OF CARPENTERS AND OLD SONGS

 

Old songs are doorways to yesterdays. On Sundays, I make it a ritual to listen to them—the ballads of the fifties, sixties, and seventies—not merely for their melodies, but for the rhythm they awaken in memory. 

They carry me back to afternoons beside my mother as she repaired a broken bariw mat. Her hands moved with quiet precision, each movement a beat in the rhythm of her day. As the lone midwife to a community of some fifteen thousand souls, perhaps this small act of mending was her way of resting from the heavy demands of her calling. I was told to take my siesta, but I resisted. I hated siestas. Instead, I rolled a pencil across the mat like a toy car while the afternoon stretched lazily around us. The movement of her hands, the rolling of my pencil, the drowsy heat—somehow, they have remained with me. 

The old songs take me there. They take me to the old house by the puericulture center, and later to my father’s furniture shop. There, the local panday worked with the quiet confidence of men who knew their craft. They arrived before seven, their pomaded hair already part of the morning scene. At nine, they paused for breakfast—sinabawan nga sapsap sa kamatis o eba—which they loved enough to sip down to the last drop. Fifteen minutes later, they were back at work. They labored until eleven, broke for lunch, took a strict one-hour siesta, and returned at exactly one. At five, they tidied the site, gathering their waste and leaving the workplace almost as they had found it that morning. 

There was a discipline to their hours, but there was also something gentler in it—a rhythm of work, food, rest, and work again that belonged to the life of the town itself. 

And so the old songs bring all these back: my mother mending the mat, the carpenters shaping wood in the afternoon light, the taste of broth, and the stubborn boy who thought an hour of sleep was an hour stolen from living. They bring back a way of life I did not know I was witnessing. 

I miss them. I miss those Sunday afternoons. 

Last Sunday, I switched on my phone’s Bluetooth to my Marshall. There, The Carpenters began to sing, and it is yesterday once more. 

Songs do not return the past exactly as it was. They return fragments of it—the sounds, textures, tastes, movements, and feelings that somehow survived in us. The old panday built the houses and furniture of my childhood. The Carpenters now help rebuild them in memory.

 

ARBOR DAY MEMORIAL

 

We observed Arbor Day today.

Early this morning, some of us from the local government unit went up to the foothill of Eumati at Sitio Arcangel Norte to plant trees. I scaled the heights of Eumati when I was a young man, but I had not been there since. Not even at Arcangel Norte. I decided to ditch the motorcycle, being unfamiliar with the terrain, and hitch a ride on the back of one of our 4x4 service pickups, together with the girls.

The road was long, winding, and mostly uphill, with the final ascent stretching more than 300 meters at a sustained incline of almost 45 degrees. Eumati leaned over us, inviting us to discover her again. But our roads diverged. We stopped at the entrance of Arcangel Norte Primary School, an old, solitary building with three classrooms, perched on a plateau facing the crest of Eumati. The school stood on an expanse bordered by a game farm on a rolling hill teeming with rambutan trees heavy with ripening fruits.

There, we planted varieties of endemic trees—narra, taghangin, and another whose name I failed to identify.

We planted them for us later to forget.

Yes. To forget.

We have been planting trees since the late 1990s. At one time, we aimed to plant a million trees across our vast territory. Balete has a total land area of 11,892.78 hectares. Its upland forest cover is pegged at only 2,054.30 hectares, while its mangrove forest covers 179.36 hectares. Our population, according to the 2024 CBMS data, is 30,310. One could imagine how thickly forested our land might have been had those million trees thrived.

But we forget.

We plant, then return to our quotidian worries, forgetting that we have planted trees.

Precisely why there is a need for an annual observance we call Arbor Day. We need it to remind us that we planted trees long before we planted trees today. Perhaps we should call it Memorial Arbor Day, an occasion to remember those trees we planted in the bare thickets of Eapos, at the foothills of Agtawagon, in the shade of Nasunogan, on the hidden hill near Kabuhian, in the heights of Anao, in the wilderness of Cortes, and in some other places I can now barely recall.

I wonder why, but today reminded me of the chocolate pig my daughter Aurea loved when she was just three. Something in them seemed to connect one to the other. I just can't figure out what.

 

Aurea at 4, guarding her sapling

RUBBING SHOULDERS

There is something valuable about riding public transport in Rural Balete. A jeepney ride offers the commuter perks that enliven his experience of humanity. In it, he is part of the whole. He rubs shoulders and body with the rest. He hears their stories. He smells their histories. He sees them as persons—not just individuals, and neither as statistics.

The jeepney is his public sphere. In it, he interacts with others through his daily commute and their quotidian worries. In it, the exigencies of life are shared. The jeepney is his community. In it, he belongs. He feels the others’ joys and struggles, the others’ victories and defeats, the others’ hopes and angsts, the others’ faith and disbelief.

