Time Flies - Happy Anniversary!

It has been a year since I published my first post in August 17, 2007. If I had been diligent with my original intention of writing one episode per week, I would have finished writing my life story and might already be weaving the pages together in what could resemble an autobiography. Many things came up as I wrote but most important of all were the insights from writing about my life experiences. There were realizations and new topics emerged as people commented or made suggestions on what and why I wrote. Most of all, writing took me to a peculiar vantage point and life looks very different from this level of awareness.

Thank you to the 7,000 souls who visited my pages, intentionally, by accident or otherwise. Thank you to those who reacted both favorably and violently. Thank you to those whom I invited but did not make the time to visit. Everything has a meaning in itself.

There are some notable items re my blog. The post that made the most hits was the post “why go to high school when you can go to school high” followed by the BMW K1200R page and finally the post “vigil” and “eternal life beckons” leading to find out more about stormsails and who me. The first titles apparently caught the attention of readers and I would not be surprised if the contents did not meet up to expectations. I can only conclude that getting high, BMW bikes and death tops the list of my readers. The order of subsequent popular titles are a relevation in itself. Failure, Second Guessing, It’s all in the Mind, and Metamorphosis indicates the depth of interest of my readers.

As I proceed with my writing, I will exert more effort to be contextually true to the title and format my pages more cohesively. I will also go to lengths to remember or find out the names and sources of some of the phrases and ideas I quote herein for proper acknowledgement.

It has been a beautiful year for me. This is an exciting time to be alive. Thank you for visiting. God Bless you all.

9/52 Fathers and Sons (Part 2)

He would often relate how he was stupefied as a six year old when the Spanish executed the Filipino intellectual Jose Rizal in a park surrounded by wealthy neighborhoods. A childhood marked by revolutions and colonial domination nurtured the prevalent ambitiousness of his generation. He recounted stories of how he proudly served both American and New Commonwealth masters because of their discipline and adamant penchant for excellence, how the war unnecessarily ravaged the rustic mountain city he helped build, how it rose from the ruins, regaining and eventually losing its grandeur as the Summer Capital of the Philippines. Relating those stories was an exercise that paid off in his senile years as I would fill in his narratives when his memory would fail him.

Being landed did not always equate to being wealthy. Such was the circumstance that my grandfather was born into that he had to walk in slippers more than 10 kilometers every week to a boarding house whose mosquito infested basement room he had occupied while studying by candlelight to be a doctor. He also walked the school route with precious shoes in tow as slippers were cheaper to repair or replace.

As one of the early graduates of the State Medical School, he was entrusted with many prominent responsibilities including the directorship of the Benguet Hospital in Baguio and serving as the personal physician of the President. He made his rounds on horseback servicing the medical needs of the mining towns that flourished in the early days of the Summer Capital. As a representative in the UN and holding various key positions in the pioneer and post war era of the city, he made a name for himself and engaged briefly in politics until he realized the growing graft and corruption would swallow him body and soul.

A tough childhood must have driven his ambition for himself as well as those for his children. He bestowed a particular favor on his eldest son whom he had named after him. As an achiever and gifted child, grand plans and foundations in business or law were laid before the scion but it was not to be so. The priesthood had a stronger calling for a man who stood his ground to follow his destiny. It was only much later through memoirs that I found out that he sneaked out twice to enter the seminary and with gun in hand, my grandfather demanded his release. Failing in that, he sued in court and likewise failed. He only succeeded when the President and an influential general drafted him to the Army and again only to lose him to the Jesuits after the war and finally losing him completely to a brain tumor soon after.

Just before puberty, my grandmother died and I was relegated to his flat to keep him company during meals, recreation and visiting construction sites. I took his daily blood pressure readings, did errands and later drove him around town and down to the hot springs. Although as a growing boy I lived in my own world, the subconscious/subliminal effects of my grandfather’s environment influenced much of how I would perceive and relate to the world.

While my mother and siblings had to make do with the best that my father brought home, I enjoyed country club meals, snacks and a library, long walks at the golf course, hot showers and massage, healthy dinners and long games of chess intertwined with glorious stories of the pioneer days of the mountain city. I was like a pup trailing his parent as he went by his daily business allowing me to observe how a man of stature related to the world around him and experienced what being privileged was like. There were no lectures, apprenticeship and indoctrination. It was simply hang around, see and do. With his soft hand that allowed me to imbibe the fruits of good living, I began to aspire to become a doctor just like him and not some traveling salesman whose face and arms were burnt from too much sun and had very little to offer except an iron hand that kept me focused on the hardships of life…or so I thought.

