By Rex Catubig

 

IT’S 7:30 pm at a corner crosswalk in Dagupan City. The traffic light on the perpendicular side had just turned green and the one at the corner of AB Fernandez I was facing, had turned red and started the countdown from 60 seconds. It was a long wait to cross. Perhaps long enough for me to recall the halcyon days when this trapik as the intersection is commonly referred to, made us wonder if it would ever have a traffic light.

Back then, at this time, this junction would have been no man’s land. Except for the hoofbeats of a horse-drawn calesa, the city would have been past asleep. And even with the amber light on some street posts, the place would have retreated under the cover of darkness. There were no overnight sidewalk vendors selling pirated cd’s. Only an itinerant balut vendor’s euphonious holler pierced the silent city that had ground to a halt.

Not many ventured out this far across the Quintos Bridge in the dead of the night. Unless one was taking the last trip of the Pantranco around the bend on the Herrero side or transporting a patient to the Pangasinan Provincial Hospital on the Arellano end.

But we headed this way to go to the PNR station to catch the midnight train on our nocturnal excursion to San Carlos. A theater member of ours lived there. She is a scion of the prominent Samson family that had pioneered in the making of cassava pudding. That glutinous cake paired with rich arroz caldo lured us to this neck of the woods.

It was one of those juvenile spur-of-the-moment adventures, when we needed to cross boundaries to break the tedium of rehearsals at our environmental theater setting on the burned site of DCHS.

That would take us to evening bonfires along the Summer Place seashore in Bonuan Blue Beach, where we watched with fascination the fluorescent minute sea creatures lighting up the clear waters. At other times, we would go the extra mile, venture out of town.

We would go to San Carlos. But we would stay no more than a fraction of an hour. We had to run fast before 1 am, to catch the last train back to Dagupan. Crossing the distance and making it was a challenge to be won.

Taking the window seats on the empty coach, the train’s chug-chugging along its tracks in the middle of nowhere, would rock and lull our tired bodies to rest. But the rush of cold night wind blowing on our faces, would whip our thoughts into a frozen moment iced with rapturous reverie.

We were children again as time chilled.

Just then, the hypnotic blinking numerics of the traffic light stopped; and the red spot switched to green with the stick figure poised to walk.

I had to cross in time. Just 60 seconds, a minute in life. But it spans the long meandering distance between then and now–reduced to a brisk walk across the white striped pedestrian crosswalk.

I had to rush, with cane and an osteoarthritic knee. I had to catch up with life that runs on without waiting. One cannot be left behind. One has to keep pace with the green light, else if it stops right when you are in the middle of the crosswalk, you get thrown at the mercy of the volley of vehicles. Time is merciless. When the green light suddenly turns red, you could be bumped off from the face of the earth..

I made it in time to the other side, without being ferried by Charon. The other side is where I catch a tricycle ride to Babaliwan by the river Calmay – where sits idly and forlorn, the remnant of the Franklin Bridge. It’s the historic bridge that links memories of the past with the present, with the future dangling at the edge where the bridge is broken.

It’s one more crossing across life.

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