Moments with my father

I WAS in Grade 2 when I decided to stop schooling altogether to devote the rest of my life, or to the limits of what I perceived as life at the age of 7, to play, play, and play all day.

I was cajoled by my mother, received the rod – actually the carabao whip – from my father to force me back to the classroom but the farthest I went was to the rice fields and the creeks around the Sto. Tomas Central School where my cohorts in the school-sucks-play-is-all juvenile mindset spent all hours of day.

No amount of persuasion from my mother, spanking from my father, and bribery from my doting grandmother made me go to school.

Until one day, what my young mind could only thought was a miracle happened: my father said he had acceded to my “decision” and would allow me to stay out of school permanently.

How heaven opened its very gates to me that day! Lolled for as long as I wanted in bed, actually on the dase over the bamboo-slatted lande, hardly taking any pandesal for breakfast before running off past the school grounds to my gang’s hideout nestled among camachile and palapat trees by a bend of a river called Lacbangan.

Swam until sawa, swang from the branches of the trees, raced with the biseros, dug for paros-paros, raided the shrimp traps called ango, and took our finds to a nearby kubo where an elderly farmer and his wife cooked them along with some biya and tilapia, that with the abundant kangkong and camias they whipped into delectable sinigang.

More play, swim, run and carabao racing till sunset bade us to go home.

The following morning, darkness was still about when father woke me up. No, he won’t ask me to go to school, he said. He handed me threadbare hand-me-downs of shorts and shirt to change to. Then told me to load bamboo poles to the banca by the creek at the back of our house.

Once loaded, he gave me an oar, nearly as tall as myself, to tandem with him in paddling the banca to the farm he tilled some 30 minutes away by muscle power.

At the farm, he told me to unload all the bamboo poles, thereafter shoved a shovel nearly as tall as the paddle to my hands, commanded me to dig foot-deep holes along the pilapil that bounded the paddy, and emplace the bamboo poles.

Grueling labor to a grown-up, hell’s punishment itself to a 7-year-old. I could barely raise the paddle on our way back home.

Despite the exhaustion, I made it a point to wake up earlier than my father the next day. He had not even gargled when I begged him not to take me to the farm again, promising to go back to school for as long as it took until I finished with a diploma.

And I have kept to my end of the bargain ever since, finishing salutatorian at my elementary graduation, salutatorian again in high school, consistent dean’s lister with a second full scholarship due my editorship of the school publication throughout college.

Rather than barked instructions of do’s and don’ts, my father’s way of educating me, as well as all his six other children, was by experiential learning. He made us feel what we had to know. And, on hindsight now, we ended up the better for it.

He did not finish grade school, and for that he suffered the harshness of manual labor. Not that he abhorred farm work; producing food to feed his brood, not to mention other people, was his elemental ideal of nobility. He just wanted, to the best he could, for as long as he could, to keep his children from the bondage of the soil that he felt he was hemmed in due to his sheer lack of school education.

That learning was his fervent wish for his children manifested the very day I was born. He made the only book available at home – a tattered dictionary long stripped of its hard covers – the pillow he rested my head upon. Maybe, that was the origin of my life-long love of reading. All too certainly though, it damned me to be a sapad for life – the back of my head is as flat as a plywood wall. Yeah, the long hair is a way of concealment first, a matter of style only second.

Intellectual arrogance fired up by the affectation of revolutionary zeal in college burned down our communication lines, especially where concerned what I decried as the native docility, the inherent timidity of his class to confront the exploitative land tenancy that damned him – and his family – to abject poverty.

In one highly charged diatribe of a monologue one night, I impressed upon him the magnitude of my activism, the criticality of my writings in the struggle to liberate him and his kind from the slavery of the soil.

He merely listened. Not a word came out of him. I hurried to bed, shaking my head.

It was nearly dawn, I reckoned, when nature called. On my way to answer, I saw the light over our dining table still on, my father hunched over copies of The Regina, our college publication I edited, his hand on the page where my column appeared. He looked at me, and smiled meekly.

How I wept at the realization of my insolence, how I hugged him for his forgiveness.

“You make me proud.” That was all that he said.

How I weep now, in remembrance of this. How I wish I can still hug him, tell him how he made me proud, how blessed his children are to have him for their father. If only for one last time. Tatang, dacal pung salamat.