Although the life away from my family was more comfortable, there was an air of discomfort for being different. My parents had become my guardians and my siblings became more like cousins and I an only child, which propelled my individualism to an irreversible extent. It was difficult to live like a have not in a have environment or a have in a have not. There was a sense of duality that swung my personality to extremes. Was I or was I not? Living in one roof with two separate worlds that had very few common denominators in what mattered to me would make me question my loyalty and belongingness especially when one would attempt to invalidate the other. I was confused on whose side I should be on. Was my emerging multiple personality a survival mechanism? It doesn’t require much to imagine what happens when I switched on the wrong one in a particular situation. Switching invalidated the other and making a stand pit them both against each other.

Caught in the conflict between two worlds of kinship and fearful of losing my identity, if not my sanity, there was only one choice…step back and move out thinking perhaps, my absence would calm the storm. I once had one father, then conveniently two, and finally none. The adventure had began.

8/52 Fathers and Sons (Part 1)

As a privileged scion of a founding pioneer of a historic city, my father’s early childhood was spent in a quaint old american style cottage tucked in a hill with a carpet of slippery pine needles that hosted exciting downhill cardboard box-sledding and conveniently served for playing hide and seek among the trees and bushes. He must have had a wonderful upbringing as far as stories I’ve heard and read of his childhood as well as whatever indications smiles and props in fading photos could tell.

Like me, school must have had a different rub in him compared to his three other siblings who seemed to have done well academically. I cannot even recall all the schools he attended and have no idea whatsoever regarding what and where he finished college. But unlike me, and to his credit he did earn a college degree.

I also don’t know the circumstances how he came to fight WWII as an Army private and subsequently joining the guerilla movement against the Japanese. He refused to regale us with war stories as it must have been an experience he’d rather forget, perhaps highlighted by the episode where he had to imbibe death and stench as he went from one prison camp to another in search of his older brother who by reason of my grandfather’s instigation was forcefully drafted into the military and survived the infamous death march. (1/52 My Petri Dish)

For one reason or another but mainly by choice, my father followed a simple lifepath deviating from a comfortable life in a growing estate and chose to raise his family by his own sweat albeit under the same roof much to the chagrin of my ambitious grandfather. Somehow, their relationship soured for some reason and I have very vague memories of a tightly knit, loving family. Underneath the holiday gatherings and photo ops, what appeared to be an ideal family was slowly getting fragmented.

As a distinguished traveling salesman he spent most of the week away from home and Sundays at the bloody cock fights. We saw very little of him and if we did, there was an apparent avoidance on our part as the relationship revolved around how we were doing in school and our general disposition. Mischiefs were meted with spankings and ear splitting down talk. He justified his correctional posturing that he might as well spend the little time he had with us straightening us up. Somebody had to do the dirty job he would say.

Although I cherished the trips when he would take me, we were very much on our own with him to his driving and selling and me to my vista seeing and day dreaming. We did not even have birds and the bees stories as once provoked by a song that I would sing over and over until he blurted “Stop singing that song!” to my innocent bafflement. The song?

Darling do you love me?

Don’t tell anybody,

We’ll make a baby

Under the mango tree…

It was only after my sexual awakening that I realized what got him so peeved. Well, I thought the least he could have done was explain it and not just throw it out the window and ordering me to shut up. I wonder how he would have reacted if he heard this nursery rhyme version;

Jack and Jill went up the hill

to get a pail of water

We don’t know what they did there

but now they have a daughter….

My father must have had high expectations of me. It seriously got to his skin when I faltered and failed. There was no intellectual coaching or personalized tutoring then. Only boot camp discipline. And boy did that fire up the rebel in me. We had a volatile relationship that got me confusing him between friend or foe. I once had a chance to ask him why he was so hard on me and he replied that I had the raw material for it…and he explained it by saying that a good sword withstood the searing furnace and immense pounding of the hammer. You will know the quality once it is tested against other swords. Uh ok…duh.

