Sunday, July 08, 2007 Cariño: Photographs, memories, melodies By Linda Grace Cariño Paradigm Shift
YOU grow up in a gentle world, in the old neighborhood, where you know everybody and everybody knows you. You have a best friend whom you go to school with, play with, study with. At seven, you learn how to dance the “twist” to the sound of the Beatles: She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah…
In high school, you fall in love for the first time. She/he sits across the classroom, and you sneak glances her/his way when s/he isn’t looking. S/he loves me, s/he loves me not, s/he loves me sana please. At the Junior-Senior Prom, s/he looks moony-eyed at someone else and it breaks your heart. You get plastered for the very first time, unashamedly singing into a glass: “Can’t live, if living is without yoouuu… !”
Then you go to college. Something doesn’t sit right with the New Society thing and what you’re learning. But you take school, with all its new horizons, well enough. You go to classes, meet the gang after, join the college organizations that are more you than the course you’re enrolled in, and go home later than you should. Musically, it is the great age of Disco. John Travolta rules.
But all good things must come to an end. And then you find yourself struggling with young adulthood, i.e., job hunting. This workforce journey takes you to a memorable first job. Some of you grow with it. Let’s see, how did that first ID look? Were you ever that young? Some of you move on to other things, that second desk, that third uniform…You remember those images, playing to Mozart, whom adulthood has made clear you actually prefer to Pink Floyd.
Then you’re giddily in love. So you court, you get married, start a family, raise the children, get them through school. And time flies. You suffer through heavy metal before new wave, thankfully, comes along. At least, they have melodies. As the children grow up, they listen to all of these “boybands.” So you foot the bill for a lot of menudo.
Suddenly the kids are in college and have their own musical icons. A good number, you discover, are local. This is paradigm shifting for you, because there used to be just APO, VST and Co., APO, Sampaguita, APO. There was Asin, then APO. The kids are done with college and there’s still APO, remakes included. Who would ever have thought you would live to see the day…
… that you turn 50 this year, to boot. Flashback: Spandau: “You are gold!”
To all who turn gold this year, a toast to more of the best of photographs and memories in our melodied lives.
(July 8, 2007 issue) Write letter to the editor. Click here. Join the Sun.Star message board. Click here.
