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Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Malilong: A happy childhood
By Frank Malilong
The Other Side
Thank God for the little children.
It is not difficult to be affected by the wail of friends who bemoan the inevitability of a blue Christmas. You cannot even claim that their mood is infectious. Not when you have been a carrier yourself all along.
I used to think of Christmas in terms of the deprivation I felt as a child. I had to walk four kilometers on unshod feet every school day until I was ten when we moved to the poblacion. There was no Christmas in the barrio; none that I could remember except for the exchanging of gifts (pencil, paper, guavas, manzanitas, budbud and the like) in school.
In the town, Christmas meant running against other children after packs of firecrackers thrown by the Boholano storeowners, hoping to find an unlit one in the debris left by the explosion. We were fortunate there was no super lolo during our time because some of the firecrackers that we picked up exploded in our hands. I could have been Frank Pungkol.
I promised myself that when I grew up and had a family of my own there would be plenty of food on the table on Christmas eve to make up for the little, if at all, there was at home in my childhood. Gifts? On my first grade, I remember crying silently in the corner because the child who was assigned to give me my Christmas present did not show up. Life was unfair even when I was young.
The experience must have traumatized me so severely that when I started earning, I made it a point to buy myself a gift on Christmas. I used to receive P30 a month as a reporter in 1969 and the first gift that I bought was a cheap pair of locally made rubber shoes.
The presents have since become more expensive as I grew older. And there is enough food on the table on Christmas eves so that my children will not remember Christmas like I did.
But why did I continue to feel so empty, so unsatisfied? The children have grown up and are living lives of their own, probably unaware of what poverty meant on Christmas eve, and here I was, still nursing my own hurts?
Why did I notice the dark and unlit houses instead of the ones bedecked with lights that twinkle like stars or gleam like pearls? Why was I so obligingly accepting of accounts that showed humanity’s vices and uninterested in those that extol its virtues?
The other night, while waiting for the traffic light to change near the Capitol building, two children came, knocked on the window and started caroling. I gave each a couple of one-peso coins after which they ran to the car to my right but not before they said thank you.
Two other boys came to my direction and I picked up four one-peso coins again but they stopped at the end of the island and sat on the edge, their feet barely touching the ground. The light had changed and when I passed by them, I saw two happy faces on bodies covered by tattered clothes and feet unshod. Their smiles glistened like pearls, dimming the white lights that adorned the Capitol building.
That evening I discovered that I had a very happy childhood.
(December 15, 2004 issue)
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