Not all was that bad. He spent as many days as it took to find me a good tempered horse. Brought home bales of grass and a good saddle. He patiently escorted me by car when I rode on the national road to a farm where we deposited the horse on school days. We helped each other with his local tire business and mowed the lawn together. He brought the family to the beach and took me to the deep end. He got us bikes and toys, shined our shoes and taught us how to drive. We opened a gas station together upon his retirement only to part ways because of conflict of management styles. It was the longest period we spent together but he was flabbergasted to find out how much I reminded him of his own father whom he apparently detested and who in many ways influenced me more than he did (Part 2). He invited me back home when I got married (asked for the rent we would otherwise have paid someone else) and enjoyed my wife’s cooking. He attempted to eject a building tenant and bought equipment so that we could put up our own restaurant. It never materialized but rather complicated our lives even more.

Life with him was an emotional roller coaster ride. At the height of our estranged relationship and my new life as a father, I found a dire need to talk to him but we had avoided each other for so long already that it was awkward to even ask for a conversation until one day we crossed paths and pleasantly smiled at each other. “Finally a window of opportunity!” I said to myself and promised to talk to him the minute I finished my regular afternoon walk.

I excitedly came home to a quiet house but was asked to proceed to the hospital. My father had been gruesomely murdered in our garage. He succumbed to 24 stab wounds. I counted them myself and noted the ritual wounds. There were arm wounds from deflecting the attack, one almost severing his hand at the wrist. He must’ve been downed by the hard blow to his head then the coup de grace…both temples pierced, five wounds to the heart and four in the kidneys, a gash across his lips. Someone indeed wanted him dead and silenced.

Because of our circumstances, I was the prime suspect and had to undergo lie detector tests and series of harrassing interrogations which in my mind was leading to self incrimination and a confession. How can you describe your relationship with your father? Have you ever had thoughts of wanting him dead? Have you ever thought of killing him? Do you like knives? How do you rate your temper? What is your financial situation? OMG are they making me dig my own grave? Luckily the physical evidence proved otherwise. Until today, some people apparently believe I did my dad in. Sometimes I wonder if I did so in a parallel universe.

We never got to talk about what went wrong between fathers and sons. Grandpa, him and me. At least, our last images of each other while still alive were the pleasant smiles we exchanged on the road that fateful afternoon. Somehow I’d like to think it meant we understood each other.

I have two sons and a grandson. Now I know what went wrong. My passion is to see the pattern (curse?) broken. I am finding it to be a formidable task.

Apparently, we only get to understand our fathers and grandfathers when we become one.

Happy Father’s Day Dad.

Thanks so much for forging me the way that I am.

7/52 Summer Love

They would be empty most of the year and come to life during the Summer and Christmas Holidays. Summer houses are usually very large homes with at least six rooms and it is not unusual to have quite a few with a dozen or more large rooms to accommodate a clan of shrieking cousins and their guests.

I had a few favorites down by the road from where I lived and a few up on the different hills doting the city. I would either ride by on my horse or drive by as soon as school broke off for the summer and see if any of the houses would have come alive by then.

The Country Club usually signals the coming of summer as guests begin to arrive and fill the rooms, restaurants, and recreation areas. The bowling alley, pool and pingpong corners are the usual teen hangouts where one would pick up who’s in town and who’s throwing the next party, soiree or bonfire. In those days, there were no decent teen bars, clubs and dance halls and it was not unusual to have a few gatherings going on in the same night giving the opportunity to enter those ghostly summer houses by party hopping. By the time I left town to explore other cities I have practically enjoyed the hospitality of all the prominent homes in my hometown.

The city would come alive only during this two major holidays of the year. Parks would get filled with the latest models of cars and motorbikes, buses and jeepneys would spill out every imaginable kind of local and international blend of the human specie. The city would be transformed into a lowland enclave with visitors outnumbering the locals.

Aside from the regular holiday visitors that kept summer homes or membership at the club, there would be new faces that would stand out from the familiar crowd and be an object of curiosity. For these new comers, the cliche “when did you arrive?” seldom applied but the rather warm and coy “is this your first time here?” would surely start a conversation and strike an acquaintance as the chances of having a mutual friend in the vicinity is inevitable. It would be followed by the usual where do you stay..where do you study…do you know…what are you doing tonight string of questions. This starts off a sequence of daily visits, city tours and weekly parties that would introduce everyone to everyone. By the middle of summer (which is quite late actually), everyone would be more than familiar enough with each other and pairs rather than groups would begin to dominate the social scene as the infamous Baguio fever would strike.

