Inscape

BEHIND THE SCENES

Alfred P. Dizon

(Yours Truly would like to reprint this article by Freddie G. Mayo one of the prolific feature writers and broadcast journalists of Baguio some decades ago. A former staff of mayors who helped pioneer the city information office, we had the honor of working with him in the now defunct Baguio Daily Vibrations in 1989. He died in New York in 1997.) 

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“Dummy swords shred morning glory,

Of children at play

Among the ruins of man……….”

From Session road. This article is memory. It is neither history nor autobiography. It is fragmentary, personal and existential. It is also true.

A spinster-aunt, recently dead, told me that my grandfather plowed rice paddies in Bauang. Struck by many fabulous stories about Baguio, he came to make his fortune as a young man.

He served as catechist with the Belgian missionaries in Itogon, was employed as a roomboy at the old Pine Hotel, was eventually promoted to the position of cashier, and then went into the private business. My paternal grandfather met him in Itogon where she also taught catechism. From union, my father, two aunts and four uncles were born.

My first memory was living in a small room in the second storey of a house made of rusty GI sheets situated roughly at the back of the Plaza Theater. My second was a visit to my grandfather’s place at Campo Filipino, also a ram shackled construction made of salvaged lumber and GI sheets. My third was being raised on the shoulders of my father on the sidewalk fronting Session Theater to view a parade. It must have been July 4, 1946: the marchers were mostly soldiers in stiff khaki uniforms.

Like my grandfather’s relatives, my father decided that the most expedient was to survive after the war was to go to business. He became a cloth merchant. I remember him putting up three stalls at the dry goods section, converting the natives that frequent our stalls for a sip of Naguilian basi to the virtues of Khaki and denims; postponing payment to the Chinaman who always seemed to be there.

I must have been a queer bird during those early days. The wide basin of my childhood was spent in the shove and scuffle of the street urchins at the City Market; the equally wide circle of this basin among children of a different breed and temper.

After the war, the market was a makeshift as the rest of the city. The tobacconists were house in the old stone building; lowland vegetables mingled with cabbage and potatoes at the open market at the corner of Abanao and Magsaysay Street, and dry good sections have the side of Zanlueta Street and Kayang Street extension. We hired comics at Dicang’s and Mrs. Zarate’s store just below the market office. Only the shoe section remains in its place to this day.

School pleasant. There was this movie by Walt Disney we saw free, Bambi, with all of us on our haunches on the floor. The girls were always giving us boys candies and such.

The first teacher I could vividly remember was a Penguin, a Belgian nun whom everybody address as mother Birthing, and who watched us sharply as we groped down the dunk and dark staircase that led us to our grade I classroom. They must have been what the early Christians called catacomb.

The second was a Filipina nun, sister Carmencita, whom I still see running around without her veil, getting things done. She was always giving us cookies, letting us play with a lot of toys. Even when we didn’t want to, she let our head lie on a low table for a mid morning nap. We didn’t fall asleep though.

Our room was just below the kitchen grills, with our small noses press on the cold wood, we still could smell the warm and delicious odors of the sisters dinner cooking.

We played tag, red rover, prisoner’s base, soft ball, rugby football at the school. At the market, my playmates were more boisterous and adventurous. We fought each other over practically everything. We probe small piles of sand for rubber bands, knocked marbles on concrete walls, engaged each other for decks of Captain Marble, Phantom and Tarzan cards, hit  rows and rows of bottle cups and horded them in empty ammo barrels.

We have wrestling matches on the slope of Camp Allen, boxing matches everywhere we can assemble, mock-wars with the children of the military, each camp armed with sling shots and shared morning glory or twisted wire, running wars at Burnham Park where we also peeled “paper-erasers” trees and dipped the green acorns of the Alnus in salt appetizers.

From the old house at Campo Filipino, we joined other immigrants to a relatively new district at the far side of Aurora hill. With my playmates at the market gone, I have more time to myself. When the neighbor who grew, we were back at our old games but this times it was baseball, first fights, sling shots and stones.

We raided camote, sayote, and pineapple patches in the Busol watershed, in Ambiong, and down the valley behind the Don Bosco parish. At school, on the other side of the city, we became suddenly, interested in Doctor Doolittle, Heidi, little Lord Fauntleroy, puppet making, painting and tennis.

One of my classmates has a pet crocodile which we visited frequently at their farm in Irisan. Another girl had a complete set of rover boys and Nancy Drew mysteries which we all devoured privately.

Sometimes, I had to walk all the way home. I had nothing else to do but to walk home. I never met someone who wanted to fight, and whenever I saw anyone at play, I either stopped to watch them or join in their game.

Except for the Laperal building, there were no imposing sights. The Baguio cathedral, Dominican Hill, and Mirador seemed to have always been there.

I remember city hall where it was housed soon after the war, at the Zarate’s residence at the edge of Burnham Park. I did not watch it climb to its present location. City Hall was synonymous with the police department then: children were afraid of both.

High School brought along a new set of friends. There are some from the old elementary school I attended, neighborhood friends, new friends from practically all schools of the city. The camaraderie lasted for more than four years.

Where was the Gaelic wars and the Catalinarians, which we all detested, basketball which we loved and the girls from the side of the campus whom we did not know how to regard. And there was skating at Burnham Park.

It was an awkward age: none of us were aware to what was going on the rest of the city. Perhaps the most noteworthy was the changing of the electric post down session road, the formation of traffic islands at its food, along Harrison road and Magsaysay Avenue.

We knew our public officials only by name, none of us bothered with what was going on at the city council, what happened to the congressional election, what transpired in the country. What kept our ears glued to the radio and our eyes to the newspapers were the game of the San Beda, Ateneo, La Salle and Jose Rizal. Life was all.

Came college and a steady stream of new faces, news ideas, new friends.

They’ll still remember us even when we do not remember them. Not all of them were born in the city as I was. A professional came from Zamboanga city.

But the bulk of the student population came from what is now known as region one in the NEDA calendar. Ilocos Norte, Ilocos Sur, La Union, Benguet, Mountain Province, Abra, Pangasinan and  sprinkling  from other region all over the country.

We were ripples in this wide student stream: we lasted only when we were there. There are new faces, and new friends, and news ideas and the stream will continue as long as our education institution stands.

Even when college was still to be over, I began to realize that our community is not our neighborhood. I took long walks around the city to what are now regarded as tourist spots: Mines view park, Crystal Cave, the hump of Ambiong over La Trinindad, Carabao Mountain, Santo Tomas, the Bekkel Watershed, Irisan, Burnham park in the early hours of the morning, Asin Hot Spring.

My impression wasn’t that of a tourist. I have more leisure. I took in the landscape on my own sweet time. I could leave the place without the regret I might not to be seeing it again. I could always return. Anytime of the day or night. I could see the same view at different hour: in the sheer brilliance of the morning sun, in the cloudy blanket of noon, in the gory epic of sunset, in the mystical kingdom of pre-dawn mist.

This was a poetic age: unrealistic because of the feeling that an individual can enjoy himself alone. Unreal because there are other tourist spots in the city where I did not go- the city market, the slaughterhouse, carinderia section, the churches, attended the numerous conference that took place under the city’s broad roof.

I have my own family now. Like myself, my wife is from Baguio. She had a different story regarding her forbears. Like me, however, her life is found in the city. But I am now part of a bigger community. I feel where there is not water from the faucet.

I could feel where the electric system does not give light. I feel when the electric system does not give light. I feel when the rent of the house exceeds the funds I have appropriated for monthly rent. I feel that transformation from the city I knew the city my children will know later.

I feel that Baguio is in my veins and my blood. I feel I will rise and fall with it.