Once upon a time… What a beautiful tune that phrase evokes in me. It was the start of many fairy tales read to me when I was young, the start of many Disney full-length movies I went to see with my mommy and my titas, with all my cousins and our grandmother, lola Ching.
Now look at us. That group who once went to the movies and giggled a lot are all in their sixties now. We all have grandchildren. Our childhood lies on a back shelf in our minds. We hardly recall it until suddenly they come to visit, our youngest aunt who migrated to Vancouver, Canada, her husband and her children, almost in their sixties now.
Once again I remember a big window in my grandmother’s old house in Sta. Mesa. Tita Hilda stands at the window crying, I can tell from my view of her. I am around six years old, playing in the garden. Behind her is tita Caring, her oldest sister, smoking, talking, gesturing. Those are my memories of tita Caring — always smoking, talking, gesturing and knitting, all at the same time. Tita Caring must have had something against marriage. She was always giving someone a long anti-marriage tirade. But for all that fire and brimstone, nothing happened. Tita Hilda still married tito Ben and I was their little flower girl. Life went on. I got a milder talking to before I got married but no longer at the window of the Sta. Mesa house. By that time Sta. Mesa was off our map.
Tita Hilda and tito Ben got married and had six children: Peeney, Nancy, Benny, Jill, Jack and Marty. We all grew up together. On Sundays everyone lunched at lola’s house. Tito Pete, tita Caring’s husband, didn’t talk very much but he came over anyway, bringing his magazines, reading off to one side. He would have lunch then go back to the living room, lie down on one of the couches and sleep while tita Caring, Mommy, tita Hilda, tito Ben and lola stayed at the dining room table chatting while children either ran around or played in the garden. If my uncle tito Toti was home from the Jesuits he would be with them. If tita Chitchit, their Carmelite sister, was here for a visit, she would also join. Lola Dede, my grandmother’s youngest sister who lived two houses down, always came, as did her husband, who I called Daddy until tita Hilda’s children were born and they called him Daddy Toot for Daddy Two. We all sat together and chatted and laughed merrily. It was the 1950s. We were a convivial family.
All of us who were born in the 1940s and 1950s remember a lively childhood sprinkled with vacations together in Baguio and competing with each other’s breakfast fried eggs. How would you eat them? With ketchup, Lea & Perrins, toyo, and any other thing you could pour over them. Of getting chicken pox together and counting our blisters to see how many we had. Of Easter Egg hunts in Lola’s garden, our egg baskets and how many we got. It was fun until the ‘60s when my generation hit puberty and the older generation began to fight over money, over their inheritance. It was like the atom bomb falling on Hiroshima.
Lola Dede and Daddy Toot moved to Wack-Wack Village. Lola moved out of Sta. Mesa into a house in Bel-Air about a block down from tita Hilda. Mommy and I moved to the South Sy-quia Apartments. Tita Caring had moved to Pasig some years before. Everyone was at war. Tita Chitchit was the neutral party who remained friends with all, talking to each one to make friends with the other. I was the neutral teenager who went to visit everyone and never brought up the subject of their disagreement. I loved them all, really loved them all, though it took many years, my whole life, in fact, to recognize how profoundly I loved them all.
The falling of the Hiroshima bomb took a long time to heal but eventually it did. When tita Caring died, tito Toti and tita Hilda were with her. Mommy called her from San Francisco and even I talked to her. Everybody was friends again but we were scattered around the world. We were not together. Then tito Toti had a stroke and eventually crossed over. My mother had Alzheimer’s disease and inexplicably hated me until she died. She was also very angry at tita Hilda. But her anger was part of her Alzheimer’s disease, not part of reality, I tell myself anyway.
Around three weeks ago, tita Hilda and tito Ben came to town with their children Peeney, Nancy, Jill, Jack and Marty. Benny passed away in a tragic accident sometime in the ‘80s, 30 years ago, yet the memory still scrapes at my heart. I visited them many times and each time I felt wrenched when I saw tita Hilda. She is getting old. But what do I expect? I too am getting old and I am 20 years younger than she. Tito Ben has more salt than pepper hair. We sit, we chat, we shop, laugh together, take care of each other still. We are the same people yet we are scratched here, scarred there, wrinkled here, white-haired there but we love each other. You can feel it in the comfort of each other’s company, in the tone of voice we use talking to each other, in the way we smile and laugh, the naughty looks we exchange.
Now they have gone back to Canada. Those who live in the Philippines make tentative dates — let’s get together, let’s pick up where we left off because this is our family, this bond of the heart, battered by life but strengthened by time, this is the one thing we can call ours. This is the one thing we are free to enjoy any time regardless of where we are. These days we live with e-mail and cell phones. Everyone is a touch away.
Our parents unwittingly broke our ties when we were young. But now that we are old, we find the ties were not broken, they just lay hidden waiting for us to discover them again. Let’s begin a whole new generation of cousins who are dearest friends, who love each other and who enjoy each other’s company at all times. Then we can begin to see where our sweet convivial childhood led us. Through rocks and crags it led us to now, away from once upon a time to this wonderful now.
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