Remembering!
By Jing Villamil
START with the black-and-white pictures you yourself hand glued on stiff pages of thick, heavy hard-bound albums. Summer beaches, our sandy fingers spooning adobo, bangus, pakbet while shivering in bathing-suits home-sewn by Mom. Weekend movies for free in your Dagupan cousins’ theaters; ice cream afterwards in karton-packs cut in equal halves. Iced coke in red thermos and kalkalaotit for the far-city visits to Mom’s Chinese hospital, then bottled Magnolia chocolaits for treats.
Mint candies in red wrappings perfectly pitched to us through windows. Plump duck you soaked in beery pineapple, fish swimming in mayonnaise!
Clinic walls of books, diplomas, plaques, preserved diseased body parts; your creaky swivel chair, tincture-tinted fingers, and whiffs of penicillin and eucalyptine.
Stories of a sad childhood, a lonely life before us. Though, you were happy in UP (but not with schoolmate Ferdie)! Tales of frisky spirits, ghostly white ladies. And scolding elementals riding with you, from which from whom, in exasperation, you flew your army jeep beyond three field squares landing with no scratch, four wheels intact! This we saw.
And many more of these memories to make a book, a series!
Your love not said but made felt every day to gray. Quiet forgiveness in the tap on our tousled heads, shoulders. No hugs – germs! Afternoon walks holding hands with the child of your child.
What tears us still is never knowing how and where you were in the end, what happened, where you now lay. But, dearest one, our hearts will always know and remember: you and our forever yesterdays.
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