School Days Are Here Again

Pre-Kinder

School has just recently started…

One of my most favorite activities at the start of the school year is buying School supplies…

Yes, you heard me…school supplies.

Not the first day of school…
Not meeting the new teachers…
Not even seeing my friends…

… Even more than starting to receive weekly allowances again. (Finally… after two whole months of being absolutely broke!!!)

Definitely NOT the homework.

School Supplies.

Mom would give us a budget and all of us would trek on to National Bookstore to choose our school supplies for the year.

Everyone would have a list. So many regular notebooks, one math, a few black and blue pens. One red (optional)….in case you are obsessive compulsive (like me and Lynette) and need a red pen in order to check your classmate’s quizzes when the teacher says “Exchange papers with your seatmate and check their answers”

There were the various sizes of pad paper, whole, halves, one thirds (which were one half of a whole sheet, only cut vertically… I know…weird for school lingo…I guess to distinguish them from the one which were cut horizontally in half. ) and of course, fourths.

Then highlighters. Yellow, blue, green, pink… whatever was the desired at the time.

Lots and lots of plastic wrapping and tape of course.

Pencils, brown envelopes, large plastic envelopes, pencil cases, erasers, pentel pens, and the huge bags…more like luggage actually.

For myself, I would get my favorites which were the blue Corona Spiral notebooks which had just the right amount of space between the lines and the actual lines were stick straight and light grey colored and not distracting in the least.

I like the Intermediate brand of pad papers. The pens must be panda and highlighters were Stabilo (which I in fact didn’t buy since Sammy used to give them to me for my birthday…she got it from her mom who got them from lalalalala) Stabilos were too expensive. Normally, I used those dermatograph pens. The waxy colored crayon things wrapped in strips of paper… the ones which had a string attached on its side? You pull the string to “sharpen” the paper?

Pencils must be Mongol number 3, erasers were whatever the current shape was “in” at the time, the rulers were the ones with the light blue plastic jacket. Bond paper, the best kind was and still is Corona bond paper.

On a side story, when I was in grade school, my teacher would ask us to bring over coppon bond for the next days assignment. I would go home, call up Mom from IH and ask her to bring me the paper that started with the letter C. I could never remember the entire name, so when asked what I wanted, I would tell ma that I needed some paper tat started with C. So Mom would bring home some from lalalala. And I’d proudly go to school with an entire packet of paper. When I get there, for some reason, everyone’s paper would be white, and mine would always be black.

Carbon Paper.

Well, it did start with a C.

This happened so often that if I rummage around a bit, I’m sure I still have a couple of packets of in my filing cabinet.

When we were young though, one of the things we didn’t look forward to a whole lot was buying the black school shoes.

At the time, the one and only shoe that was acclaimed by one and all, for its quality, its sturdiness and durability was Gregg shoes.

Gregg shoes at San Juan.

Where there was a rarity of parking all the time.

Its main boast was its durability.

Durability…

The parents lauded it that was its best quality

For the kids though, that was actually its worst fault…

Gregg shoes were in fact, virtually indestructible…meaning so long as your feet did not grow much, you kept that shoe forever and ever.

And if the parent was lucky, and the child unlucky…

Their next child would grow into what the first child has grown out of.

A little shoe polish, a new sole and it was virtually brand new.

That never happened to me though…because Jo Ann hated those shoes.

First Day

She once wanted a new one so bad that she did whatever she could think of to try to destroy those shoes, she dragged them around, threw them all over the place. Banged things on them, and tried to tear them to pieces. No success. They were Gregg shoes.

She just had to wait till she outgrew them.

By the time she did, I had started school in JASMS and since they had no uniforms, I wore sneakers all the time.

High school was when our preference of shoes changed. I started buying Bandolino shoes. It was soft and cushy and comfortable. They looked really well too.

But as in all things, they had one minor fault.

They squeaked…

A lot.

In a parade of students going to the canteen at recess, you could tell who were wearing Bandolino shoes because of all the squeaking. It was the same pitch, tone and duration.

Everyone knew everyone else who had them.

It was almost a secret club…hear a squeak, look up, and give each other a wink and a smile.

“Bandolino shoes…right?”


