I STEER clear of politics nowadays if I could, especially after a Social Weather Stations survey showed President Rodrigo Duterte is on the way to becoming the most popular Philippine chief executive ever. That’s how far notions that the people will soon embrace again liberal democratic tenets have crumbled.
I posted recently on my Facebook page these lines from the Jim Capaldi song, “Old Photographs:” “Even though we walk the diamond-studded highways, it’s the country lanes and byways, that make us long for home.” This was, I think the third time I posted those lines on Facebook.
A friend then asked me through a message if I had gotten “senti” when I posted those lines again. Indeed, every time I hear the song on radio, I always get sentimental. Three words and phrases there hit me in the gut: “diamond-studded highways,” “country lanes” and “byways.” They are triggers to the surfacing of some of my younger years’ better memories.
The phrase “diamond-studded highways” always make me recall those times I would sit on some good vantage points on the peaks of the mountain areas of Cebu City and watch Cebu province’s main urban center, which is composed of Cebu City and the cities of Mandaue, Lapu-Lapu and Talisay. You’ll discover up there that not only are the metro’s highways “diamond-studded” at night but so too Cebu’s main urban center.
I remember Giya’s reaction upon first seeing it when we were on the fourth hour of a night trek from the village of Bonbon. The footpath was going uphill, then entered a bushy portion of the slope near the peak. The trees and bushes were like a black curtain we went through before it opened to the area that provided us a sight of the metro far away.
We were supposed to be silent trekkers but Giya could not contain herself upon seeing the “diamond-studded” metro. She shouted, “Wow!” and urged us to stop and relish the moment for a while. The peak was somewhere in a village called Bocawe that, unknown to me, would become one of my future bases when I lingered in the city’s hinterlands for a number of years.
I believe that village as I knew it is gone now, a victim of the struggle that burst there in the waning years of the Marcos dictatorship. Save for one family, the people that lived in Bocawe mostly belong to the clan of the patriarch we referred to only as “Tatay.” The village “vanished” after the entire clan and the rest of the farmers evacuated to the lowlands. Fanatics ensured they would not be able to return by burning the deserted houses.
I actually went there years later for an errand together with some friends. I had insisted on guiding these friends by my lonesome up the peak but got lost because I based my knowledge of the terrain on the position of the houses that sheltered me in the old days. That was when I realized that I need to write a book now on those years because those times have remained only in a memory that, in old age, has began to thin.
Which reminds me of the lines in a Barry Manilow song: “Memory, all alone in the moonlight/ I can smile at the old days/ It was beautiful then...”