May 4, 2005 – Surviving in the 20th Century

May 4, 2005 – Surviving in the 20th Century

It is Friday April 29th and I’ve just arrived home in El Paso after a short flight on Southwest from Austin. I’ve come to spend time with my father and mother and my two sisters, who live in the neighborhood. When you first get home after being away for some time, you spend time getting back into the rhythm of your past life. All of us relate to family in a long worked out ritual. We’re strangers after so many years away and all we have in common is blood and our past together. Now nearing the end of my sixth decade on earth, I’ve been away twice as long as I was ever at home. My parents’ lives still revolve around a daily pattern of close interaction with friends. There’s my uncle SQ on my mother’s side who lives close by. He’s married to a Filipina and has two stepchildren—he has no children of his own from the marriage. There is HM, whose husband died over a decade ago—she’s supporting her one daughter and grandchildren from the marriage. There’s PG, also a widow. Her husband died in a fire some years back. Those are the ones closest to my mother.

My mom and dad were both close to Gene, a man in his 90s, who my parents knew for over 50 years—I mentioned him in an earlier entry. He was a cook in the army and made some memorable meals for the Filipino community when we would often get together to celebrate holidays, weddings, and funerals. His wife Basha, was the taller and thinner of the two, with the stern look of one in perpetual deliberation on some serious problem. The moments when her face would break into a smile were rare. Gene had the body and disposition of the Pillsbury Dough Boy, a round face ready with a smile whenever it turned to you. They were polar opposites and their children reflected it. The oldest, my age and my school mate, HR was as serious as his mother. His two brothers WR and DR, both with the build of their mother and sister CR who shared her father’s rounder shape had their father’s disposition, though with less enthusiasm and extroversion.

Basha died some years back—I forget now the cause. My mother and father were helping clean up and paint their empty house before it was to be sold. The house was one block north and two blocks west of my parents’ house. It was mid morning and mom and dad both watched someone approach the house from the front then circle around to the side as if to enter by the patio door in the reach. Both waited for the door to open and the neighbor next-door to enter but no one did. They walked out the patio door looking for where the visitor might have gone but found no one. Each looked at the other puzzled then smiled and said “Basha” in unison, convinced that her ghost had returned for one last look before she departed this earthly place for good. Convinced that her affairs were being properly handled she went on her way.

Besides friends there is my mother’s family, most thousands of miles from El Paso in the Philippines or scattered all over the world. My mother comes from a large family that lived in Agoo La Union. Her father Luciano’s first wife died shortly after my mother’s younger sister Margarita was born, leaving Mom, her older brother Marion and the newborn behind to grieve. Luciano remarried SQ’s mother and had another six boys and a girl, none of whom my mother knew. She had been given to her father’s brother Domingo to raise in Manila—Domingo wanted Mom to be a companion to his only daughter, Juliana. These details I learned during dinner on Friday as we sat about the kitchen table talking about my mother's early life in the Philippines.

My mother’s father and uncle were both policemen, I learned, but Domingo decided to become an undertaker and went to work for a mortuary on Rizal Avenue in Manila, while Luciano remained a policeman in Agoo La Union. I found a picture of a school class in Agoo—pronounced “a gu o”—on the web, dating back to the early 1900s. It shows a clearing with five large thatched roof buildings extending into the picture, the foremost of which is shaded by a large tree that towers above the roof at the immediate left of the building. At the bottom of the picture are eight to ten rows of children stretching filling the foreground of the picture—easily 500 in total, aligned in as many as 40 to 50 columns. All are dressed in white uniforms. It’s possible that Luciano and Domingo are among those assembled for the picture.

When my mother moved to Manila with her uncle Domingo, she entered a life of comfort. Domingo’s house, which he shared with his common law wife Louisa—they never did get married, was a large flat above the funeral home where he worked. Domingo and Louisa only had the one daughter, though mom could not explain why. Filipino families tend to be large—as Luciano’s family attests. The funeral home was owned by a wealthy woman, who might have given Domingo the job because he was qualified or because he was a handsome rogue, known for his womanizing. (Most Filipino policemen then were lady’s men, my mother declares.) Mom and her cousin Juliana both had their own rooms. The household had a cook-maid—Louisa’s cousin—and a hired male launderer, who kept the household in clean cloths. Mom and Juliana walked the few blocks to elementary school, which sat on a side street off Rizal Avenue. Next to the elementary school, was also a high school. Mom tells me the kids at her school wore uniforms—blue skirts and white blouse with black shoes and white socks for the girls—was it coed? She never said. She explains that at the start of the school year her uncle purchased a dozen uniforms each for Juliana and her and would buy another dozen mid-year.

I asked her about the funeral home and she recalls coming down the stairs into the parlor containing displays of caskets. On occasion she would come down and find her uncle Domingo sleeping in one of them. She would become frightened and would shake him to ensure he was only sleeping. He would rouse from his slumber and return to work. What better place for a nap than in a comfortable casket designed to support the sleeper for eternity? After that exchange, Mom fell silent, no more memories rushing into the present. Mom left home in 1920. A generation earlier, the Philippines had become a U.S. possession in 1898 after defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War. Less than a generation later it would be embroiled in a far greater conflict.

My mother is an enigma, who from a young age learned the art of survival. Given the opportunity to leave home and live with her uncle, she did so without hesitation—she was seven years old when she left her father’s family. She remarked to me that she was the oldest girl and would have been the one to do many of the chores in her father’s household. Mom spent nearly all her young life, apart from her growing numbers of siblings. Her decision to join her uncle Domingo’s family was a wise one. She received a good education while living a comfortable life for the times. Her learning—especially a command of English, acquired from the time she entered school—and her instinct for survival would stand her in good stead for the huge challenges life would throw her way after she left school twelve years later in 1932.