Garage" on YouTube.

He’s an antique car collector and he makes these short videos about them.

He likes to feature some of the oldest cars ever made—Ford Model T’s from the 20s, Dusenbergs from the 30s, Cadillacs from the 40s, Chevrolets from the 50s, Chryslers and GM’s from the 60s—and marvel at their impeccable engineering from the era when engineers used the slide rule, pen and paper and no computers.

There are two categories of old cars: “VINTAGE,” which is really old; and “RETRO,” which is trying to LOOK old.

There are two categories of RETRO: “RESTO” which means restored by refurbishing the original parts, including fabricating new parts by strictly following the specs of the old original parts but machining them out of modern steel; and there’s “RESTO-MOD” which stands for restored and modified.

Strictly speaking, “resto-modded” cars are not even antiques, to begin with. They have NEW small-block turbocharged fuel-injected (no carburetor) engines with enlarged rebored cylinders, mated to a six-or even 7-speed automatic transmission that produced enough torque to drive even an 8-ton Caterpillar bulldozer at speeds that can rival a Formula 1.

REAL antique cars have big-block 4, 6 or 8 cylinders in either an “in-line” or “V” configuration. They are all air-breathing, meaning they had carburetors that crudely mixed air and fuel, as opposed to most engines today that inject fuel pre-compressed by a turbocharger into a preheated combustion chamber to produce an unbeliebably powerful explosion in the cylinder.

Real antique cars have four-speed manual or “stick shifts” that arranged the gear sequence into your standard “H-pattern.” You had to step on a clutch to disengage the drivetrain and change from one gear to the next.

Back in the day, people had to LEARN how to OPERATE an engine. Today, you can know nothing about automotive mechanics and still “drive” a “’MATIC” (short for "automatic transmission") out of the showroom in 5 minutes. And “tail-end” somebody in traffic in ten.

Real antique cars had drumbrakes that you pumped 2 or 3 times to scrub speed. That means you THOUGHT about stopping a hundred meters before you got to the intersection.

Today’s cars with hydraulic power disc brakes could “stop on a dime.” Or on top of a pedestrian if you missed your calculation by a fraction of a second.

This is why people ENJOYED driving cars in the 40s, 50s and 60s—convertibles could bring down the roof, you had the wind in your face and yet you were not in danger even through there were no seatbelts, airbags or even headrests.

Why? Because YOU had total control of the car. No computer is calculating for anti-lock in your brakes, or constantly adjusting your fuel mixture, or load-sensing what gear you should be in.

YOU drove the car at the speed YOU were comfortable with—or YOU killed yourself or others. That is why, just like with a gun, you needed a LICENSE.

Today, young people think a driver’s license is just something you handed over to the cop writing you a speeding ticket.

Whenever Jay Leno interviews some guy about to restore an old old car, he pleads with him to “keep it STOCK"—meaning don’t put anything in the car that wasn’t there in the original when it rolled out of the factory in Detroit 50 years ago.

Most of them listen to his advise, but a few overeager ones don’t. After all, when you have all this “modern money” and you’re 50 years behind on your boyhood dream of putting together whatever was the hot setup when you were in high school, it’s very hard to resist the overbuild.

And that’s how you ended up with all these hideous-looking cars with tall engines sticking out of a hole cut through the hood. And if you peeked inside, there’s only ONE seat, for the driver. The rest of the cabin space is bristling with roll bars, sway bars, anti-crush columns, Allen-bolted anchors for a four-point harness, and a huge auxilliary high-pressure cylinder that held 200 pounds of nitrous gas—for the turbocharger.

You had to have either extraordinary courage or a death wish to agree to be strapped onto to a thing like that. This is a car you died IN.

What’s funny is when you look OUTSIDE, that rocket engine is sitting in the chassis of a 1957 Buick—which is the only giveaway that this thing MIGHT be an “old car.”

