Sunday, October 12, 2008 Estremera: Those moments... gone By Stella A. Estremera Spider's web
I SOMETIMES have these inexplicable moments when something flits in and then lingers on in my mind, bothering me to no end. The only recourse is to understand what's happening...
And that's how it was last week when I awoke thinking about this old white lady in a white dress whom I always saw walking along Juna Avenue when we still lived there, way before I entered kindergarten. Yup, my childhood memories are divided into two: before kindergarten and kinder-and-up. That's because before kindergarten, we lived at Robillo Apartments along Juna Avenue in Matina. The family transferred to the house in Bago just before my kindergarten school year, where we stayed until late 1990s when the incessant floods drove us away, forever.
Since the memory of that old lady was at Robillo Apartments, therefore, it was sometime before I turned 6.
For me, she has always been old. And she was white, Caucasian-looking white, not your friendly neighborhood ghost white lady, that is. And I called her Auntie-something.
That Auntie-something was what bugged me at first, I couldn't recall the name. And so I texted my sister; she should know, she's our eldest.
"Sino nga ba yung old lady na puti whom we called Auntie sa Juna?" I asked.
"Mrs. Feranil," she replied. "But we didn't call her auntie."
The Mrs. Feranil didn't ring any bell. I insisted I called her Auntie, but my sister said we didn't.
"Was she the nurse?" I asked, although not sure where I got that memory that the white lady who wore white was a nurse... that's how it is when you're dealing with pre-school memories, you're not quite sure why you know. You just.
"Yup," my sister replied. She was the one who gave us our shots, she added. I don't remember any of those shots, all I remember was that I called her Auntie-something... and then it came just like that, "Auntie Lily."
"Auntie Lily!" I texted my sister, and that was when she too recalled how we addressed the lady she remembered as Mrs. Feranil. But that didn't end there, as I know these moments too well. They're not just flits of memories; they're somehow linked with the present. What that present was, I didn't know. And so I searched it through the Internet -- Google (Don't you just love this post-modern age). "Lily Feranil," I wrote and got several unrelated entries and one very intriguing one with the heading, "Re: Descendant of Leopold Schuck Philippines" in a genealogy forum.
In his year 2002 post, one Mario Feranil introducing himself as from Manila but formerly of Davao City, said he was putting together the Feranil family tree and that he had an auntie "named Martha Schuck (known to us as Auntie Lily) who is married to my father's brother, Emilio Feranil."
In just one Google find, my Auntie Lily and my sister's Mrs. Feranil was there, all together, confirming that Auntie Lily did exist and that she was a resident of Davao.
What interested me more was that she was a Schuck and just that week, I started reading this book on the Sulu-Sulawesi Sea explorations of German Captain Herman Leopold Schuck ("The Saga of a German Sea Captain in the 19th Century Sulu-Sulawesi Seas").
I sought out the book in the pile on (yes, on) my bed, flipped to the genealogy page and looked for Martha, and there it was "Martha 'Lily' Schuck", daughter of Charles Schuck by his second wife Juhaila Isahac. Charles was the fourth child of Capt. Leopold by his first wife, Sophie Wilhelmine Honstein. My Auntie Lily's grandfather was a 19th century sea explorer.
It was both "Wow!" and "Sigh! I was born too late..."
In the memory of this once a child, barely five, she was a white lady; again let's make that clear -- Caucasian white, and not friendly neighborhood ghost white, lady. All I remember was that she was also always wearing white. Well, she was a nurse, and so that should have been expected of her. And that she was always walking along Juna Avenue. I don't even know if she lived there or anywhere nearby; she was just there. I don't remember the shots she gave us, I don't remember talking to her. But I do remember that she gave me a red apple once. Childhood memories, indeed.
Today, I would have wanted to know more about how she remembered her grandfather, the sea explorer. But at just around five years old or even much younger, one's priorities are different; talking about ancient folks and history isn't among them.
How many more stories could there be, untold, unspoken, only because nobody asked... and wrote them down? Millions, maybe even billions. Another entry, this time from the Feranil family tree on the Internet showed Auntie Lily died on November 21, 1990 at the age of 78. Too late. Much too late.