I haven’t seen those in a long time. There is no one around here who still has to wear standard black school shoes.

Bandolino Shoes

I wonder if they ever got those fixed.

Father’s Day

I once asked dad, what heaven was like

I was about seven then, still wearing those blue flowery dusters which Mama used to buy us from Divisoria.

He was seated at the kabisera of our old Dining room table.

He said. “Just like this.”

“Mama and Papa, Tatay, and Nanay, your Mom and I would be there. We would all be seated at the dining table and we would be eating the most delicious food you can ever imagine.

We would have lechon and steak and spaghetti, chicken and Mama’s pancit Molo, Turkey, chocolate cake, lamb chops, spinach soufflé, roast pork, dim-sum, prime rib… “

And he just went off on a prolonged journey of enumerating his most favorite foods which he would eat in heaven.

That's what heaven is for Dad.

He just loves food.

Now don’t get me wrong, he’s not all about food. You already know about the singing and the obsession with teaching us to speak in English when we were little. He likes opera on occasion. He was the one to introduce us to the pleasure of watching plays and musicals. He likes golf, war movies, assorted other sports like Basketball and Football, and ok, ok, so also and including looking through Victoria Secret Catalogues. What do you expect? I didn’t say he was a saint you know.

But still, he just loves food. It’s high up there on the list of things that are so much a part of who he is.

I suppose some of this was due to the lack of food during the war.

He once ate Bibingka during the war. Mama used to cook some up for them to eat. They were living in Malolos at the time. After a visit to Manila, Papa took them bibingka that he had purchased there. Dad tasted it and said that they were enormously good. When he asked Mama why Papa’s bibingka was so much better than the ones they had at home, Mama replied because Papa’s had eggs and butter and other goodies in it that weren’t available in abundance during those times and thus were omitted from her recipe.



Once, on Christmas, Dad, Tito Jun and Tito Nonoy were given an egg as their present. They were so happy. I asked why, since getting an egg from Santa didn’t seem like a nice present to get, he said it was because eggs were so scarce during the war, and so were extremely valuable.

All that was available at that time were those dried and powdered eggs which you add water to. I’m not sure but I guess you add water and mix…kind of like powdered milk? Anyway the only things they could be used for was scrambled eggs. I guess you kind of got sick of eating that day in and out.

I’ve been eating brown rice these days. Mainly for the nutrition’s sake…you know, fiber and stuff. Dad saw me eating it and said that they used to have to eat that during the war.
Bad memories I guess. He’ll stick to eating white rice.

His favorite cookie is the ‘Nilla wafers, his favorite chocolate are Butterfingers. Why? Because those were the ones that the American soldiers handed out to the kids at the end of the Second World War.

When we were young, and whenever we got sick, ( Eric had asthma a lot, as did I, or maybe I already had early signs of pulmonary hypertension… my asthma was not the same kind as Eric’s) he would give us a call from the office asking us what we wanted him to bring home for us.

It was generally chocolate. It was so very rare in those days.

Dad would come home with a large bar of chocolate for the sick kid and two smaller bars for the other two (Lynette and Laurie was not in existence yet. ;-) )

It was always the big giant sized Hershey’s chocolate bar… and I think the other two would be Cadbury’s chocolate.

Those lasted a long time…specially when hoarded carefully in the freezer. It was ever so carefully hidden from sight… so no one would sneakily eat it behind our backs.

Still, these days, when someone is sick, Dad comes in bearing chocolates.

Mama’s favorite Turtles (which she used to cut into fours to make them last longer), Whitman’s sampler (which was used by all the teenaged boys during dad’s days to impress the women), Baby Ruth’s (which was mom’s favorite because of all the peanuts) and his own favorite Butterfingers (which is now available as a hot peanut-buttery chocolate drink) and the current flavor of the month Almond Roca (with the newly released Mocha Roca and Cashew Roca) which I still have an abundance of.

(Want some?)

Whenever someone would travel out of the country, Dad would provide us a list of where to eat and what we should order.

Each time he or anyone else goes home, before talking about what we saw or who we met, we talked about what we ate and how good it was.

