Think about it
A tribute to mother
By Jun Velasco
WHENEVER and however one looks for his comfort zone, the word and the warm body that is mother instantly comes to mind.
We pay homage to our beloved Nanay — the former Aurora Martinez, who marked her 82nd birthday yesterday.
Auring or Coring, to our late versatile and singing Tatay Pio, Nanay is a towering strength beneath the wings of her ten children and several apos.
Through the years — and we are now past 60 — Nanay is love incarnate we couldn’t recall a day she would be caught dropping an ill word from her lips. And never — we emphasize this with the clearest memory — has she raised a voice or used the proverbial stick to whack a misbehaving kid.
Was love, all-giving love, for that matter, her secret in raising her large abode?
We have looked far and wide all over the world, literally, to plumb the depth of her effective child-rearing method because, again, we couldn’t recall a day any one of her children quarreled.
It would be utterly fantastic, you’d say, that such a human being exists, but here is the warm body, full of beauty, divinity, love, friendship, and spirituality. We surmise it’s her all-loving heart where her strength dwells. Nanay hasn’t reached high school. Ditto with our singing Tatay.
Father was versatile on several fronts —cooking, fermenting vinegar, making coconut candy, tailoring, laundrying and dry cleaning, making Christmas decors, tending ice candy and popsicle, singing, he was second top none.
Uncle Erming wrote in a Martinez family coffee table book that Nanay fell in love with Pio because of his mellifluous renditions of Jerry Vale and Vic Damone ditties in the 50’s in Laki Peles’ store amidst a throng of admiring Malued folk. Nanay was barely 16, and he was 23. When marriage was offered, the obviously stunned Lolo was a portrait of objection not that he disliked Pio for, on the contrary he liked him a lot for being handsome, respectful, helpful and multi-talented —but because Nanay was too young.
But love conquers all, and so marriage was set to the great celebration in the barrio by Pio’s singing fans. Since their marriage, Nanay has maintained a total, all encompassing support for hubby unmindful of their modest earnings. Tatay was a regular winner in a weekly singing competition at Radio DZRI, and his number one fan was Nanay.
Up to the time father succumbed to cardiac arrest at the tender age of 63, Nanay was always a pillar of strength, cool under fire, never rattled or moved by problems which were far between. There’s in her persona a stoic character that easily reduces tough issues and the run-of-the-mill but sometimes vexing problems that confronted her — as simple detours and opportunities that get solved like a simple crossword puzzle.
Mother’s love, indeed, is the most powerful moral discipline we can give to our children. We thank our nanay for it being its living example.
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