While lowlanders would fill the upland city, there would be windows where we in turn would escape and get away from the maddening crowd. The family would head off to the beach where much like the summer mountain city, the beachfront was dotted with private homes that would fill up with very much the same composition of relatives and friends. A similar routine of bonfires and soirees brought people together and unlike the city bug that would take weeks to sink in, the beach bug bit almost instantly. It must be the beachwear and almost bare nakedness that made pairing more conducive.

I had a few of my own summer loves, from neighbors to family friends, acquaintances at the country club and the unavoidable kissing cousins to beach flings. By college they would have come from cross enrollees that took summer classes as an excuse to be away from home or maybe really up to get out of the lowland summer heat and have a breath of cool mountain air all the while getting bit by the love bug. Unable to shake of the virus, a few would extend their stay by enrolling for the following year and the next.

Towards the end of summer, separation anxiety starts to sink in and an air of melancholy fills the air as “When are you leaving” becomes the byword. There are no goodbyes and hasta la vistas. “When are you coming back” is nothing but a dumb question surely to be met with “next summer if we don’t go abroad”. A sudden lifeless neighborhood and community of empty houses and quiet recreation halls simply signals the end of a flurry of events that will fill the mind for a few weeks until the local routine takes its place. I find myself bowling and swimming in the pool alone with echoes of the recent summer chaos still bouncing between my ears. A few attempts to write love letters in hand crafted stationery ends up in the trash knowing that she (they) will be back next summer.

Every summer seems to make me a different person. The diverse experiences brings about a new worldview that binds me to new relationships but apparently isolates me from ones that I’ve outgrown. As I evolve and make friends with new minds, I outgrow the familiar and become a stranger to it. There are times when I savor the sweetness of the innocent past and yet surrendering to its memory, knowing that sweeter memories are still in the making.

I may not have lost my virginity in any of those summers but I definitely lost my innocence with each passing season.

6/52 College Sports

College is never college without competitive sports. At 5′11″ it was a given that I try out for the varsity team whether I knew how to play basketball or not. My height was all it took to get me to wear the school colors and all I had to do was get on top of everybody, grab the ball, land and pass it on. I never learned to dribble and bring the ball down. I tried but lost the ball all the time. I made enough points to get cheers, missed a lot to get booed and started fights to everyone’s chagrin.

After getting enough of elbows and scuffles in college varsity basketball, I stepped back somehow until I found the fun of solo and non contact sports in tennis. I took on a private coach and learned the rudiments of the sport from John Newcombe books and Tennis magazines. I woke up early and bashed balls all morning. It didn’t take long before I found myself on the court all day, sometimes through the night. I learned the difference between shell, concrete and asphalt surfaces…on sunny and rainy days. Yes we played in the rain too. My feel for the ball got so sensitive I would use two cans a day to keep my consistency as the ball pressure diminished. I bashed balls so incredibly well, I began setting my sights for Wimbledon and creaming Jimmy Connors (yes that’s him up there). Soon, I neglected my studies in favor of tennis and that got the ire of my dad. End of ambition, left home and struck it out on my own.

It was by coincidence that an International Tennis Tournament was going to be held in Manila that year featuring Ilie Nastase, Bjorn Borg, Yvonne Goolagong and Martina Navratilova. I can’t recall if Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert was there too but anyway, I couldn’t afford the tickets so I cringed at the thought of missing such an important event.

As serendipity would have it, I met the event organizer through a friend and they needed some ‘technical’ help (which ended up as sales) and I got a job in the tournament for meager pay but allowed me to see the games for free. So that solved my dilemma. My job was to distribute 300,000 numbered tickets to outlets all over the city. It took me a week to sort it out and come up with a systematic distribution and tracking system. The day before distribution, I reviewed the tickets and to my shock, someone shuffled the tickets like a deck of cards. Dates, seat numbers and sections were all mixed up. I had to redo the whole thing in less than 24 hours. Someone was out to make a fool of me. We never found out who it was but I have a strong suspicion on who the jerk was…someone who wanted my assignment and didn’t get it. I got the job done but learned my first lesson at work…secure your work.

So there. From Wimbledon pfft down to playing at local clubs and teaching tennis briefly…soon the itch was gone. Was it ever there in the first place? Talk about aborting ambition.