Yesterday, I had the grand opportunity of commuting to Kalibo. I seldom take public transport these days. I am what others see as a privileged one, being placed on the high seat of power by local standards. I rub shoulders with the power-that-be. In a way, I am alienated from the common tao, from the ultimo, those who have least in life.

I seldom hear their stories and woes firsthand these days. I’m confined in the inner air-conditioned room, guarded by gatekeepers. Only the select can come to see me on a regular basis. My office has been appropriated and allotted to those who sought my advice or those who sought my intervention.

But yesterday, I had the wonderful opportunity of commuting. My travel was personal, not official. And I opted to commute. I don’t want to abuse the perks of a service vehicle. I want to reclaim my experience of rubbing shoulders with my fellowmen. I miss hearing their stories. I miss hearing them utter their unguarded tales, inflected in the sound of their language. There’s something different in their idioms, in the way they exchange words.

Yes. Yesterday, riding on a jeepney bound for Kalibo, I regained that heartwarming experience. As I rubbed shoulders with my fellow commuters, I listened to the tales of a woman behind me. She was addressing someone from her place. She was telling him about someone who was hospitalized and whose bills were now accumulating fast. She wondered where they would get the money to pay the bills. She talked also of a loanshark they happened to know. She said she was soulless. She said that she believed in gaba—karma. But the loanshark, she said, was not affected by it. It was her family that suffered because of her evil ways.

Kaeuoy ta ra mga unga nga nagaantus. She pities her children who suffered in her behalf. Sayod na gid ron. Sayod na gid ron. She emphasized it as if reciting a mantra.

Her words reminded me that the jeepney is not merely transport but a chapel of stories. In its cramped benches, we carry each other’s burdens, and in rubbing shoulders, we rub away the illusion of distance between privilege and struggle.

 

AS MORNING BREAKS

 

The morning is breaking softly today. The wet blades of grasses mirror the morning light in mythical symmetry. Some roosters still perching on their Indian Mango roost welcome it in solfeggio intervals. The brood of chicks plea on their mothers to hasten their morning rituals to hunt for some prospective worms. A couple of snipes inspect the drying stream winding through the orchard and down into the culverts set up by DPWH. It follows them across the Aklan East Road to join the greater water of the Jal-o yonder several communities in rural Balete. The lanzones and mangosteens spread their leaves quietly exposing proudly the ripening of their abundant fruits. On their branches black ants are already queueing in their endless lines as if they have not taken a respite.

The morning is breaking sweetly today. My wife’s brew is already steaming, a weft of bitter aromatics escapes into the fresh air and mingles with the sweet scent of a ripening eangka. The coffee! My morning ritual. A candle is lit, its flame dancing silently as if a laud, its whitish smoke raising the sigh of praise and longing around the altar in our living room.

The morning is breaking. Vehicles zoom fast the road outside in different directions. People are rushing it for their worries and concerns. The net is buzzing. The radios break in angst.  All are up and about.

All save for one.

In her bed, a barangay official refuses to welcome the day. She puts her pillow over her head. The night had been restless. Morpheus failed again to lull her to slumber. In her mind, no sheep are jumping over some fence. In its stead, a list of names keeps appearing as if phantom haunting her over and over again.

The list. That robbed her of her rest. It was not a very long one. Nor it was a very short one. Nothing special about it. But something in it deprived her of her sleep.  Names she knows quite well. It was like any other, a simple list of names. Names everyone in the small neighborhood know. Names of people whose roofs displays no stars and whose house stands on owned lots. Names of people whose parents get invited in social events and whose family names carry weights in a community that give due regards to men of consequences.

The list is for indigent beneficiaries. And they are there. All of them.

OF NEEDLES AND BLOSSOMS

I remember the morning because of the smell.

The saliyaw was in bloom around the star apple trees near the plaza, and the morning air was fresh and sweet. Across Plaridel Street stood our Gabaldon school building, where something unusual was happening. Health workers had come to vaccinate us, accompanied, as I remember it, by men in uniform.

Even as they were caught by surprise, my classmates were quick to concoct other plans. Some of them scrambled out through its Capiz windows. I watched them from near the Sunny Hillside Arch, amused by their ingenuity and perhaps a little proud of myself. I had nothing to fear. I was already vaccinated. My mother was the midwife.

I was five and was a “visitor” in Grade 1.

I did not know then that I was growing up under Martial Law, or what Presidential Decree No. 996 had to do with the government that had sent the health workers and the soldiers to our school. I knew only that my classmates were escaping a needle, and that I was safe from it. That morning held a strange paradox: laughter and fear, blossoms and needles, health entangled with the heavy hand of command.

Today, that old Gabaldon is gone, and the star apples and saliyaw no longer grace the plaza with their sweet scents. New structures rise, but the Sunny Hillside is still watching, still remembering.

