Showing posts with label delusions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label delusions. Show all posts

Friday, July 20, 2012

Past Blessed the Child

It was great to be a child in those days.

On lazy afternoons, my brother Mente, my sister Nene and I made horses out of Mother’s pillows and played the Zimatar or Diego Bandido episodes which we heard over DZGE, the local radio station.

We played in the rooms upstairs, riding our pillow horses, facing our enemies and pursuing our adventures, until our Manoy Ano scolded and told us to bring the beddings—blankets, sheets and all—back to order or else Mother would call it a day when she returned. But we would play to our hearts’ content; after all, we thought Mother would be pleased because we were only playing inside the house. That way she would not really be bothered.

Some other days, in my grandparents house which we call Libod (literally, backyard), my cousins and I would play taraguan (hide and seek) and be thrilled by not easily finding all the playmates. After a while, one would give up not “seeking” the last one hidden; and find out he already left because his mother asked him to run an errand. And so we’d stop and think of other games which would thrill us.

We would then gather and tell stories we would just invent. Once, I wove a story about the pictures from a book I read until my cousins pestered me to finish it perhaps because it did not make sense perhaps because I only jumbled them.

At the time, we made our toys out of materials just available to us. We made our own toys and games and we enjoyed them. Perhaps they were cruder but we and our imaginations, not our toys, not other things, were responsible for our own enjoyment.

Our parents—aunts and uncles—did not mind especially if we were all playing in Libod. Here, left to our own devices, we devised our own games, things and stuff and in the long run, made memories which we can only consider ours. In the open yard of our grandparents’ compound, my parents ancestral house—we were free to play. The space, the time, the freedom given to us by our ginikanan (parents) allowed our imagination to create things that pleased us. And when we played our games, we did not only kill our boredom; we also made some things worth remembering.

In those days, a child’s play was also his passion, if not his “profession.” If my nephews Yman and Yzaak play their Ragnarok or Pokemon cards today, I also collected my own set of tex cards and lastiko (goma or rubber bands). In those days, to have your own box of tex cards or a string of lastiko was like to have invested well in stock market. In our time and place, these were the child’s prized possessions.

The game of tex and lastiko went side by side. For each player’s turn, we flicked three cards—my own and those of two other opponents and added up the numbers of the cards facing up. He whose cards faced up with the highest sum won. For the bets, we piled tens or twenties or even hundreds of rubber bands of grouped colors. The winner took all these wagers.
We would do this routine until someone among us knew he’s collecting the cards of all the rest. Anyone who refused to continue playing after he’d won big was called saklit. Having gained such reputation, he would be avoided by others. In my case if I began to win big, I just felt lucky if my playmates parents summoned them to run an errand or already asked them to go home. That formally excused me from gaining the “ill repute.”

In our sixth grade, my classmate Michael Arimado from Triangulo was the “official” King of Tex and lastiko, having won over every other classmate from Baybay, Iraya and even Tigman. He was undisputed. Like a small-time Mafia, Michael would hang his long string of lastiko on his neck, while he swung his sinampalok (tamarind-shape bolo) during our hawan (weeding) sessions in Mr. Olarve’s Industrial Arts class.

At recess, he would invite Edgar Bayola or Sulpicio Purcia to challenge him at the back of the Marcos Type Building. Talk of the early days of UFC. In these Days of Pre-Physical matches, Michael would win big and reclaimed his “title” now and again.

It came to me that I could be like Michael. So gradually I went to start “collecting” my own set, by playing other classmates and betting my own sets of cards and lastiko. When I became fond of tex, it wouldn’t be long till I had won my own box and some 500 pieces of lastikong sinaralapid (braided rubber bands of various colors) which I now hung like the two snakes of Zuma’s, the Aztec-inspired character I read on Aliwan Komiks.

Like my classmate Michael, I had become a self-declared King of Tex in my own right, through my own tex, sweat and cheersBut this glory would be short-lived; I would soon declare “bankruptcy” of this investment after Mother discovered my necklace-length collection of lastiko. She must have thought I was already distracted in my studies so she asked Manoy Awel to burn this “investment” one evening when he was cooking our kinusidong abo for supper. No questions asked. Barely having arrived from an errand, I tried to save them from the stove but it was too late. That night I cried the hardest and the loudest.

