some things i remember

[from a letter to my cousin who lives an hour away in hostile territory]

about growing up in the 1970s and 80s... that was the kingdom of our childhood and so it will remain a sort of unreal/magical realm, no matter that we now know how much grief there actually was all around us. memory has a way of distorting and blurring events/perceptions that it is certainly impossible to capture all of that with any accuracy. though we can try, the result will of course be colored by who we are and who we have chosen to be today. there is the danger of nostalgia, even that perverted kind that makes the past to be worse than it may have actually been.

i tend to begin my nonfiction using fragments of memories. that is always the starting point. our respective childhoods had a lot of strange contradictions and i don't know if i should curse or thank the adults around us for shielding us and/or not telling us the whole story. somehow my writing, especially about papa's experiences, is my way of filling the huge gaps in those stories our titos and titas did tell us. still, no matter how much i invent, the blank spaces remain, stretch out even further, because there are still too many things they aren't willing to talk about.

it's impossible to think of my childhood in a detached manner. it will always have little hints or threads in it of my parent's separation, papa's disappearances, the many kinds and instances of abandonment, the political activities, and the many attempts (which i'll always be grateful for) of our family to fill in the holes left by my parents' absence. even when i consciously try to write generally about issues and events of that time (martial law, marcos, EDSA, my jasms years), the personal wounds and echoes of papa's politics always intrude, changing the picture just a little bit.

i assume your POV is quite different. but yes, even my citadel church memories are colored by how different my family situation was from everyone else's. do you remember for instance how we used to ride in the back of lolo's old station wagon, and how we always fought over who got to sit on those two bumps where the wheels are? i remember that you were the bossiest, and you always got one of them. there was a lot of yelling and pushing back there in those days. at least that's how i remember it. i could be making this all up.

anyway, my memory of that changed drastically when i found out that a few years before you and i were born, that same smallish space in the back of lolo's car had carried the broken bodies of three murdered boys who didn't live to be twenty. they were papa's aktibista/guerilla friends and because papa was in jail at the time, it was lolo and one of my titos (either your papa or tito R) who had to drive and pick up their bodies from the mountains of isabela.

today, those boys share a grave in the same cemetery where we buried lola (here i have a flash of R playing brahms' lullaby on his violin as she was lowered into the ground; you have no memory of that because you were in singapore that day). their tombstone was cracked and dirty and their names almost faded the first and last time i saw it. papa brought me there some years ago. i have a feeling those three never have any visitors because that day we visited, it took even papa a long time to remember where they were. they were children of peasants, he said. their parents are probably dead too. i have a feeling only three people today know they are there: papa, your papa/tito R, and me. i would like to think i am wrong in thinking this.

lolo probably doesn't remember those three boys because he doesn't really remember much anymore. he actually thought he turned 73 today instead of 83 (he did his math calculations wrong). we all had dinner at superbowl gateway this evening and i asked papa what gift we could give lolo. he said: lolo needs a memory stick, a flash drive. i asked: pwede na ba yung 512 kb? papa said: kulang yun, kelangan niya 4 gig at least! haaay... if only it were that easy.

so there, basically that's how i write my stuff. one memory leading to so many ideas. we're actually telling the same story but from different angles. but i think your message will be heard more clearly if rendered through a more specific and personal voice, kind of like how you sound in your prayer letters, whose quietness make them all the more compelling to read.

so you ask: what was it like for me to live in the 70s and 80s? again, my simplified answers are very particular: the world was getting ugly and those who loved us tried to keep the ugliness at bay as best they could. this is what i remember:

we mostly stayed in the house instead of playing in the streets (too dangerous), we spoke in English, were taught to love books and music (we could and *did* have piano lessons during those hard times!) and learning (as a way to light up those dark days). we were taught to pray and to trust in a God who will make things right, were also made to give macopa and coins to children from the nearby squatter's areas whenever they tried (and often failed) to sing christmas carols come december. i remember they always had colds during those chilly nights and had crusts of dried snot between their mouths and noses. many of them ran around barefoot and because they were still very young, they actually looked happy doing so.

one of my first memories of marcos: he looked like a weak wizened little monkey on TV, all wrinkles and gravity pulling the rest of his face down. his high voice quivering with effort, like a yelp in some parts of his speech, like someone was poking him. he was always seated on what looked like a wooden throne (or maybe it was a wheelchair) and i remember wondering how he was able to make every man woman and child in all the 7,000+ islands in this country under his control. we were told to eat up and think of the children in africa and biafra and negros and chernobyl, even if we were too full sometimes. we or at least i liked to listen to the grownups' conversations and they would always talk in ilocano when they knew we were listening.

i remember a lot of things but i'm not at all sure what they mean. maybe we can put our stories together, make a clearer picture. our version of what happened back then and what it could mean now that we're all a little bit older.