THAT is the ridiculous concept of “RESTO-MODDING” something.

Sometimes, I can’t help but think THAT is what we’re doing to our city.

We are RESTO-MODDING Baguio City. And, boy, did we ever “go to town” overdoing it.

On the surface, we think we are restoring the city to its old glory—without a clear understanding of what comprised that glory.

Just like an antique car, a real vintage car is about its body and soul—meaning the graceful lines of its outer appearance (its body) as well as the inner working of its original engine—its SOUL.

Baguio City, if you’re looking to reclaim its glorious history and heritage, is also about body and soul. That means Baguio is about the city AND ITS PEOPLE.

What did the PEOPLE of Baguio love about their city back then? Those things got everyone else envious of Baguio people, so they rush up here whenever they can afford to (in terms of time and opportunity, not just money).

That list is long and I’m not claiming to be an expert, by any stretch. But I know, as a Baguio boy who has lived here for the last 56 years, that I loved being able to go the woods—and, back in the day, you didn’t need to go far to find “woods.” Oftentimes, it was right in your backyard.

Of course, it’s altruistic to expect to find any more “woods” anywhere in Baguio today, other than a few small pockets of nature in Camp John Hay. But what really made for the woods are the PINE TREES, which are a vanishing species today.

The way we behave, as if losing a single pine tree—let alone many—is so anachronistic and overactingly irrelevant, leads me to conclude that these majestic aromatic iconic trees for which this “City of Pines” was named are doomed forever.

When millennial smartasses look at me funny whenever I talk sentimental about pine trees, I don‘t feel slighted at all. I just look back at them in total pity and compassion, “Sayang…kawawa naman kayo, hindi na ninyo inabutan at hindi na ninyo makikita o matitikman yung Baguio City na naranasan ko.”

When family and friends coming up to Baguio after being away for a long time get the shock of their lives—unable to recognize the same city they thought they knew—they ask, “What happened? What did you do??”

Now I know how to answer them.

“We resto-modded.”*

I'm a product of the VERY EFFECTIVE Old School System

don’t have a masteral or doctoral degree in education. So I consider myself unqualified to evaluate our Philippine educational system and say what’s wrong with it.

However, I am a product of the “old system”—

one we had before people with masteral and doctoral degrees started to “improve” it.

These “improvements” began with extending basic education to twelve years—adding two years on top of the traditional 6-year elementary and 4-year high school curriculums (alright, curricula) that I went through.

Of course, that also blurred the boundary between elementary and high school. Honestly, when a kid tells me today that she’s in “Grade 9” I don’t know quite what to make of that. She has completed 8 years of elementary—two years more than I did—but she hasn’t graduated?

Back in the day, that would have meant that you were a 2-year Grade 6 “repeater” and your parents would be livid.

But I guess I’m a dinosaur with an ancient educational skillset, I should just keep my mouth shut pertaining modern educational philosophy.

In fact, maybe this is a good time to focus on what I DO know like the back of my hands—the “old system”—and realize what a horrible system it was.

Children today are introduced to computer technology so early, I am green with envy. Even at Grade 3, they’re already just clicking dialog boxes on a computer touchscreen—I guess the digital equivalent of our “multiple choice” tests—except if they clicked (or guessed) the right box, the screen exploded into a myriad of cascading screens of text, photos, videos and sound expounding on that one box that the kid clicked correctly.

We had no computers when I was in Grade 3. We didn’t even have calculators. In fact, my memory of the time was of me—and thousands of kids my age—bawling in the middle of a shop that sells notebooks (the paper kind, not the Acer brand) and tugging relentlessly at my Mama’s “palda.”

I wanted her to throw back her first choice of notebook, cause I wanted her to buy the OTHER kind for me: the one that had the whole multiplication table printed on the back cover!