When we came home from a trip and asked Raymond to transfer our video to VHS tapes, Timmy, his son, stayed to watch with him, and he asked Raymond...”Why are they just eating all the time?” We generally stopped everything to document meal times. Half of a roll of film would be just pictures of our food before and during and after we eat it.

On a trip to Hong Kong, Dad had perused the menu to decide what foods to eat… he ordered this and that and this again. After a few orders, the waiter looked at him and actually said. “No more. That’s enough… No more food for you.” Then he took the menus and left.

I mean really.

And as everyone is currently at President’s at China Town, eating Dad’s ultimate favorite Chinese foods, from his ultimate favorite Chinese restaurant, I sit down just to write and greet him...

Happy Father’s Day Dad!!!

We love you.

Last day of summer

We had a Last Day of Summer party last Friday. Just me, Ara, Bessie, and Christian. We had one last Marathon game day before putting our games away in its closet.

I sent out these as invitations.

Invite


I know I know…so we all live in the same compound. But I wanted a dress-up party so I “formally” invited them to it. Otherwise it wouldn’t be an “event” it would be an “I’m bored let’s play a game thing” and we have those every couple of days.

Also, I usually put out the board games at the start of summer. It’s placed right in plain view. A little messy but accessibility is important. You notice how when you’re bored and you have nothing to do, it usually also means it’s an “I’m feeling too sluggish to even reach out for the remote” kind of thing? Anyway, when the games are already out there, you feel as if half of the job is done. Just pick it up and play. Kind of like when you get someone to hand you the remote and now all you have to do is push a button and watch television.

At the end of summer, I have all the board games packed up and put into a closet. The reason is because one, it is such a mess when they are just out there in the open, and two, with the kids going home, there’s really no one available to play the games with anyway.

Since the three are now going to start their first year of College, and the summer semesters would make long boring summer vacation days few and far between. I decided to have a summer game marathon to “seal” the memory.

One day twenty years from now they’ll sit down and say, “Remember the time when Ate Leslie and we used to….. She was so weird.”

Ok... I admit it. Check my profile…what does it say?

Why else do you think I sit down and write these things up?

So anyway, I sent out the invitations, and scheduled the events.

4:30pm Cites and Knights of Catan
7:30pm Turbo Cranium
9:00pm Texas Hold’em Poker

And of course, everyone had to get dressed up. Anything poker-ish would do.

Here we are. Can you guess what we came as?

Me

Ara

Bessie

Cristian

Sirit na?

I came as a Cowboy. You know? Poker as played in Western movies or in the movie Maverick? Ara came as the Joker in a deck of cards, I think. Cristian came as one of the professional Poker players in the Tournaments we see on TV, and I don’t know Bessie’s explanation of her costume. She had a faux fur raccoon cap on. Hmmm, maybe she came as the furry velvet cloth that lines the tops of Poker tables...or maybe she thought since I was coming as a Cowboy, she’ll come as a trapper and be somewhere in the same era. I really have no idea. She came out all pretty though.

We started a little late, and our Catan game went on a little too long. We had hotdogs and pizza, squid balls, popcorn and brownies, which we munched on as we played.

Ara won that particular game.

Catan

Laurie and Josh came to play Cranium with us. It was hilarious. We got Cristian miming a belly dancer one time. I have a video of it. Funny, funny, funny.

At the end, Bessie and I won over Josh and Ara and Cristian and Laurie, who came in second.

Cranium

The poker game went on all night. I quit early. I was tired out. No point in winning anyway since I was the one giving the grand prize of one thousand pesos. The other three tried their hardest. They were tired and sleepy but they wouldn’t stop and forfeit the prize. As I left, Cristian was winning, then later he was losing to the two girls. Ara finally lost at around 3 PM. Then it was just Bessie and Christian. The game finally ended at around 4:30.

Bessie won.

Cristian immediately pressed her to buy him a new pair of shoes. She being Ate and all. She may, or may not... I don’t know.

Poker

It was a half a day-er. Can you imagine…sitting on your butt for 12 hours straight?

That’s the last of those board games. I had them packed away the very next day. Hopefully, next year we’d be able to take them out again.

Goodbye summer.

Tomorrow School officially starts.

Retreat

Laurie is going on retreat tomorrow.

