Our cherished childhood
Today I had to go to Quiapo from San Juan. It’s the first time I was doing it and I did not quite know where to pass. So I put myself in the hands of my driver who said first we were going through Blumentritt then to Ramon Magsaysay Boulevard. That used to be Santa Mesa Boulevard when I was small, I said. Maybe, ma’am, he said. My driver is at most 30 years my junior.
He doesn’t know that from the time I was a tot to around 15 I lived in Santa Mesa, in Valenzuela, near V. Mapa. A few years ago I visited my old home and the neighborhood had been eaten up by the slums. True, the slums were behind our house even then but I didn’t think of them as slums. The word did not exist. They were our poor neighbors. I would go with our maids to their sari-sari stores to buy things and watch a monkey put two softdrink caps in his cheeks. I would buy pink and yellow sugared bread that looked like atis. I loved the flavor of it. Later as I grew older I would flirt innocently with the boys over our wall, when Lola and my mom were not watching.
The old San Juan market has gone underground. More than 60 years ago it was on the ground. My grandmother would take me with her to market where she would drag me around. I remember running into bilaos of clams in the fish section just responding to Lola’s pulling. Then we would go to the dry goods section and she would buy me embroidered shoes or clothes. The memory of that stays. To this day I get a big thrill out of buying my clothes in the market where they are cheap and good.
Now it is called San Juan’s Agora and it is in the basement of a mall. I don’t know it anymore and don’t want to explore it, the very thought makes me claustrophobic but I miss the old San Juan market. We would buy our weekly food there and the rotting mangoes that Lola would make into her delicious mango jam.
Nothing on Blumentritt looks familiar to me anymore except the old municipal hall across the market but it is a different thing now. The real municipal hall now is closer to my flat on P. Guevara and it looks grand, but not familiar, not dipped in childhood memories.
Santa Mesa is another thing altogether. Gone are the grand old houses with big trees that used to lead up to Stop & Shop, the fashionable grocery when I was a little girl, where my favorite Katy Keene comic books were for sale at 45 centavos each. Across it was Standard Grocery, not as much a standout as Stop & Shop was, then farther down where Pure Gold is today stood a cheap grocery called Fernando’s. All of them are gone now replaced by things totally unfamiliar to me.
I hoped to see the cluster of old houses, among them the Herbosa dental clinic where we all went to have our teeth attended to by our uncle, Dr. Francisco Herbosa, Tito Paquito for short. The street doesn’t look the same anymore except for a few dilapidated apartment houses, what were then called accesorias, in Spanish. I know they were there when I was small because I recognized the grills. I looked for my Daddy’s tailor. He had a nice small house on the corner with arches, shocking pink bougainvillea, and big trees out back. Couldn’t find it. It must have been sold to someone who put up a building.
The only familiar thing was the sign Pureza, which brought back the voice of my Lola Dede telling her driver to bring something to Pureza.
Suddenly we were on Legarda. I missed the big billboard of Ideal Theatre on the corner. Of course, there’s no more Ideal Theatre and there’s a new overpass that brings you directly to Legarda then on to Morayta where I saw FEU, where my Daddy used to teach. I used to pick him up. I saw the old Samson School, which used to be green and white then. It looks more modern now and it’s in blue and white. We passed the National Teacher’s College where one of my aunt’s maids studied. I went to her graduation. I must have been around 10 years old.
How the city has changed with time! We cannot revisit a place and find it the same expecting to see us again. And if it did wait for us, would it recognize us? We are old. We have changed too.
How difficult it is to have to confront our aging. But what can we do? We console ourselves that our memories stay alive in our hearts and driving through them somewhat shocked inadvertently brings us back to our cherished childhood.
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If you are a member or Career Executive Service Officers (CESOs) you may phone in your registration to the Jung conference on July 10 and 11. Just call Donna at 951-4981 loc. 126. They will pay for you. Please do this. You will enjoy the conference.
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