“Pastilan, anak! Anong gusto nimo, mandadaya na lang kamo sa imong arithmetic?!” she castigated me in her halting Visayan accent, tugging at my right earlobe on every syllable. (To this day, I think THAT must be the scientific explanation why my right earlobe is bigger than the left).

She said she would TEACH me how to add, subtract, multiply, divide and, on top of that, MEMORIZE the workings of basic math. But how can she? She’s only a high school graduate, for Christ’s sake!

You’ll be amazed.

The toughest line in the whole multiplication table was the “times 9” series. Mama said take any number, say 8, and think of the next number lower to it: 7. Then ask yourself, “how many more before 8 becomes 10?” it’s 2—ergo, 8 times 9 equals 72.

I tried it with all other numbers between 2 and 9 and, sanamagan, it DOES work!

WHERE did Mama learn that? She said from an American soldier who taught her and a bunch of other kids under the spread of a mango tree back in her hometown in Leyte after the war. Mama was about eleven at the time. She was born in 1933, which means she’ll be marking her 90th birthday this December.

Today kids CANNOT be asked to write long essays, it would be too stressful for them to conjure up ideas out of thin air. The pressure to come up with “something out of nothing” encouraged altruism and “fictionalization of thinking,” this leads to them learning how to MAKE UP things—in other words to LIE.

Of course! How could my Grade 5 teacher NOT have thought of that?

Mrs. Leonora Cachero Adalim (that’s her name, God bless her soul) made us buy this hideous thing called “Theme Notebook” and once EVERY WEEK (that’s thirty-eight weeks for a whole schoolyear!) she would make us turn to a fresh page of that thick notebook and give us a topic to write about.

Forget “What I did last summer” she already used that LAST year and parents said she never repeats her topic list. So she asked us to write something about “what I think of shadows.”

WHAT??

We were tiny little Grade 5 “uhugin” brats, you can’t expect us to tackle philosophical subjects like that. So predictably, all we could come up with were senseless banal stuff like, “a shadow is what I see when my back is turned and I’m not facing the light.” How profound.

Somebody else wrote, “when I look at a shadow it makes me think a day is gloomy even though the sun is bright.” How thought-provoking.

Just more stupid, stupid things like THAT—certainly nothing that can trigger deep intellectual introspection. But that’s not the worst part.

She also told us to write on the front side of every page ONLY, never on the back. Also, we were to leave the OPPOSING page blank. We wondered why.

We found out why.

After a day or two, she returned our Theme Notebooks to us, with her comments. She peppered our essays with a whole gamut of proofreading marks.

Sometimes she just encircled a misspelled word. Or sometimes TWO words—a noun and a verb—and connected the two circles with a line and a big question mark that meant, “these two do not agree, fix this!”

The thing I hated most was when she drew this long loopy arrow to the margins where she wrote a paragraph-length remark that you were supposed to CONSIDER in your rewrite—oh, but you’re NOT allowed to copy anything SHE wrote.

My classmates and I would compare notebooks, “ano’ng nilagay sa iyo?”

“Ang dami nga, eh, nakakainis!!”

So THAT’S what the opposing blank page was for. We wrote 38 decent-length essays (in Grade 5!) and then REWROTE every single one of them after she was through mangling each one.

How did she even find the time to read all our notebooks? There were forty of us in her class. The government must pay her a lot of money—but, then, why did she WALK home and not own a car? And why would she pack her lunch just like we all did back in the day?

Today, kids cannot be put under undue pressure, like having to do too much homework. Affirmative action parents clubs maintain that schoolwork should be done IN SCHOOL—not at home where a child must be free to engage in non-curricular interaction with non-academic peers (like online gaming opponents halfway around the world). Otherwise, you are harming that child’s “holistic development.”

My God, that totally makes sense. Why didn’t anybody say this to all our horrible teachers in Baguio Central School in 1973?

Whenever they gave us any seatwork, it was ALWAYS under time pressure. Not only were we expected to complete a task, we were supposed to do it within a non-extendible deadline. So you often heard that classic line, “Finished or not finished, pass your papers!”