In high school, we used to have them every single year. We would overnight in a different retreat house, the priest would be different and so were the ultimate message they wanted us to learn. So, each year, you never knew what "kind" of a retreat it was going to be.

There were the crying ones where they guilt you as soon as you get there and make you realize you're such a bad, ungrateful, and insignificant person and you're so lucky God loves you still, and then,there were the ones where you are welcomed with open arms. You get there, and you are you, and God sees who you are entirely, and loves you so, so, so much and is so happy that you came for a nice long visit with him.

They all end up the same way of course, it’s the delivery that is different. You leave the place and you're happy, you feel at peace, you are thankful for everyone and everything, and you go home behaving like a perfect angel...for at least a couple of days.

So basically, what I'm saying is, Laurie, when you get home, can you please make me Choco-hot-o-pots?

he he he he...

Devil-woman.

For some reason, a lot of my memories about retreats involve food. I don't know whether they thought a well nourished body makes for a well nourished soul or that the constant internal struggle involved in the process made people hungry. Whatever the case, there was always, always, food around.

The places we used to stay in had five different meal times. Breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, merienda, dinner, then, in case you get hungry after dinner, they put out mini snacks and hot water with Milo or instant coffee in a corner outside the dorms.

This is where I learned to appreciate really good Batangas Coffee. The barako kind. Dark back, sweet smelling, no milk added and hot hot hot. I can see it now, on the tables in the retreat houses. One entire stainless steel kettle, just for you. Mmmmm.

Add to all of that, the massive amount of snacks everyone else brings to the retreat. Cookies, chocolates, brownies, cheese curls, Pringles and Jack and Jill Chippy. All of which we would eat in the dorms despite the strict prohibition against food in the sleeping areas.

It’s a good thing we were all teenagers and had hyper metabolisms. I had just one retreat in college, and I came home after three days three pounds heavier.

There were and are of course, always Ghost stories which abound in the retreat homes. It may be because the places are all old, or maybe it is because of the hundreds and hundreds of the weeping repentants who go through these places, whose teenaged sobs echo silently in the night, or maybe it is because of the abnormal silence of reflection…the unease of staying in a strange place, or just the lack of normal sounds we are so used to hearing, like the humming of the refrigerator, the lack of radios blaring nor the ever present and constant chatter of television shows.

Whatever the cause, you could feel it… just as the sun goes down. A sudden eerie goose-pimply feeling…and suddenly, you can’t go the bathroom without dreading that you may see or hear something there. Every flittering bit of light, any sudden flutter of the curtains, causes you to have a strange feeling of sourness in your stomach, a knot like tightening in your chest, and a chilly coldness right at the back or your neck.

One time I was in Tagaytay in a retreat house right on top a very high cliff. The dorm we had was basically a large room where plywood walls separated rows of cubicles. The top couple of feet from the ceiling remained open. In the middle of the room was a wide hallway. It separated the four rows of cubicles into two sides. The backs of the cubicles formed two solid walls running the entire length of the hallway.

The first night was uneventful, a trifle quiet but no biggie. The second night though, was another matter. I suddenly awoke in the middle of the night. I heard a clunking grating sound which was slowly going back and forth through the length of the hall. It was a grinding, stumbling, creaking sound. I was on the top bunk and I thought of maybe just sitting up and peering down through the darkness to see what it was, but then again, my waist wouldn’t bend, so I decided… maybe not.

So I lay on the bed, breathing weirdly as silently and as normally as I could. I hear the dragging go back and forth, up and down, the hallway, and back again. It moves very slowly, like a night watchman walking up and down his post. Creeking, stumbling, swishing. I lay there all night, forcing my eyes shut. I would hold my breath whenever the sound would pause a bit. I didn’t want to see it. Nope, nope. I just kept on pretending I was sound asleep…trying to convince myself I wasn’t hearing a thing.

Maybe an hour or so after, when the sun started shining through the windows, and the room was filled with enough light, I was finally able to gather up my courage to look down at the hall. And just at the moment I was finally able to tell myself nothing happened in the night someone fearfully asked “did anyone else hear that?”

Everyone did, and like me, everyone tried to ignore it the best we could . We all laid as silently as possible, all awake hearing the stumbling sound go back and forth the hallway.