In those days it was great to be a child.



Friday, May 25, 2012

20 Minutes before Takeoff

Reading Leoncio Deriada’s “Airport on Mactan Island”


In Leoncio Deriada’s “Airport on Mactan Island,” a family who has lived near the Mactan airport for a decade, is presented with a number of dilemmas.

One day, the mother, unable to stand the noise of the “steel monsters” or airplanes, frets and desperately wants to leave their house. The father’s dilemma is caused only by the dilemma of the wife. His wife pressures him to consider moving out despite the lot’s sentimental value to him. He is torn between leaving the land—which he inherited—and helping his wife ease her troubles. Their son, meanwhile, is caught up with his own problem. He is exploring the possibility of getting a job in the factory and at the same time is helping his father sell guitars. He is more inclined, though, to get the job rather than help his father.

After I asked my juniors class to stage it in the classroom, three students turned in noteworthy insights, clarifying a number of realities raised by the literary work.

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In a piece titled “Just the Way It Is,” Irene Grace Lim begins, “In a usual family setup, the man’s decision is final. At times, his decision is unchangeable. We see the same in Deriada’s “Airport on Mactan Island.”

“The husband’s decision was still the final decision for their family. And although the wife was already starting to lose her mind, out of desperation she wanted to get out of that place, the husband still stood with his unshakeable decision to stay. For him, there’s nowhere to go and there’s no one interested in their land. The man said they could get used to the noise of the airport just like the way he did.

“Though his wife was already desperate, driven to leave the house and even the man she married, the man stood by his decision, which shows that essence that while woman wavers, man maneuvers, then prevails.”

Lissa Angela Suyo, meanwhile, focused on the wife’s character, labeling the piece as a matter of “Faith vs. Fate.” She writes, “Like most Filipino Christians in Cebu, the mother’s faith in the Divine Being is on the Sto. Niño. She prays fervently to the statue so that their condition will improve and so that her son’s job away from their place could somehow change their fate. Unfortunately, faith alone did not help her get what she hoped for. With her husband not cooperating, her son getting rejected, with their home daily bombarded daily, she broke down. She lost faith even in her own self that she could maintain her sanity. She was disgusted with her fate. She hoped that by being a wife, her life would change. She wanted to change their fate, but she did not take action to do that. All she did was to complain.

“The wife was so desperate for a new life that she fell apart when she found out that her son, their last chance, didn’t get the job. She believed that to live in poverty was their fate. She thought that by having faith in the Sto. Niño, her fate will change. In the end, she broke apart...she has lost faith in the Sto. Niño, which strengthened her belief that this was, indeed, her fate.”

Then, in a more sweeping effort to read the piece, Casten Guanzon writes, “Leoncio Deriada opens our eyes to some of the more overlooked aspects of the marginalized poverty, what goes on in the home. The play does not focus on poverty or exploitation but rather the domestic scene in a family whose lives have been twisted by progress. The play starts building momentum when the wife and the husband are left alone in the house and it is here that we see two things in contrast: desperation and action.”

For Guanzon, “Desperation is displayed by the wife who nags the husband to leave the place, eventually hating him as much as the airport and its demonic noise. Her husband, almost her exact opposite, is always controlled and calm in his replies except for some emotional peaks on his part. In the end, she breaks down when the Sto. Niño fails to help her son get the job ultimately failing to deliver her from her own hell. She is distraught and unstable, eventually driven to attempt desecrating the statue as her final act to stop the noise.

“But what of action? After all, is it not the wife who starts making plans and suggesting other places? Yes it is; but it is the husband who has done something and, having failed, focuses on adapting to the airport and improvising for anything in their life it has changed. The husband is the one portraying action here. He is practical. Having tried and failed to sell the land, he focuses instead on maintaining their status of life. The wife, on the other hand, is prepared to make blind leaps in her eagerness to escape that hundredth circle of hell filled with its unholy abominations of steel. She is blind to her husband's reasoning because she, in her state, does not or chooses not to see its sense.”

While Lim and Suyo recognized the distraught character in the wife and the composure of the husband, Guanzon saw the play’s binary opposites—the husband’s action and the wife’s desperation.

All of them agreed on how the dilemma of the wife, which embodies the tragedy designed by the author, is not resolved at all.

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