Remembering childhood

It is a gray day. Rain falls steadily. A cool pleasant breeze blows, stroking and soothing my cheeks. Suddenly, I am a child again at our old home in Sta. Mesa, at the corner of V. Mapa and Valenzuela Streets, behind the Baltao Building. It was the 1950s then, when Sta. Mesa, Pasay, San Juan, and Sta. Ana were posh districts to live in. They were full of old stately houses set in the center of large lawns covered with big old trees.

We lived in what must have been a compound once, then it was sold to different owners. There was a stony road you turned into and the first house on your left belonged to Alfonso Calalang and his wife Virginia, and their children Cely, Odying, Ben, and Conrad. Those were the four I remember. I don’t think they had more.

The second house belonged to Nicanor and Mercedes Tomas. Nick was the husband of Dede, my grandmother’s youngest sister. He was my surrogate father. My father died when I was six months old and later, when I was around three or four, I found out he had no babies so I asked him to be my daddy. I called him Daddy Toot. I adored him then and now. His wife, Lola Dede, was also a surrogate mother to me. She brought me fun, joy, and laughter. On gray days like this my cousins Mimi, Didit, and I would be at her house setting up a store made of wrought iron flowerpot holders and other odds and ends. We would dig into her closets for clothes, scarves, fancy jewelry for our boutique. Then we would play at shopping, taking turns at being the shopgirl or the shopper.

When my cousins weren’t around I would spend summer days at her house, turning on the radio as noon approached so we could both listen to Dr. Ramon Selga and Gulong ng Palad. She had flowerpots on her windowsills and they all bloomed with pink impatiens, that’s what those flowers were called. In her back lawn she had two tall trees — a star apple and a golden shower. In the summer the golden shower would burst into wild yellow cascades of beautiful scentless flowers that would eventually turn into long, hard brown pods of seeds.

The third house belonged to the Cosculuellas. Who knew how many of them lived there? It was like a Manila pied a terre for this Bacolod family. There was Ilay, Ging, Tentay. There were the children, my childhood enemies, Reggie and Dichay, who grew up and married (and was widowed by) my first cousin Reggie, the son of my father’s younger brother, who was also killed in the war. We are friends now.

The fourth house belonged to Concepcion Arguelles vda. de Cruz. That’s how she signed her name. She was my maternal grandmother and another of my surrogate moms. Lola Ching, as I called her, was my caretaker. She took care of the house. She took care of me, especially when I was sick. She taught me to sew on her sewing machine when I was around nine or 10 years old. She made blouses for me that were funky then and would still be funky until now.

Lola Ching’s house was the largest in the compound, though all of the houses looked the same. It had an air raid shelter out back that perpetually smelled of Japanese garden snails. Eventually it was demolished and turned into part of the garden. After they got rid of it, my mother gave me a bahay kubo for my birthday and it stood there in the corner between a clump of banana trees and the santol tree.

I will never forget our santol tree. The fruit was small but very sweet. But the tree is engraved in my memory because one year it was covered with big fat caterpillars. They were about five inches long and you could hear them climbing the santol tree, making a grating, swishing sound. I would hear them from upstairs and run downstairs out to the back terrace. We had a wrought iron table and chairs in the garden and the gardener would pick up a few of them for me to watch. There were so many of them, hundreds of big fat caterpillars that gave me the creeps. They were there going up the tree for around three days. There they formed their cocoons and then quiet descended.

Weeks passed and one morning we woke up to find many huge brown butterflies in our house. We had screens only in the upstairs windows but none downstairs. The caterpillars had freed themselves from their cocoons and filled our home with big brown butterflies, no really bright colors except maroon outlines around the gray ovals on their wings but they were big, dramatic, made a strong quiet statement. You could not deny that they were there. I will never forget.

Many times I feel like going back to Sta. Mesa again, just to see if the houses still stand. But I remember my mother feeling this way, too. When we went to the site of her old childhood home nothing looked familiar to her. She was heartbroken. I don’t want to get heartbroken again.

So I look at the gray day and allow melancholia to sweep over me. They were wonderful times. They will never return. But once in a while a gray day, some falling rain, I remember again. Yes, I remember again.

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