By Rex Catubig   SOME 2,000 years ago, an unlikely untimely birth made the biblical headlines, and subsequently became the matrix of Christianity. We are familiar with the circumstances of Joseph and Mary’s trek to Bethlehem from their home in Nazareth to comply with an edict for villagers to return…

 A patriarch’s dream, a grandson’s mission By Rex Catubig   IT’S symbolic that the remnant of the Oriental Hotel’s facade is now overgrown with weeds and shrubbery and boarded up with galvanized sheets. As if to hide from public scrutiny, the bygone life it harbors. What stories does it keep…

By Rex Catubig   IT has sat there for years: a box building or what remains of it—having rectangular portals with flat apex, the sides indented with draped corners. In earlier days, big backhoes and other heavy machinery stood on the side like sentinels watching over a mausoleum. Now, it…

By Rex Catubig   SHE was variously viewed as intimidating, domineering, haughty. But she was also a most kind, caring, and faithful friend who valued her late husband’s associates like they were her own. And the respectful regard extended to their family, the way she extended her hospitality to this…

By Rec Catubig    I did not get to meet Pangasinan’s political luminary, Speaker Eugenio Perez Sr, who authored the charter that made Dagupan into a City, whose birthday, November 13th has been declared a Special Holiday in the province, in recognition of his pivotal role as the First Speaker…

By Rex Catubig   WITH Typhoon Marce hovering in the vicinity as if casing the surroundings, and its tentative winds blowing the dust off the cover of memories, unearthing the treasure of past remembrances, one discovers anew the coveted fossils of time, resurrecting the worn images of life pressed on…

By Rex Catubig   THE past week held us hostage in a cliffhanger situation, dreading the landfall of Typhoon Kristine, who from all accounts, is the personification of the saying: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  Close on its heels, another typhoon named Leon, like a spurned lover, was on a…

By Rex Catubig   WHEN I see Nanang, our old-maid aunt, in the kitchen, stirring black gooey Deremen in a deep kawali perched on the wood-fired clay dalikan, I know it’s Pistay Inatey—All Saint’s Day, the highlight of Ani or harvest month—when religion and folk custom meld into one celebration. Following the belief that the spirits of…

By Rex Catubig   NOTE: I’m reprising this previous column in support of the National Mental Health Awareness Month and to give a face to the menace of suicide that afflicts even the seemingly normal person, robbing the young of their power to dream and cutting short the future that…