We never did find out what it was. The next night we never heard a thing.

There were more pleasant memories that happened during retreats too. My favorite retreat was during my third year in high school. It was the year when my barkada encompassed about one third of the classroom. We were all chummy and were very, very close.

some of us

We went to Antipolo, in a monastery, along with our favorite theology advisor, Sister Erlinda. She who was the most worldly of all the nuns I have met. She was pretty, and giddy, and according to her, the belle of the ball when she was younger. She professed she was vain, and had all the boys following her around. Her family had laughed at her when she told them she was going to be a nun. They couldn’t believe it. Nor could the droves of boys who paid court to her. According to her, her suitors could not stop themselves from barging into the convent in order to try to convince her to change her mind.

As she entered her novitiate, She told us she bought a years supply of Ivory soap for her face. At the time, Ivory could only be bought in Cash and Carry. It was imported and came in double bars stuck together. They were required to bring a years supply of basic needs for their year’s seclusion during the first year of her training. Little did she know that the supplies that they were required to bring were communal. She said she never saw one bar of that soap again. It was probably intentional though, they wanted to train the women out of their personal vanities. She had cried buckets when they cut her long silky black hair off. She hated the nun who “viciously” chopped off her hair and couldn’t make herself forgive the nun for ever so long.

She was a gentle and sweet and she really understood why we were the way we were. I think her girlishness was so much a part of her that you saw her before you realize she had a habit on. Unlike other nuns whose habits identify who they are and close contact is needed before you see the different personalities within.

Anyway, it was the first time we were in a monastery. There were all these monks and a lot of seminarians who went about with hooded cloaks and rope belts, and silently went throughout their day with bowed heads.

Side: I’m really glad I came from a coed grade school, where I was grew up with the same boys year after year. Boys were not alien to me. My classmates in high school, who spent their entire lives separated from boys went gaga at sight of a male figure. Once I saw a group go crazy over the sight of a guy, the top of whose head ( the top mind you ) they spotted from four floors up. They craned their heads from the windows all excitedly.

It was weird.

So we were in this monastery. And there was this one monk whose bowed head showed his very very red lips. That’s all you could see. Just his lips. He drove the girls mad. Even as she listened to the giddiness of her girls, Sister Erlinda knew exactly what was bothering them “the brother with the red, red lips?” she asked, as she had noticed him earlier. The girls drove him mad too, and not in a good way. They would drop pens and pencils just in front of him as he passed by. Just so they could bend down and peer up at his bowed head

Once, he was in the canteen standing on one side of the door with a jug of water. His role was kind of like a manual water fountain, silently pouring water into glasses that were presented to him for refills. The girls almost drowned themselves trying to chug down their water so they could get another look at him. I mean really… I think the poor boy had to fill up his jug 5 or 6 times during the course of a mid morning snack.

I think that was the last straw though. After that, the monks sent him to kitchen duty and confined him to where he was hidden from the retreatants. He had apparently begged the elder monks to be relieved of the duty, and the monks finally relented and assigned him another post. He was too much of a distraction anyway.

The monks were a strange species to us. It was hard to conceive that they kept themselves secluded and silent and constantly in prayer.

I remember that this was precisely the time for the coup d' etat near the Camelot hotel. The one that nearly succeeded? A few of the parents went up all the way to Antipolo to pick some of the kids up. It was at a time when such revolts were still foreign to us, and as such, instilled a lot of insecurity and dread. We were in the big lecture hall room and the stress and fear level was high. Monsignor Paloma quit talking about spiritual matters and dealt with what was concerning us at the moment.

I remember him saying very calmly. “Ladies, there is no need to worry, you are at the safest place you can be. If danger comes, the brothers and I are here. We will not let anyone harm you; we will stake our lives for you because it is our duty to God. ”

It was such a nice chivalrous statement. After all who can you trust more than brothers in a monastery?

Very much knights in shining armor and evokes images of the crusades, and medieval times. Don’t you think?

So very noble…

And to a gaggle of sixteen year olds, it was sooo damned cool.

There are other stories of course, but I think I’ll save it for next time.

Laurie, I hope you’re retreat is fruitful...

And in case you’re feeling angelic when you come home…

Choco-hot-o-pots?