More than half a century later, I found myself sitting in a public hearing in Balete, this time talking about a proposed local measure—the Expanded Balete Mandatory Immunization Ordinance of 2026. The report from the Municipal Health Office was sobering: only 43 percent of infants and children in Balete were considered fully immunized children (FIC) in 2025. That figure is far from the 95 percent coverage that the Department of Health seeks to achieve in every community.

We looked at the numbers on paper, knowing that behind every percentage are children, parents, health workers, and the community's responsibility to protect them.

And suddenly, the Grade 1 boy standing by the Sunny Hillside Arch came back to me.

The circle had closed. But this time, the needle is not a command born of fear or coercion. It is a covenant of care—a community remembering what it owes to its children, and passing that protection down to those waiting in our barangays.

 

THE RITE OF PASSAGE

 

My father’s errands were small rites of passage. He would press a few coins into my palm and send me down the street to Lola Elvie’s store, just a few houses away from our home at the back of the Puericulture Center. It was a general merchandise shop, typical of the 1970s, where rice stood beside soap, kerosene, and sundry goods—necessities for survival in upland Balete, when the Jal‑o River was still the principal road. By Saturday, Market Day, the place swelled with voices from Ilaya, the upland folk carrying their week’s barter and coins.

There, amid jars of candy lined like jewels and the faint smell of kerosene clinging to the air, I would ask for my father’s brand—Marlboro. Nang Viola, Lola Elvie’s daughter, would smile as I appeared at the counter, her eyes bright with familiarity, and ask what I was after for the day. That simple gesture—half welcome, half ritual—made the errand feel less like contraband and more like belonging. The cowboy’s brand, riding across the television to the brass and drums of The Magnificent Seven. I did not care for the cigarettes themselves; I cared for the music, the gallop of horns that seemed to promise a frontier beyond our town’s center.

            Returning home, I carried the sticks like treasure. I would lift them to my nose, inhaling through the filters, imagining a future where I too would smoke—not Marlboro, but Philip Morris Menthol, cool and green, a boy’s fantasy of adulthood. I told myself, when my time is come, I will be that man.

           Yet wonder of wonders, the years passed, and I never lit a single stick. The cowboy rode on without me, and the menthol dream dissolved into laughter. I laugh now at Ayn Rand’s solemn declaration that smoking is Atlas shrugging—man asserting his mastery, or a capitalist man proclaiming his dominion of Earth’s resources. To the boy I was, however, it was nothing so grand: only a cowboy, a soundtrack, a smile at the counter, and a scent caught in the filter.

          Now I stand grown, lungs unscarred, memory intact. The Marlboro Man remains a phantom of my childhood, his anthem still echoing somewhere in the background. And I, who once thought smoke would crown my adulthood, discovered something else instead: that sometimes manhood is not in the fire one learns to light, but in the fire one learns to leave alone.

 

BUEON-AGAN IN THE SUMMER OF 1980

Weeks before our graduation from Grade Six, the four of us were invited by Samuel, a classmate who lived at the foothill of Bueon-agan.

Bueon-agan is a steep, rocky hill stooping down on the small poblacion in the valley cut by the Jal-o River. It got its name, according to local legend, from a girl or woman dinaguit—abducted from what is now called Dumaguit. From there, her body, abused and dissected, was said to have been sun-dried on the rocky slab atop the hill we now call Bueon-agan.

Old folks claimed that Bueon-agan was mystically connected to the other hills of Balete: Agtawagon, Nasarok, Eumati, and another whose name is on the tip of my tongue but which I can no longer name.

I have long wanted to discover the tales about these hills, but I got distracted every time I went out into the Baleten-on world. Maybe one of these days, when I am no longer preoccupied...

Now, the four of us—Roy, Simeon, Jonard, and I—summoned our courage to hike into that mystical hill. This would be our first adventure outside Poblacion.

We were Boy Scouts. Not just ordinary Scouts. We held the highest ranks in the district organization of Baden-Powell. Perhaps that alone gave us the courage to venture into the unknown.

How were we to find our way? We had no map. No Google Maps back then, no Waze. We relied on instinct and common sense. On strangers we encountered along the way. And on our training as Scouts.

It took us less than half an hour of hiking and then another stretch of steady ascent to reach our destination. But we did not seem exhausted. The lush greenery, the fresher air, the singing of birds, the pristine water flowing melodiously along the creeks, the wonderful scenery, and the privilege of looking down on the poblacion from a vantage point—all these were enchanting.

From there, we could look across at the once-towering hills of Eumati and Agtawagon and wonder at how they seemed to rise to the same height as where we stood.

Add to that the sumptuous meal Samuel’s parents prepared for us: aromatic bisaya rice, binakoe nga manok, and pinayukan nga dahon it balinghoy nga may sinaeay nga batod.

Wow!

Those were the days indeed.