Memories from another time

I’ve got to go downtown to buy supplies for my jewelry business.  Shall we go on Wednesday?” I asked my first cousin Didit, who is here visiting from Spain.  Of course, she came.  Lately we have been visiting Quiapo and Divisoria  together to buy beads and other things.

This morning we met first to have  a huge breakfast — delicious tapa, fried egg and rice — at the restaurant on my street corner.  Then off we went.  We passed Gil Puyat Avenue formerly Buendia.  “Remember when this area was clean and genteel?”  I asked her.  “Over there was our dentist when we were small.  We turned into Buendia from Taft then turned left on the first small street.  I don’t remember the dentist’s name.  I remember only that we would all go together and at the end of our session she would make us choose a plaster dwarf, one of Snow White’s seven, for us to paint ourselves.  Or sometimes she would give us lollipops.”  She did not remember. 

We grew up intimately.  There was a time in our lives when either she would sleep at our house in Sta. Mesa or I would sleep at their house on M. H. del Pilar then later in Pasig. Once she slept at our house.  In the middle of the night she sat up.  I woke up and asked her if everything was all right.  She boxed my face.  She was dreaming.  I asked her if she remembered that.  She didn’t either.

But we both remember the vacations we took together in Baguio when we stayed at a lovely house on Outlook Drive, then on Quezon Hill, then on Leonard Wood Road.  I think I was around 13 then or maybe 15 when the big family quarrel — our parents and their siblings fighting over inheritance — got in the way of our childhood.  She and her brother were sent to school in England.  I went to Switzerland.  We grew up.

I got married at 18.  She got married later but in the end we found each other.  I lived with my grandmother, she was living with her husband nearby.  We would get together and were taught to market by my aunt who was one of the chosen enemies of our mothers.  But, never mind, we belonged to another generation.  We would still get together first two couples, Didit and I and our respective husbands then my cousin Toto and his wife joined in. 

They were good times until her father died and she disappeared from view, leaving her husband.  That was sometime in the late ’60s, so long ago.  Then after that I left my husband.  We lost touch for many decades.  She lived in Spain, married again there, got a divorce, was “widowed” there.  So many similar things happened to me, too.  But now we are both happily single on the wrong side of 60 that we are together again, laughing again, becoming very good friends again, proving that relationships are always there to be picked up and enjoyed all over again.

At the end of our shopping trip, I was exhausted.  I don’t know if it’s because I’m growing old but I tire more easily now.  She suggested we go to Lili’s at the Hyatt and pig out on dimsum, something that our jewelry teacher said was very good.  I was so thirsty I drank two Coke Lights, squeezing the lemon in them.  We both loved the interiors at Lili’s.  Next time we go shopping downtown, we will lunch there again.

Trying to get my bearings while waiting for the car I saw an uncle’s old house across the street.  “That means that Gaiety was on that corner.” 

“Remember we used to walk to Gaiety to watch movies on Sundays?” she asked.  I remembered.

On the way home we passed M. H. del Pilar.   “Is it safe to say the whole neighborhood has gone to seed?” I asked.

“Yes, definitely, it has,” she said, a tiny sad smile on her face.

Didit lives in Spain now.  Her oldest son, Pok, lives in France and her youngest son HP lives in London.   My daughter also lives in England but not in London.  She lives two hours away by train.  I have another daughter who lives in the San Francisco suburbs while I have two more children who live in the South.

Our generation is all over the place now, in a sense, though in another we still move towards each other, not hesitant about becoming close again.   “It’s Wednesday,” Didit said.  “You have to write your article tonight.”

“Oh, yes,” I gasped.  “I forgot again.”

“Want me to remind you every Wednesday?” she asked sweetly, making me laugh.  She will remind me from Barcelona by e-mail and she will be so good at it I am bound not to miss a single deadline.

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