Proud of my roots

It had to take a death in the family for this writer to relive old, childhood memories.

Nov. 17  my Aunt Paulina Francisco died at the age of 97. She was my father’s older sister. Given their wide age gap, she could have been mother to my father.

The mystery that hounds me to this day is the fact that by the time I was born, she was almost ripe enough to have been my grandmother. And yet, we all grew up calling her Ate Pule till the end.

She and a younger sister Marcela, who had also passed away, were both spinsters. Deeply religious  as in Catolico cerrado  they surrendered themselves to our Creator pure and chaste. We were all sure about that.

It was a major issue, therefore, when some decades back, they had to submit themselves to a male obstetrician for some ovarian checkup. Despite assurances that the procedure would all be done clinically, there were huge protestations.

My Aunt Paulina, to begin with, rarely saw doctors because there is something about the Francisco genetic makeup that would have physicians go out of business.

Most of us rarely get sick. In my case, the only time I get ill is when I am extremely fatigued and stressed out  factors that are unavoidable in show business.

The world of Aunt Paulina, however, was limited to the church and the sari-sari store that she, her sister Marcela and niece Cristeta operated in front of the ancestral abode.

Until she was almost 70, she did needlework without eyeglasses (I don’t think she ever owned a pair). And this you better believe: At that age, she could carry a whole sack of rice by herself.

A couple of days after she passed away  it was most likely due to old age  I drove back to the old Francisco house in Sta. Elena, in the town of Hagonoy in Bulacan. That gave me the chance to trace my father’s family tree.

The Franciscos (at least, our family) are of no prominent stock. In fact, no one could tell the origins of the Francisco family, except that it supposedly started from another Hagonoy barrio called San Agustin.

What I managed to trace was the mother side of my father that began in the 19th century through an industrious woman named Julia Ramos. Julia was practically unschooled, but she was enterprising and was able to buy rice fields and fishponds that covered a good area of Sta. Elena.

Julia Ramos married Brigido Reyes and one of their children named Isabel wed Agustin Francisco  yes, the one from San Agustin.

Isabel and Agustin had several kids, but the only ones I met were those who were still alive by the time I was born: Hermogina, Paulina, Marcela and Leonarda. All the rest  Julia and Brigido and Isabel and Agustin included  had already died by the time I came into this world.

Our side of the Franciscos is pure Bulakeño, but we had been mistaken for Cebuanos for the longest time because my parents decided to invest in Cebu and my sister married Michael Rama, who is the current city mayor. But I take pride in being an adopted son of Cebu.

If I don’t have childhood memories of the Queen City of the South, that’s because I was already in high school when I was made to spend a whole week there  my first-ever Cebu visit that didn’t happen all the time since plane fare was never cheap.

All my childhood summers and even weekends were spent in the very humble barrio of Sta. Elena that is actually an island connected by a bridge to the rest of the town.

Sta. Elena seemed remote even if in those days it only took two hours (shorter now) to get there by car (maybe that was long for a child). I wondered why despite its distance, on its more popular feast day May 4 (the other one is Aug. 18), people from far away came to hear Mass and added more to the crowd that was always spread out on the street  blocking vehicular traffic that forced little bratty Butch to walk to church (again for a kid, those were giant steps).

The answer came very slowly when I joined the workforce. I discovered later that the artist Al Perez was supposed to have been sickly as a child and it was through the miraculous intercession of St. Helena that he survived all the way through adulthood and had become respected in the field of arts. He began painting churches and images of the Holy Empress who found the Cross of Christ hundreds of years after the Crucifixion.

I now have two Al Perez works  both of which, however, are that of a nude woman.

Two years ago, the Manunuri also invited poetess and film teacher/reviewer Dr. Benilda Santos and she, too, turned out to be a Sta. Elena devotee.       

The Sta. Elena church in our barrio may not be as famous as the cathedrals of Antipolo and Manaoag, but it is  and it’s only now that I know  a pilgrimage site.

That gives me more reason to take pride in my roots.