How cruel.

So now guys like me still suffer from the devastating long-term damage that those cruel teachers did to us. Give us a topic today and we would regress right back to those dark days of mental torment, and turn it into a long grammatically-perfect discourse. Ugh! That is so disgusting.

I wish our teachers back then had given more thought to our feelings. I wish they had never cheapened our achievements by turning our good deeds into some kind of exchange currency with which to pay for our bad deeds. Seriously, what's the big idea behind “RIGHT MINUS WRONG??”

It compelled you to aim for perfection and to abhor mediocrity. How absurd.

How dare our old teachers indoctrinate me about responsibility and accountability by making ME correct my best friend Frederick del Prado’s spelling testpaper. I had to put an X-mark on his “judgement” because there’s not supposed to be an “e” after the “g.”

Freddie didn’t speak to me for a whole week, and there was no point trying to escape his wrath, because there’s no denying I cost him a point. The evidence was all there because Teacher made me write “corrected by Joel Dizon” on Freddie’s paper. She made ALL of us do that. How primitive and predatory.

Today DepEd policy prohibits teachers from delegating correcting tasks to theirs wards because that encouraged "victimization."

Also, making another child aware of your child's mistake exposed him to "peer contempt and prejudice" which is a violation of your child's right of privacy and a form of "violence" against his tender juvenile self-esteem.

Of course! By golly, that IS correct, what took parents and teachers this long to WAKE UP to this basic reality?

Good thing for kids of this generation because now both parents and teachers are “woke” people finely attuned to the cutting edge awareness of modern educational philosophy.

Our teachers in the 70s? Forget it. NONE of them are “woke.”

I guess that’s because I don’t think any of them really went to sleep.*

Games the old Baguio media men used to play

wo sports were closest to the hearts of Baguio mediamen in the 80s and 90s—chess and darts.

I’m replaying vignettes from my own memory from when I started writing professionally for the Gold Ore--Benjamin Salvosa's legendary weekly city paper.

The year was 1980, I was 16 and fresh out of Baguio City High School. Our Baguio Correspondents and Broadcasters Club (BCBC) president was Oswald N. Alvaro.

There was a second “rival” group of press people back then, called the Baguio Press Club, headed by City Tourism Director Narciso “Nars” Padilla.

The “rivalry” was a friendly one and was dictated mostly by work affiliation. Most of Baguio Press Club’s members were journalists connected with the government—PIO’s of the different line agencies.

The reason they wanted to have their own press club was practical. It was the height of martial law and while “red-tagging” in our present day is just a name-calling issue, back then it threatened your tenure if you were working for the government.

BCBC was a “looser” organization that admitted anyone of any political stripe. So we had guys like Peppot Ilagan, Gerry “Boo” Evangelista, Jr., Domecio “Dom-C” Cimatu (Frank’s big brother), Freddie Conchu, Carol Brady de Raedt, Nathan Alcantara, Steve Hamada—all student activists back in their college days in the University of the Philippines.

If you were from UP, it was PRESUMED you once belonged to the militant 1970s Kabataang Makabayan (KM) with leftist leanings. Government writers would be wise NOT to be in the same group!

As Groucho Marx famously said, “military intelligence is a contradiction in terms” and nobody wanted to test the theory. Why risk being labeled “anti-government” when you can just separate the chaff from the grain by having TWO press clubs?

Anyway, believe me, these guys all loved one another and it didn’t matter which press club they belonged to. At the end of a working day we all ended up in the same big round table, sometimes two, at Session Café owned by Jimmy Tong.

Luisa’s Café was a daytime (especially lunch) hangout then, while the breakfast crowd convened at Dainty Restaurant.

But evenings—no question about it—was the sole jurisdiction of Session Café.

