Things we haven’t done in a while

I was doing a very summery kind of thing the other day – imbibing an ice-cold glass of shaved melon – when it struck me how long ago I had last done that. Not just drinking sweet melon juice, but – and here comes the best part – leaving all those strips of orange mush at the bottom of the glass, and then tipping the glass over at juice’s end to deliver, with some coaxing, the remaining contents into your open mouth. Plop! slides a wet clump of melon smack into your maw. With any luck, the mass (or should I say mess?) will also flood your nose and drip onto your shirtfront – but will you care?

That reminded me, in turn, of another ancient sensation – that of gorging on one fruity ice drop after another and feeling so cold that your head began to hurt, right behind your eyeballs. One of the great things about being a kuya was the power to send the littler and lesser ones out to the corner store for a bagful of ice drop and ice buko – they got a stick or two for their labors – and then polishing off the bundle under a kaimito tree or before the TV set, watching Lassie or The Three Stooges.

Speaking of kaimito, that’s something else we haven’t done in a while – not the eating of it, which we can’t do enough of, but the filching of it from the tree in the neighbor’s yard (where, experience tells you, the kaimito or the atis is always sweeter). Funny how there’s no exact word in English for this technique we know as "making sungkit." It’s really a process that begins long before the dastardly deed itself – with the surreptitious scouting, weeks before, of the neighbor’s tree, and laying one’s claim to the most promising bubots. When the fruit (or your enthusiasm for it) has ripened enough, you trot out that 10-foot, hook-tipped pole, sometimes with a bag under the hook, and brave dizziness and your neighbor’s wrath for the pleasure of snatching victory from the jaws of – well, from someone else’s jaws.

And how about other bygone experiences like sharpening a pencil, not with one of those thingies you stick the pencil tip into and turn, but with a double-edged razor blade (yup, remember the old Gillette – or gilit, as they called them in the barber shop)? You marked a line about three-quarters of an inch from the business end of the new Mongol, and then you shaved the wood off from that line onwards, culminating in a needle-sharp tip you wanted to poke in the eye of the class bully (or of your rival for some 12-year-old’s affections).

I never could sharpen those pencils without getting little razor cuts all over my fingers; if the cuts got nasty, you swabbed them with mercurochrome (which all kind and loving mothers dispensed) or with merthiolate (preferred by vicious aunts and sisters, to be stocked with the cod liver oil). If they got really bad, or if you got those 50 centavo-sized abominations on your skin whose name was as ugly as they looked (bakokang), then you treated them with a bath of agua oxigenada (hydrogen peroxide to you) – after the obligatory wincing and squirming, if the agua was applied with a cotton ball that bubbled horribly every time it touched raw pus – and then finished the procedure with a sprinkling of sulfathiazole. You took a couple of these sulfa tablets, stuck them in a fold of bond paper, got a bottle with a thick butt (a Coke bottle did nicely), then hammered away until the tablets turned to powder.

Now, how did I get there? This was supposed to be about pleasant sensations – some of which are simply too pleasant to publicly recall – or some fairly neutral deed like coloring your shoes with Joe Bush (jobos, get it?) dyeing powder, or dipping your feet into a milky chlorine bath before jumping into the pool at Balara Filters. Chalk it up to the nature of human memory – we remember both the very good and the very bad, the latter often more vividly than the former, despite all the defensive roadblocks our minds put in their way.

Some varieties of unpleasantness are more annoying than painful, unless you count the psychic pain. I don’t miss the last time I used one of those abre lata can openers that were apparently invented before Archimedes thought of the screw. You know the kind I’m talking about: they came with a bladed tooth at one end and either a wooden handle or a corkscrew recess at the other. These can openers had no use for grace or ingenuity; they worked on the underappreciated principle of brute force, which meant that, to open a can, you had to stab the blade straight into the edge of the lid with bone-jarring resolve (which rarely ever worked at first blow, so you had to keep pounding the damn thing with the butt of your palm), and then you cut upwards into the metal, centimeter by finger-numbing centimeter around the rim, until you could lift the snaggle-toothed lid up (and promptly cut yourself, leading to a repeat of the whole merthiolate scenario above).

Neither do I lament the demise of carbon paper, the smartness and the novelty of which probably passed out of human memory circa 1935. We were still using them in the ‘60s and the early ‘70s, and I swear that Philippine literature – or at least that smidgen of it that came out of my Smith-Corona – would have been immensely better if we’d had word processing then.

Those carbon-copied, pre-Xerox entries we submitted to the Palancas weren’t only smudged like a troop of flat-footed chickens had raced all over them; they were also as raw and as unedited as any sophomore’s term paper, since carbon-copying discouraged thorough revisions, or even thinking about them. One mistake actually meant five mistakes (on one sheet of coupon bond paper and four of onion skin) – for which you then had to employ a whole armamentarium of corrective devices.

You began with an eraser (sometimes a balled-up rubber band did the trick, the same way a clump of rice from your lunch subbed for paste) – but woe unto you if you rubbed too hard, or if that last nubbin of rubber (the one you forced out of the pencil’s butt with a good bite) came off, leaving you with five gouged pages to redo. You thanked the Lord, a few years later, for Snopake and Touch-and-Go – until you tried typing through Snopake as thick as the soles of your platform shoes.

Come to think of it, some days I’m happy the past is past – especially since some things have never really changed, like melon shake and the way we like it.

* * *

If you or your kids are doing little that’s truly new and interesting this summer beyond the usual trips to the mall and the beach, you might want them to learn a thing or two about art and writing. The summer usually brings with it a flurry of art-related workshops and activities for both adults and kids, but one workshop that I would heartily recommend is the one that’s going to be offered by the new West Point Creative Arts Studio at 48 West Point St. in Cubao, Quezon City.

My recommendation stems from the simple fact that I know the people running it (don’t ask me how, but I can guarantee they’re good!) and have seen the place – an oasis of peace and quiet in the middle of the bustling city, shaded by fruit trees and serenaded by a small oriental fountain in the yard.

Basic and advanced 12-hour courses – for adults and children above seven – will be offered in drawing, painting, sculpture, and writing for children. The courses will be taught by Gloria Tenza-Lava, June Poticar-Dalisay, and Isabela Banzon-Mooney, following either Saturday or Tuesday/Thursday schedules beginning April 13. For details and reservations, call Chingbee at 912-31-48 during business hours. Go out there and unleash the Picasso or the Renoir or the J. K. Rowling in you!

For English teachers inclined toward more heavy-duty, scholarly work (which, some of my colleagues assure me, can also be fun, although I’m hard-pressed to imagine how), there’s the 41st annual convention of the Philippine Association for Language Teaching (PALT) at the Teacher’s Camp in Baguio City, on May 1 to 3. This year’s meeting will focus on "content-based instruction" or CBI. Directors from the Department of Education will talk about the new (and controversial) Basic Education Curriculum. Not only teachers of English are invited here – the conference should also prove worthwhile for teachers of Filipino, science, math, and social studies. For inquiries, call Teresita Ignacio at 929-93-22 or Edna de la Cruz at 911-86-71.

* * *

Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.