Daddy's Tales

I love it when my dad talks about his happy childhood memories. Over dinner he told me how Lola Nene brought him and his siblings aboard a trailer attached to Lola’s jeep, to Darabulbol. Yup, catchy name, just had to write it down.

Anyway, Lola Nene was my dad’s tita. Her family had a piece of land in Darabulbol (sorry, just had to say it again) in Concepcion, Tarlac. They grew sugarcane. And during harvest season, she’d bring my dad, his brothers and sisters and cousins along as she transported the harvest from…Darabulbol…to Hacienda Luisita to be processed. It would usually take a few hours for it to be done, so she’d make a side trip and bring along my dad and company to the nearby river for a swim.

Oh how his eyes light up when he talks about those good ‘ol days. And he’d always laugh when he’d talk about that time when he and Tita Angge went fishing on that same river. They were so excited to use their fishing rods that they failed to exercise much care in handling the potentially dangerous, but seemingly harmless-looking hook on a long rod. I forgot whose lips or cheek got caught in those hooks when Tita Angge whipped up the fishing rod too far back—hooking an unaware cousin in the process. Must’ve been painful, but for a bunch of 7 or 8 year olds on a summer vacation, it must’ve been so funny that it sent them on a laugh trip all the way back home to San Fernando. I guess it wasn’t that big an injury. None of them grew up to be Scarface.

Or that story about that time when they’ve grown tired of flying their kites, that they rested on the haystacks…not really haystacks but stacks of palay and they pulled at the harvest, eating some bits like butong-pakwan, up until the owner realized that there were intruders playing on his ricefields.

I suddenly remembered those times my cousins and I tried to catch dragonflies and grasshoppers. And that time when Joy, Chito, and I think LA too, found a huge pile of carabao dung on the road. We used grass stalks to draw on it and turn it into a mighty foul-smelling, but cute, birthday cake. We were careful not to touch it though. Who would’ve thought you could have so much fun when life brings along a huge pile of shit?

It’s a pity my nephews and nieces can’t have these same stories. Them with their PSPs and DS. But I guess they’ll have their own stories to look back on when they’re this age. I just hope I could do the same things for them, as those my daddy did for me.

Suddenly I feel I ought to write a piece on mommy as well. But that’s a whole new article altogether. Just as happy, and just as filled with love.