I would like to thank the people who have emailed me with kind words about my column, which I have been writing in the Philippine STAR since 1998. I used to edit and write for The Manila Times until that unfortunate time when then President Joseph Estrada accused us of irresponsible reporting and we were threatened with libel. The Gokongwei family that used the newspaper had to close shop – and we thus lost our jobs. The Philippine STAR gladly welcomed me with open arms. Here is my column for today.
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Mama always bought my merienda or snacks. She did not want me to buy junk food and soft drinks. Bad for the teeth, my mother with the whitest teeth would say.
Always, when the bell rang for recess, I would go to her classroom, Grade VI Section 1, housed in a building hemmed in by star-apple trees turning their leaves of translucent green in the sunlight. The leaves were green on top, brown below: their twin colors never ceased to amaze me.
I would cross the field, the wooden building looming into view. Then I would climb the concrete steps – one, two, three, four – and stop before the door just as my Mama was about to dismiss her class. I would walk into the classroom just as her students were leaving. Some of the girls would pinch my cheeks; the boys would mess up my hair. I wondered why people bigger than me and twice my height would do that, and then I would smirk.
I would go to Mama, her fingers and uniform smeared with chalk marks. That was how I always remembered her: wiping chalks that somehow had managed to whiten her sky-blue uniform. After this, she would hand me my snacks: boiled peanuts, or colored rice cakes topped with grated coconut, or fried plantains wrapped in sweetened rolls, everything except junk food. That, and orange juice in a tall blue Tupperware glass. Gratefully, I would wolf down the food, smile at her, then rush down the building, onto the wide field glittering with sunlight.
Since she prepared my snacks anyway, she only gave me five centavos per day. But in those days, five centavos could buy you any of the following: a large rectangle of chicharon, supposedly pork skin but just flour with artificial flavoring and that old reliable MSG.
Five centavos could also buy you a bar of Chocnut, crumbly chocolate that stuck to your gums, or a try in the game of bunot in the school canteen. The game involved choosing a number, after which the storekeeper would peel away the layer of paper covering the numbers on a board. Whatever was attached to the number – a sheaf of Tex playing cards or five marbles, ten rubber bands or a plastic duck, a car or a robot made of tin and painted with the gaudiest colors – would be your prize.
But one day I felt healthy enough from all of my mother’s food, so when the canteen was transferred to the building farthest from Mama’s classroom, I ate something she had forbidden me to eat: ice drop.
“It’s so cold it will just give you tonsillitis again,” she would say, “and then, you don’t even know if it is clean.” Nevertheless ….
One day I saw the ambulant vendor in the school yard, standing under the dapple of acacia leaves. He was opening his Styrofoam ice box. I went to him. When I saw vapor rising from the mouth of the box, I ran to take a peek.
Ice drop, indeed: shreds of young coconut, boiled red beans, milk and sugar forming a concoction frozen around a flat wooden stick. After looking to the left and then to the right, I bought one, walked fast and only stopped when I was already out of anybody’s view.
A wall hid me from the world. As I leaned against it, I hungrily pulled away the wrapper. The ice drop had begun to melt, the sticky liquid trailing down my fingers. I licked my now-sweet fingers, and then began nibbling the ice-drop.
First the top, full and swollen with shredded young coconut meat and red beans, letting the sweetness bloom in my mouth. Then the body (chilling my teeth, numbing my lips, but it didn’t matter). In a few minutes, nothing was left but the stick. I went to the faucet to wash my hands, then returned to the boring class in Arithmetic.
But that night my tonsils began to itch. I wish I could put my hand all the way down my throat so I could put my thumb and forefinger around the thing that itched. My nose began to run; dry cough followed. And after a few hours, when I faced the mirror and opened my mouth, my tonsils had flamed into a soft, red mass.
Then my mother would begin her ritual. First she scolded me for disobeying her, threatening to completely cut-off my five-centavo allowance. Then she would fix me a glass of lukewarm calamansi juice (five small round lemons squeezed into the water), with no sugar (yuccch!), and make me drink it.
Then, she would make me gargle a glass with the following mixture: potent vinegar from fermented coconut sap and hot water. This was a “cure” my father said he learnt from his Thai classmate when both Asians were trying to survive their first winter in the military school in Colorado.
Afterward, my mother would tuck me in bed, giving me a back rub. Like my grandmother, she would use Vicks Vaporub, her warm fingers kneading my back and chest. She would rub my neck and finish this off with something that had the color and coolness of ice. Only then would I drift into a sleep ripe with dreams.
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