reminiscences

We live on the waterfront, in the west end section of our town, and during certain times of the year, mostly in January, the saltwater floods our backyard and wilts everything in its wake.

Our house and the one across the street serve as border line from Tago’s ghetto. When I asked my father why the residential location, he said that when he acquired the lot from a priest, only a dilapidated church stood on what was once a cemetery; the peripheral area was waterlogged and the slum sprang only after years of accretion.

Our neighbors are wine and vinegar makers, nipa weavers, firewood gatherers, and fisherfolks who derive livelihood about 150 meters away, from a marsh dense with sani and bakhaw and a river teeming with marine life. It was in Tago River that I learned to swim on the sly, earning not a few welts from my father’s belt when he found out. It wouldn’t sound good, he said, for a lawyer and a teacher’s youngest son to drown in a river murky with human refuse. He was partly correct, but why would a child learning to float and dreaming to grow gills care?

I grew up shooting birds, playing hide and seek, tag, and siklot with slum kids. From them I also learned, among other things, to weave nipa shingles, to paddle a boat without shifting the paddle from this side and that, to haunt brooks for baits, to fish, and to crab. More often than not our maid would fetch me for lunch and then my mother would twist my ear because she couldn’t grasp why I liked playing not with my kin but with smelly kids in squalid homes. She didn’t know that from them I learned to appreciate the virtue of hardwork and the importance of food down to the last morsel. While my father had only to sign documents to earn money, theirs had to break their back with empty stomach just to get by.

Don’t ask me why but last week, after over 25 years, I went back to Tago River. Though they say that you can’t be at the same river twice because the water is always new as it continually flows, I saw the same Tago River of my youth. Things from my childhood were also there and I looked at each of them as though for the first time: the pungo, a palm fruit that yields nipa wine and vinegar and whose meat tastes like kaong; the sani whose leaves can be woven into nipa shingles; the uson, a lobster-like creature that burrows under a minute mud tower called bagal; the bobo and the panggal that trap fish and crabs.



The trip down memory lane would have been complete had I seen some karaykay---crab’s peanut-sized cousins that scuttle onshore, in colors that make me think God has grown tired of His crayons and tossed them in pieces.

We built, meters away from the river bank, a lantay and a table out of drifting bamboos. The sun was setting when we were done, and the blue green water glistened from where I sat. I shattered its stillness, creating ripples deep into a cache of memories that---though buried---remains vivid and alive.