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.
