An encounter with my 10-year-old self
In my Grammar and Stylistics class at the Graduate School of UP Los Baños, where I am currently taking my master’s degree in Communication Arts, our very first activity focused on text that shaped our writing. The exercise brought me back to my 10-year-old self, the age when I discovered that my love for words would define the path I would pursue.
As I wrote my short assignment, I encountered the younger version of me that was defiant to the hardships of life, curious about the world, and welcoming to challenges and changes. Nothing has changed. That’s still how I view world. That’s still how I deal with life. That’s still my survival kit.
The writing assignment required me to trace back the books or pieces of literature that influenced my style as a writer. I never realized that it was the same assignment that would made me celebrate my 10-year-old self as I rediscovered my style in life.
Here goes…
It was 1981. I was 10 years old.
CONTINUE READING BELOW
Two weeks before the Christmas break, Bb. Zenaida Lorenzo, my Grade 4 (section Laguna) adviser at Gulod Elementary School, told the class with reduced enthusiasm: “Who would like to join a short story writing contest? The municipio of Cabuyao is looking for entries. The winner will receive P50. The winning story will be published in Gintong Batingaw.”
I tentatively raised my hand. It was the only hand Bb. Lorenzo saw in class.
“Okay, Cresencio. Submit your handwritten story in a yellow pad before the Christmas break,” Bb. Lorenzo said.
I went home after class. Home was a cramped abode made of lawanit with a raised communal room for my father and mother and their five boys. Outside the house was a tall Fortune plant that bore dainty flowers despite the dry soil where it was planted. It was on the same parched earth—not on a pad paper—that my mother taught me to write my complete name using a dried ipil-ipil stick when I was barely five years old. And before I turned six, I was taught by my mother Candida, who finished Grade 6, to read, courtesy of the thin A-Ba-Ka-Da book she got on credit from the neighborhood store of Aling Milang.
At home, that afternoon, I was racking my brain on what story to write. The inspiration was hard to come by simply because I had no experience writing a short story. (Except for the stories I read in komiks, I didn’t know much about short story writing. Yes, at seven, I was introduced already to Nora Aunor by Ate Yolly de los Reyes, a neighbor who rented out komiks, through Superstar. I would later on read Hiwaga, Aliwan and Pinoy Klasiks. Pinoy komiks were part and parcel of my early literacy.
My curiosity to learn to read better was at a fever pitch when I saw several titles clipped on a line (like a clothesline) made of straw or kawad. But because I had no 10 centavos to pay for komiks rental, Ate Yolly would lead me to a secret box where all the back issues were. I would read to my heart’s content. And those I could not devour in her house, I would bring home to read with my mother and my brothers. My Kuya Gaddie and I would literally fall asleep with smiles on our faces, our hands still clasping onto komiks.)
The closest experience to writing a short story was when I would fill my head with the lines of Sisa in Noli Me Tangere, whose sad story was shared to my young mind by my cousin Phil Hatuina. I would act it out in front of him and his siblings, with his mother’s skirt that doubled as my wig as I did my soliloquy, complete with tears. “Crispin…Basilio…Nasaan nakayo mga anak ko?” I would say as I found words coming out of my mouth just so I could extend my monologue. Early on I know I had no stage fright. Early on I know I had a way with words.
But still, for the short story assigned to me by Bb. Lorenzo, I was still bereft of a muse.
By 5 p.m., as it was my duty every day, I found myself loading a sakate in a cart. A sakate was a mound of bundled-up grass that my father brought home, gathered from the field. Every afternoon, I would sell sakate to Inang Rosie in Gulod. The sakate was for her family’s livestock.
Before I got the P5 payment for that mound of freshly scythed grass, I had to wait for Inang Rosie outside her home for 30 minutes. Such was the case every day. To while away the time, I would always read the day’s People’s Journal, a tabloid in English, whose rumpled pages were scattered on a side table. That day, a photo of malnourished children from Negros province caught my attention. The kids’ eyes were bulging from the sockets, their ribcage protruding, their arms bereft of flesh. They looked like living dead. I would read about them for a few days straight. I was bothered.
But I also knew I had already a short story to write.
I submitted “Ang Pasko ng mga Bata sa Negros” to Bb. Lorenzo before the Christmas break. In my short story, the malnourished kids of Negros had a voice—and their voice was heard by the government.
My own voice was heard by the judges that when classes resumed after the Christmas break, I was adjudged the grand winner of the short story writing contest.
Looking back, my late mother’s A-Ba-Ka-Da and the neighbor’s komiks prepared my spirit to be a writer, a storyteller.
My late father’s sakate was not a burden but a blessing in disguise. It was my father who inspired me to write simple prose. He was a no-read-no-write man. (I would read to him my column in The STAR as we were ensconced on his hammock under the himbaba-o tree. My duty as a writer was to express ideas and to be understood. And if I passed the standards of my father’s capacity to understand my writing, I had succeeded.I would always get a smile or a thumb’s up every time I read to him.)
Big thanks, too, to Inang Rosie who made me wait for her payment of P5 every day; it was in waiting that I learned to read the newspaper. It gave birth to my craft.
I learned to write when I was 10. It has been 44 years since then. My heart and soul still make love to words and wisdom.
Every day.
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October 28, 2026