If you had something of public interest to spread, you didn’t need to organize a “presscon.” You just showed up there, said “Ta-daah!!” and you were the next morning’s radio headline news and the weekend’s frontpage story on all local weeklies.

Ever wonder WHERE the OTHER press club hang out?

The answer is on the SAME table at Session Cafe at exactly the SAME time.

In the socialization part, club affiliation became irrelevant. You faced the legendary “Baguio Media” as one monolith of independent-minded journalists—genuine, authentic dyed-in-the-wool Baguio boys and girls—and they counted some of the best writers to never be recognized in their lifetimes.

Nobody dared to compare himself or herself with anyone else. But the primal instinct to beat one another to a bloody pulp was always ever present in the back of everyone’s mind—and it cried for a medium, a venue, and a nice set of rules to go by which to objectively compare everyone’s physical deftness and mental acumen.

Ergo—now you’re getting it—DARTS (physical) and CHESS (mental) became those two proxy battlegrounds.

(This is for the younger ones so they would have an idea of the roots of this twin obssession.)

Darts became such a big thing with us, it even spun off its own club. The “Session Café 01 Club” was so named in reference to the "701-501-301" perfect 'Killers' game scores—as well as the qualifying score you need to gain acceptance.

Those who “bogeyed” of course (like moi) were still press club members, just not quite part of that elite "Ow-One “ circle.

Jimmy Tong built a mezzanine floor over the main dining area just to accommodate the games. Manny Salenga, Baguio Toastmasters International guru and Benguet Corporation PRO, got the mining company to cut up some lengths of heavy duty rubber conveyor belt, which were glued to the floor to catch wayward darts that ricocheted off the four world-class professional Unicorn genuine woodcork dartboards mounted on the wall.

Having your own dart set was a status symbol. Although the house darts were fine (they were offered to walk-in guests), we all mostly brought our own personal sets of “competition darts” that had to weigh 18-23 grams when using brass or 23-26 grams when using tungsten darts.

Back in the day, everybody seemed to have a relative in the States who would send them a set of darts you couldn’t buy anywhere in Baguio. The more exotic and “rare” your darts were, the higher you clung up on the proverbial monkey tree.

But Peppot beat them all. He discovered that he could write his signature on the margins of the page layout “paste-ups” of the Gold Ore before it went in the camera room at the printing press.

When it emerged from the darkroom, you got a whole “negative” film sheet 18 by 22 inches big, bearing the image of the whole page (this is photographic offset printing technology before the advent of “computer-to-plate” software).

The film’s edges were always trimmed off and discarded anyway—except this time they bore an image of Peppot’s signature! He then used a pair of scissors to cut out of them what he called “special limited-edition personalized signature fletchings for competition darts.”

It was a big hit! It was made of the same plastic material, very light and very flexible, and totally matched the specs of those “designer flights” on some of the top-level darts. But Peppot could put ANYTHING on them—your signature, your company logo, your photo…

Guys were lining up, begging him to make some for them--and although Peppot was only joking when he said the “production cost” of a set of six flights was P1,000 there were just enough gullible people on earth that believed him. No wonder the Gold Ore staff could afford all those lavish meals ON HIM!

If we weren’t throwing darts, we were “pushing wood”—the sportswriters term for playing chess. Little known fact is that many of Baguio’s practising mediamen were unsung masters. Guys like Gold Ore’s Gerry “Boo" Evangelista, DZWT station manager Atty. Dometilo “Domi” Pineda, City Hall PIO’s Freddie Mayo, Andy Hernandez (Leslie’s old man), Ramon “Mondax” Dacawi and his older brother City Hall HR head Joe Dacawi, Midland Courier’s Steve Hamada, Gaudencio “G-Bert” Floresca, Associated Press’ Abe Belena, and many more. And Peppot, of course.

How good were these guys? They were given “ELO ratings” (I don’t even know what THAT is) by the Philippine Chess Confederation whose national President Florencio Campomanes was a bosom buddy of Midland columnist Des Bautista.

