BENCHWARMER

Growing Up in Baguio III: Boyhood
Ramon S. Dacawi

Freddie Mayo, the Baguio boy, ex-Jesuit seminarian, feature writer and ghost writer at city hall, should be the one writing about boyhood here. He wrote the finest pieces and speeches before he left for the Big Apple where he kicked the bucket in 1997.

Like Peppot Ilagan and other Baguio boys, Freddie failed to develop material acquisitiveness. He grew up with his cousin Rene Cortes, an Ateneo law graduate, former OIC city vice-mayor and forever human rights lawyer. Both grew up at Bayan Park.

With their dummy swords and slingshots, the cousins turned the Busol Watershed into their own Sherwood Forest. Having seen too many movies, they grew up believing they would eventually join Robin Hood and Friar Tuck’s band.

In one exhausting expedition through the pine forest, the daring duo stumbled upon a pineapple head they readily feasted on. On the way back to Bayan, Rene remembered what should have been done. He rushed back and placed a five-centavo coin on top of the headless stalk - for the planter.

The closest I came to matching Rene’s sense of fair play was when boyhood buddy Milo Candelario and I would wait on week-ends for stray balls at the side of what was then Hole 11 of the Baguio Country Club.

Like lions waiting for prey, we would lie low in the grass for a wayward ball flying to our side. As a rule -- and out of respect for a player’s class -- we never scampered away with a well-placed shot to the green.

The Pacdal Forest Nursery where out fathers worked was our home and our playground. Its name was well-deserved for it was the richest specimen of botanical diversity then. It boasted of eerie cabo negro palms, tea shrubs, a banaba tree, dwarf weeping willows, jacaranda, persimmon and even a lanky holly surviving by its lonesome in the middle of the terraced flower gardens.

We climbed Spanish guava, macopa, cherry and even exotic,.thorny apple trees that produce clusters of minute red fruits full of dark seeds that grated our teeth and spoiled what should have been the honest-to-goodness taste of apples.

We tapped giant rubber trees of white sap we rolled into balls, fashioned out bamboo tubes into blow guns, carved guava branches into tops and whittled down Y-shaped twigs for slingshots. May to September, we hunted edible mushrooms and puffballs, sometimes spotting red, ripe and wild strawberries, “sabong bato”, jack o’lanterns and “singkamas bakes” that we now find hard to show our own kids.

We followed the courses of brooks to where we could stone-wall swimming pools. From the brooks -- which are now dead -- we fished out tadpoles and crabs, caught bullfrogs bigger then our fists and baited “bunog” and “jojo” with hooks made from phone wires.

For the eels coming out of their nests after a flood, we pounded nails into hooks. Either you were a bootblack or newsboy or both. Inherited my brother Joe’s shoeshine box when he and Willy Cacdac were big enough to caddy for hacks at the posh Baguio Country Club. Milo Candelario and I found renting out ponies fat the nearby Wright Park more exciting and less humbling than hearing the golfers’ expletives or stereotyping the stingy or cheats among them.

Problem was we had no ponies of our own and had to revert back to cutting “sacate”, shining shoes or selling newspapers when the owners opted to handle their mounts during the peak months.

That’s how I met fellow newsboy Noe Villanueva, who grew up in City Camp, at Manong Rudy Daludado’s newsstand. While waiting for the paper deliver vans, we spun tops, won or lost rubber bands, marbles and “taptap” cards on the spacious market alleys that havesince vanished.

Noe was a born salesman. He sold his bundle in a jiffy. At times I ended up broke with unsold copies of The Manila Times which, being then the leading daily, was considered sold the moment you pulled them out of the newsstand. I even ended up one time with a souvenir – a fake peso coin a buyer handed.

I didn’t realize it was soft, malleable lead. The alert newsstand checker recognized it for its worth and returned it to me while I was remitting my sales. Still, we all made a killing with the headline the day after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. It seemed everybody in the adult world mourned as all our copies were gone in an hour.

We would see each other after making the rounds, for a bowl of “mami” , “arroz caldo” or plain “caldo” at the carinderia above the fish section of the market, a plate of “pansit” at Bontoc Café, and a date with Superman and the other comics Superheroes at Fred’s Magazine.

Early in the afternoon, we lined up at Aurora Theatre for a double feature of re-runs, mostly westerns, war and medieval epics. Before heading for home, we would drop by City Bakery for a bag of pandesal that was then worth its price and then decide whether to walkand save or use our last 10-centavo for the jeepney ride.

Like most Baguio boys, we worked our way through college. Noe ended up a lawyer and is now the senior partner of respected human rights lawyer Pablito Sanidad. Milo enlisted in the U.S. Navy and we lost touch for over 30 years until somebody gave him a copy of an earlier version of this memoir.

“Finally, I read my name in the papers,” he e-mailed. (To be continued next week. e-mail: rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).