BENCHWARMER

Growing up in Baguio IV: School
Ramon S. Dacawi

Baguio boy Rod Limpin, who, I guess, has resettled in Canada, e-mailed me last week about boyhood in Baguio: “I clearly remember the many brooks that we used to follow and discover a "tambac" where we could swim from "one to sawa" for just 10 centavos. Kids like me from the Campo Filipino area travel towards Trinidad to follow the brooks.

I guess kids from Pacdal follow a different route. On school breaks, we walk to Asin Hot Springs early in the morning andcatch the last Dangwa for a trip back home. We should be back before dark otherwise our mothers will give us the dreaded "kawayan". While you probably were selling 'nila times, I was selling sweepstakes. We know every nook and cranny of the downtown area especially the marketplace.”)

When I was seven, my father lined me up for the first grade at the Rizal Elementary School. In lieu of a birth certificate, I had practiced swinging my hand over my head and reaching for my ear on the other side to prove I was ready for school.

The registration teacher saw no need for such thing. She just asked my father’s name. “Dacawi,” I answered and she wrote it as my surname. Neighbors who knew heroes and presidents must have suggested my name and those of my brothers Jose and Manuel, as our parents never knew who these figures were. Those in the know were probably absent when mybrother Danilo and sister Elena were baptized.

Young couples nowadays adopt several or coin exotic names for their kids, making the toddlers sound special. Mang Swanny Dicang, who seldom uses his baptismal name Juan, says the practice is outright impractical. It gets to be torture to the kids when the teacher booms, “pass your papers” when they’ve just spelled their names and are about to answer thetest questions.

Because I had to go to school, my father had to buy me a pair of rubber shoes for my whole year use. It was the cheapest he could find at the shoe section of the city market. I didn’t know it cost him a fortune.

My first, a worn-out, brown pair with soles as thick as onion skin, I found on top of a trash heap. Otherwise, they looked like what the young ones wear nowadays – as they are again in fashion. Wearing cheap rubber shoes too often then instead of black leather was like having your kid today use your primitive cellphone with the protruding antenna infront of his classmates. No class, but we didn’t mind it then as kids now do.

A few months into the first grade and I was ready for a fight. A classmate had sprinkled my head with salt, believing it would make Ramon a dull boy. He so told my buddies Bert Saclangan, Fred Catbagan and Santiago Mateo and they told me. It worked because I wasconvinced it was so true. I challenged him to a fight, which was what he really wanted.

He shook my head with a nasty right straight just after we reached Polo Field, now St. Joseph Village, at the back of St. Joseph Church. If it was any consolation, I believed the punch shook off what remained of the tiny salt grains on my head, saving whatever remained of my brain from turning into brine.

Seeing my right eyelids almost met, my father took me to the hospital. A nurse worth her salt wrapped an ice cube with tissue and told me to press it for a while on the black eye. The melt started dripping on the jeepney floor and wetting my pants on the way home. I kept my head bowed, to keep the normal eye from catching the knowing smiles of the other passengers.

We all paid the price for truancy, dished out by our dads or the truant officer, a regular policeman assigned to our school. My father would use a piece of chopped wood, my brother Joe a branch or bamboo stalk and police Sgt. Moises Bautista his thick and wide black officer’s belt.

I couldn’t wait to be grown up and get back at my brother. Meantime, I helped myself on his piggy bank with a thin shaving blade. I stopped reducing his savings after he caught me holding high his book-like treasure box, coaxing coins to drop. “I never thought you could steal from your brother,” he said.

Sometimes, without regret, I remember them for those whacks. I did it once on my son Boogie - when he was in the grades – and regretted it for days. Each closing of the school year just took its toll on my father’s meager pay as a city gardener at the Pacdal Forest Nursery. He had to buy me new clothes and a pair of rubber shoes for the ribbon-pinning ceremony, which I had to skip at the end of the third grade.

“Blow out, Mr. Dacawi,” my teacher told my dad as we were about to finish fourth grade. He smiled sheepishly and left. He came back with a box of assorted soft drinks which he laid down before my teacher’s feet. “Agang-agawak laeng, dakayo met,tata,” my teacher said, red-faced.

My father had to attend the graduation of Class of ’64 of Rizal Elementary, in his old rubber shoes and gardener’s clothes. Shortly after the ceremony, I met Ms. Regina Blancas, my intermediate grade teacher who congratulated me again. Close to tears with pure relief and joy, she told me she had to defend my academic performance against some living or social standards in the selection of the class valedictorian. (to be continued next week. e-mail: rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).