This meant they were good enough to compete in open invitationals. So whenever Eugene Torre, the Philippines’ first Grandmaster and Des Bautista’s perennial house guest, needed to hone his skills in preparation for a tournament, Des would call these media colleagues to sit in a row and play Eugere Torre in a “time-forfeit simul” pitting the fierce and merciless grandmaster against twenty boards. I think Boo was the only one who ever beat him in one unpublished event.

The only problem with darts and chess is that both were INDIVIDUAL games that didn’t really foster teamwork, or provide opportunity for friendly team competition.

Mondax, when he was BCBC President, solved this problem. He used to say that as a true Baguio boy, he was a “former everything.” He used to be a former pony boy, news boy, shine boy, kumboy—and pinboy at the old Aurora Olympian bowling lanes in Upper Mabini street.

So he organized an inter-outfit bowling competition in 1988, each media outfit would comprise one team that can field three bowlers and two substitutes to try to bowl a perfect 300.

Whoever was the head of the outfit—who was either an editor or a station manager—was automatically the team coach.

The Gold Ore team was made up of Peppot, Chris Bartolo (now of DZWT), Nathan Alcantara, Catalina “Kit” Tolentino (now a journalism professor at UP Diliman), Bernard Okubo (our photographer) and myself.

We were a great team, coached by the elaborate tactician Peppot who barked out play strategy like, “Chris, take out the 3-pin thick on the left, to send it flying to take out the 9-and 10-pin for a spare!”

Even Kit, who looked so frail you wouldn’t think she could lift, let alone hurl, a 3-pound (1.7-kg) duckpin bowling ball, could follow Peppot’s order. “Kit, you're right-handed, try to sweep the kingpin on a late curl from the right for a strike.”

Kit said, “Yes, kuya” and did exactly that.

I, of course, could always be counted on to carry out some of Peppot’s most difficult game instructions: “Joel, for the love of God, hit SOMETHING!!!”

On nice, beautiful, warm and sunny summers, we were off to the briddle paths at Wright Park, riding horses—but I’ll reserve that story for another time.*

The years I served as an altar boy

he year was 1975. The parish priest of Saint Vincent Parish Church on Naguilian Road along the way to Lourdes Grotto was a Belgian priest named Fr. August T. Belens, assisted by two Filipino priests, Fr. Pedro R. Rulloda and Fr. Fernando O. Luvina.

It was the year I began to serve a three-year stint as an altar boy (“sacristan”), under the supervision of the head altar boy at the time, Ariel Canlas.

He would go on to become a civil engineer and now runs his own engineering and architectural design consultancy firm right here in Baguio City.

I was always assigned to service (we used the term “service” instead of “serve,” I don’t know why) the 5:00 o'clock daily afternoon mass, because I would be coming from school. Class dismissal at Baguio Central School, which was a 5-minute jog to the church, was at 4:30 pm.

That gave me just enough time to make the 5pm mass on most days—except Wednesdays when I’m a “cleaner.”

Back in the day, the school only had one janitor. There’s no way he could clean the main building (which had 20 classrooms spread on two floors and 2 wing basements), and another 20 more rooms in four “Marcos-type” prefab buildings spread around the school quadrangle.

So as a labor augmentation device, we pupils (that’s what elementary gradeschoolers were called) in every class were grouped into five.

Each group (about 7 or 8 kids) is charged with cleaning the classsroom after class on a particular day of the week. So on Wednesdays my group scrubbed the floor with our feet using coconut husks, swept the dirt off with walis tambo, wiped the window glass panes squeaky clean with a wet rag, and picked off the mud that had caked on the “doormat” made of tansans (bottle caps) nailed to an 18-inch square board, using a walis tingting (stickbroom). It was child labor, pure and simple.

Recently, I read on a newspaper how a wealthy parent in Quezon City sued a school teacher because she made her spoiled-rotten precious little boy take out the trashcan.

