Magician, Santa, toymaker, supporter of dreams & everything that my father still is to me
The yearly Father’s Day celebration always brings me back to childhood memories. It is important to revisit them because they are my moral compass. The celebration hits differently when one human being, single in status, has been without a father for 16 years already.
The loving bond between my father and me may be gone but in its wake can be found an empty rocking chair or a now rundown hammock under the himbaba-o tree. The silence of the hammock has a weight of its own even if it is swayed by the breeze. But in the tenderness of the day, the heart remembers to smile. The choice of an orphaned son is nothing but to smile. There is a celebration that necessitates a smile.
Beautiful memories have a way of making one count countless details. They say the devil is in the details. I say my joy of celebrating my father is in the details he left in my memory bank. Part of my tapestry is him—his temper, his compassion, his morality, his diligence and conscientiousness, even his shy cleft chin.
My memories of him are incandescent. They formed part and parcel of me. They fortified me and made me whole.
They are lessons that have become witnesses to building my character. Strong in times of uncertainty; unflinching in times of defeat. The never-say-die spirit, I got it from my father. I have had many defeats, but my father taught me to stand up after every fall. In more ways than one, he even taught me to catch falling stars, even at my lowest. I was raised not to give up. We both did not know how to do it then, but he somehow taught me how to shine. As long as I know how to live a life without pretense, I will shine. I always remember that.
The way I remember his memories now is with a smile.
My father, the magician
When I was five years old, I was a recipient of magic and a magical act. My young mind was molded to think that my father was a magician. And how.
When the full moon would hang low in Gulod, then a sleepy neighborhood in Cabuyao that was sandwiched by Laguna Lake on the east and a vast rice field on the west, I would stand still outside our house with my palms outstretched to heaven. The moon would play hide-and-seek with the silhouetted canopies of tall buboy (local cotton) trees but I would always find delight in the stark beauty of a full moon. In my mind and heart, perhaps born out of hardship, the full moon was a sign that I would receive a gift.
“Moon, moon, pengeng pera (give me money),” I would say, my gaze at the orange orb steady. My mother taught me that plea. Only when I felt the weight of her arm on my shoulders did I relent and go inside the house. The moon seemed within my reach. But my dreams were not yet in sight.
The following day, my father would wake me up early and ask me to check underneath my pillow. I would find a five-centavo or a 10-centavo coin under it. It was an answered prayer from the moon. It was the first magical experience of my childhood. My father was the magician. And his act made me believe in God all the more. Looking back, my juvenile faith sheltered me from what might be a deep bruise caused by poverty. My father was there to cushion it—one five-centavo coin at a time.
My father, my Santa Claus
For some reason, the Western concept of hanging stockings by the window on Christmas Eve seeped into our humble home. I hung my green Cub Scout socks with the hope that Santa Claus would notice them and give me the gifts on my wish list: toys and chocolates.
We did not have a chimney but I was hoping Santa would find the tall, flowering Fortune plant by our window a substitute landing area for his sleigh of reindeer. The kid in me was peeping from our communal room, waiting for the socks to move until I fell asleep.
Christmas morning came and I excitedly checked my socks. Like pendulums, they swung back and forth. I thought Santa was generous enough to fill them in with the gifts I wanted.
My father helped me bring down the socks with a caveat: “Kahit anong matanggap kay Santa Claus, magpasalamat (Be grateful with whatever you receive from Santa).”
It was a scene of great expectations between a child and his father on Christmas Day. I held one sock at a time in my hands. I felt it. Lumpy. Bumpy. Hard. Heavy. With bated breath I reached for the gift inside the sock.
An impish smile ran across my father’s lips. “One. Two. Three,” he counted to signal the revelation of the gift in my hand.
It was a plump camote.
My father and I laughed. Santa had a sense of humor.
I will always thank my father for that experience. Santa was a farmer. He could not afford toys and chocolates. But he afforded me a childhood experience worth more than all the toys and candies in the world.
That year was the first and last time I hung a pair of socks on Christmas Eve. But it was the beginning of my belief that my father would always find ways to make my childhood happy.
My father, the toymaker
In one summer of my childhood, my father still gave me my first toy — a trumpo he fashioned from an old ipil-ipil branch. It was not as sleek as the machine-produced tops the children from the neighborhood played with, but it was still the best there was among the children I spun tops with in Gulod.
I could still see how he made the top shiny by rubbing against its crown and body with a sheet of sandpaper. I still remember the nail he used for my top to spin beautifully when I hurled it from a sa-te (a string used to loop around the top) to the ground.
The top he gave me was made out of love. It’s still spinning strikingly in my 54-year-old mind.
My father, the supporter of dreams
Even when I was already an adult, I did not mind if my father treated me like a child from time to time. I saw this on the day I would march for my college graduation day.
My father rented a blue jeepney that we could all use to attend my graduation day in UP Los Baños in 1992. There was spring in his step; he was whistling, smiling generously. He was excited as he loaded onto the vehicle a basket bursting with chicken-pork adobo and rice wrapped in banana leaves that Nanay prepared. That day was one proud moment for him because it was the first time a family member would graduate from college.
That day was also the first time he wore a long-sleeved shirt to attend an occasion. His other long sleeves were his uniform in the rice field to somehow protect his farmer’s skin from the sun.
We arrived in UPLB two hours earlier than the appointed time of the afternoon graduation. The jeepney was parked in between a malachite green Mercedes-Benz to the right and a white Toyota Supersaloon to the left. That moment, I remember telling myself that I would do better in life because I wanted to give my father and mother the comforts of life.
After the graduation rites, which finished a little before 9 p.m., it was my father who first hugged me like I was still a child, his joy still uncontained. The oppressing heat of the day did not restrain him from bearing an overflow of joy.
I managed to bring him up the stage and found a spot where we could have our picture together. That photo remains to be the one and only photograph of my father and me. It’s a treasure that always reminds me of the many sacrifices he mustered and mastered. It’s a reminder to me that I should always do better in life.
Happy Father’s Day in heaven, Pang.
