BENCHWARMER

Growing up in Baguio: My old man
(Second in a series)
Ramon S. Dacawi

I was born here because my father, originally from Hungduan, Ifugao, reached Baguio out of necessity. Having nary a rice terrace to inherit, he hiked five days along the mountain trails to find work here.He came for the manual labor Baguio offered during its post-war reconstruction, mostly back-breaking, poor-paying soil leveling. He couldn’t read or write, but later on had to learn to scribble “Dacawi Maguide”.

Now also a lifer in government, I could see the impatience of his fellow workers waiting on the payroll line as he, in painfully slow, clumsy strokes, signed his name.

His most vivid recollection about starting to raise a family here was on the grounds of the former church and convent on a promontory at Liteng, Pacdal. It was where I would walk to mass, before they built the St. Joseph Church bear the Pacdal Circle. There, the Mother Superior mistook him for a machine, if not a descendant of the slaves who built the ancient pyramids of Egypt.

I would hear the story during those times I’d come home late and readily lose my appetite after inspecting the simple fare his pay could serve on the table.

That wooden table, made of planks of pinewood of uneven sizes, was unmovable. Occupying almost three fourths of the room, it was one of the biggest and most multi-functional I’ve ever seen. It served as our common bed in the windowless, one-room space our family of seven occupied at the basement of the government bunkhouse. It was also our study table. Sitting on a short, shiny plank on the cement floor, he would turn his face away every time I opened and closed the lid of the viand pot blackened by pinewood soot. He would quietly relight his tobacco pipe and then wait patiently for me to finish eating before relating the story again.

I never thought it had something to do with my gustatory preference beyond salted fish, “bulilit” sardines sautéed with sayote tops and fruits.

My kids Beng and Boogie have been more circumspect, sparing me the hurt I had repeatedly inflicted on their grandfather over food. Until I was old enough to understand how costly it was for him, I always looked forward to those times he would be roused from sleep in the wee hours.

He would sit on the floor, trying to figure out what a dream - about a relative or his parents long gone - meant. It meant he would be in the market early the next Saturday and come home with a fat, sacrificial fowl, preferably a duck.

He would pray over the poor fowl, mumbling like a “mumbaki”, before it’s blood was drawn from a slit in the throat, its feathers burned, dressed, and stewed whole. I hated the pre-meal prayer, which was torturously long, sometimes ending when the stew no longer billowed steam. Waiting allowed me to parody some of the prayers as he would. He was aghast to hear memumble them.

“Don’t do that again, as you have been baptized a Catholic,” he told me in the dialect he used when talking to me, my sister and my brothers. I forgot the prayers but now feel good being able to speak Tuwali Ifugao.

My old man kept us intact, even after we lost our mother at a young age. He never told me of his own childhood in Hungduan where he returned after retirement, before Beng and Boogie were born. He came back to Baguio only for a while, to meet them in their innocence. We lost him before they could build their own treasure box into which childhood memories are stored and later retrieved.

When I arrived in the village with a box of gin for the wake, my sister Elena told me she baptized our father when she knew he was going. It was a real consolation, as was watching relatives and villagers coming in single file on the rice terrace dikes with what they could – pigs, fowl, camote, bunches of harvested “tinawon” rice panicles or ready-to-cook grains.

For years, my old man nurtured seeds into seedlings, saplings and poles and plants into bloom at the city nursery in Pacdal. He would be out there in the forest plucking mature pine cones from mother trees, or sorting empty cans in garbage dumps and turning them into seedling pots.

We kids would shake the drying cones spread out to dry in the sun, for the tiny, brown or gray seeds the size of a rice grain. We were careful not to detach their wings the size and looks of those of termites coming out of the ground in early June.

After collecting a handful, we would throw them up in the air and watch them spin down like detached helicopter rotors or termites fluttering and circling a lamp during evenings.

On his Christmas breaks, my father would repair back to Hungduan. He would give me a peso coin after making sure I would water every morning the rows of flowering plants he tended. Although always on official leave, he would use his vacation to gather orchids for the city nursery.

Year in and year out, we watched him and the other gardeners in their quiet, manual routine of preparing the seedbeds and garden plots, sowing seeds, transplanting and shading them with “anam-am” (fern) leaves, watering and coaxing them to bloom.

We called each “uncle” : Uncle Pinong (Candelario), Uncle Anton (Baguio), Uncle Bernan (Aberin), Uncle Budah, Uncle Melanio (Cayapa) and Uncle Solibio (Pitas). They needed no bundy clocks and watches, relying on the sun’s position and sometimes calling it a day only when it was dark.

Early on, I learned from them the names of what they propagated: daisy, bachelor’s button, cosmos, larkspur, marigold, salvia, begonia, gladiola, everlasting, calla lily, dahlia, azalea, baby’s breath, Queen Annie’s lace, aster, statis, snap dragon, carnation, petunia and even poppies.

One time my father came home with a certificate the city gave. In no time, he forgot about it - a model employee certificate which I should have kept. (to be continued next week. E-mail:rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).