The parent sued under the “VAWC Law” which penalizes Violence Against Women AND CHILDREN. She claimed that her little boy suffered from “victimization” and “mental trauma” because being made to carry the trashcan in full view of other children made him the “object of derision” and “verbal remarks of cruel stupidity.” (then why sue the TEACHER?)

My reverie wandered back through time to our Grade 4 classmate, Lee Ignacio. He could turn his eyelids over, and roll his eyes all the way to the back of his skull, until nothing was showing in his eyes except all white!

Then he would slowly grope his way around the classroom like a zombie—it made the girls so sick to their stomachs, one of them threw up on the floor.

Just like that, me and a few other pals of Lee Ignacio who were laughing our hearts out—we were guilty of “cruel derision”—were rounded up by our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Elsie Gutierrez, “Whose stupid idea was all of this??”

Of course we all pointed at Lee, but it didn’t help. It didn’t save any of our skins, so to speak, and we ALL had to clean up the vomit off the floor—with our own handkerchiefs! Talk about teaching us NEVER to do anything like that ever again. Back then, WE were stupid, and nobody sued the teacher.

None of us even dared to tell our parents, either. Why? Because in those days—late 60s, early 70s—teachers and parents were in CAHOOTS!

Back to being a sacristan. I was not motivated by any moral calling, nor did I experience some kind of life-changing epiphany, to make me decide to “service” the temple of God.

It's just that long before Chin Alcantara and Juris Fernandez came up with “Make Your Mama Proud” (MYMP) as the name for their acoustic band, that was ALREADY the life goal of every kid in the 70’s.

If you grew up in the 70s, like me, you loved your mother and, although you didn’t really hate your father, you just didn’t want to be around him as much. He smoked, he drank and he owned a 2-inch wide leather belt.

I became a sacristan because I wanted to make my Mama proud. My constant service partner was another young boy my age, Fernando Lasala, who was from the Holy Family Elementary School, right beside the church. We always worked in two's.

We loved wearing the altar boys’ traditional vestments, which consisted of a full body length white habit—basically a lab gown but with the opening slit in the back so that the front was a seamless sheet of white. It was topped with a red sort of like a mid-rib square “camison” (it really was!) with delicate white lace trims and hemming.

Finally, we put on this gold “dragon collar” with fine gold thread needlework that the nuns had worked on all week. It was cut with a scalloped design that wrapped around our necks like a peacock’s tail fan. We looked like angry lizards.

But the mamas were proud to see their little boys in frock—diminutive little “mini-priests” scurrying about the church, looking like they’re about to be ordained and beatified on the same day.

Mama beamed and grinned from ear-to-ear, sitting on the front pews of Saint Vincent church, beside my more modestly-proud sister, Lavlina.

Mama would lean towards her and whisper, “Anak, tignan mo yung kapatid mo, o…kulang na lang tubuan ng pakpak!”

Even from so far, I could still faintly hear my sister respond, “e baka mauna pang tubuan ng tuka at saka tare sa paa yan, Mama!”

Women back then wore shrouds to church—called “belo”—and spared no effort embellishing them with embroidery, little beads and sequins—I mean they pimped these belos like they were cocktail dress accessories.

Even our young girl classmates each had her own belo which they made small enough to fold and keep in their purse.

And THAT led to its demise—the belo gradually shrank in size from a full-size shawl, to a tiny little crocheted circle placed on top of the head, then smaller and smaller still…before finally disappearing altogether sometime in the early 80s.

Which is just as well for my sister Lavlina, who really just used her belo--which was just large enough--mainly to cover even her mouth—because she knew I could read her lips!

Then the priest “celebrating” the mass (we used the term “celebrating” instead of leading or officiating--again I don’t know why) would finally get the proceedings going.

“The LORD be with you….” the priest greeted.

“And also with you…” the people answered, and we were off to the races.*