Getting high on memories

It must be a Pinoy thing.  No matter how you send reminders, poking, nudging, short of tying a string around the pinky, the most immovable, hardest-as-rock-to-push creatures are the Pinoys.

It must be a Pinoy thing.  When the deadline has been reached and the sand in the hourglass has all but flowed down, you are suddenly besieged with volumes of entries.

My niece was familiar with this phenomenon, this quirkiness:  “Wait for the eleventh hour and watch the tickets sell like hot cakes, Tita,” she said.  “Any hour earlier than that is spent in agony biting the knuckles that had turned purplish blue.”  Do we have a hit or a flop?  That was the cliffhanger guaranteed to turn any producer’s shiny auburn crown to platinum.  In short, your hair turns as white as Snow White.  

We had one week before the deadline so I e-mailed Juris Telmo, our class president in high school.  She was the calm, composed and cool one.

“Here’s what I’ll do,” she proposed.  “I’m going to write down bullet points that every classmate could relate to.  For sure, it will inspire them to jot down what they remember.”  I imagined the bullets flying:

• Write in a language you’re most comfortable with.  But since many of us have become mercanos, we will accept wersh-wersh English;

• Write about the time when we were ingénues and wet behind the ears, essentially inexperienced, unseasoned or even a bit naïve or immature, in short, me gatas pa sa labi;

• Write how we were called to the Principal’s Office for an infraction deliberately or innocently committed;

• How we dodged the five centavo fine of Anne Choa and Poch Macaranas of the English Campaign.  To train students to be fluent in spoken English, speaking Tagalog was banned in the campus.  English language enforcers roamed the hallways, pressing their ears on the ground and kibitzing if not interrupting conversations to catch and fine errant students;

• How we stitched and sewed those pillowcases, PJ’s made of thick flannel and shirt dresses in our Home Economics class that were really made by our good, reliable and tight-lipped “Inday”;

• How we cooked those rubbery, bouncing meatballs while humming Burl Ives’ “On top of spaghetti all covered with cheese, I lost my poor meatball when somebody sneezed.”;

• How we managed to make our Math teacher, Miss Aida David, cry….Huh?  Did we?  I thought we were the ones bawling like pusakals (street cats) atop a picket fence;

• How we grappled, squeezed, climbed with flagging arms to catch the canteen girl’s attention for our bottle of Coke, 7-Up, Tru-Orange and Cosmos and a sandwich of thinly spread Dari-Crème with liver paté;

• How we looked more Chinese than Susie Wong in our Chinese brocade costume or more Mexican than Frida Kalo in our bright red skirt, hoop earrings and peasant blouse worn to our United Nations fiesta/PE extravaganza;

• How we played hide and seek with Dr. Socorro de Llanderal and Mrs. Araceli Murillo if we forgot to wear an undershirt or a half slip — but honestly, the uniform was already as thick as a bullet-proof vest — or how the sword and the sable fell clumsily from our white-gloved clutches;

•  How we savored dirty ice cream peddled by Mang Berto  outside the iron gates and made more sinful by sandwiching it between pan de leche or pan de lemon;

• How we bit into those sweet and chewy saging na saba that was floating in crushed ice from the Chinese restaurant that we named after “Beho” in the corner of Asturias and Dapitan gates;

• And for the bourgeois (French for a social class oriented to economic materialism) – those who had P1.00 as their baon, the well-heeled, manicured, impeccably groomed ladies and fetched by a white uniformed yaya, and how they downed and gulped the halo-halo in Little Quiapo along España Street and Eugene’s hamburger;

• How we mastered the art of cheating in quizzes (may lightning strike you if you deny this; somehow we were involved in cheating, whether you allowed your seatmate to copy your answers — in the name of comradeship — or you were guilty of copying or worse, made “codigos” (notes that were scribbled in tiny bits of paper and subtly tucked in the sleeves, shoes and for the inventive ones, chewed stuck inside the dental cavity.)

Those who would vehemently deny this must show proof of how they passed Chemistry, Trigonometry, Physics and Calculus…hmm, before your nose get any longer. If none of us was guilty of hoodwinking our Jurassic registrar, how come there is no monsignor, or reverend father or a mother superiora in our batch?

 It’s been 50 years since we left the august halls of our secondary education.  Let’s shoot the breeze and sing “We’re still high on UST High.”  Rah, rah, rah.