Ashes of Summer

It has been raining a lot lately, going into the second week of March which is summertime in my country when the sun should be blessing us with its bountiful grace. But instead, the sky threatened us with a reprise of its wrath in 2011 when it covered the landscape with a quick flood that wiped out lives and memories in a matter of minutes.

Few options this rain brings—in the hinterlands you would have to get up, put on a salakot and check on your livestock, and on the rice fields you would have to say a quick prayer for your rice paddies and your future finances that are surely hanging in the balance in the next few hours. And in a quiet home in the city you can hum to yourself the memorable tune of Reminiscing.

"Now as the years roll on

Each time we hear our favorite song

The memories come along

Older times we're missing

Spending the hours reminiscing"

The last time I remember it was raining like this was in the summer of '77 or maybe '78 in a place called Mangagoy, Agusan del Sur. Back then as a young lad I felt it was the best summer yet, away from school and into a completely different view of earth and sky. Like a song verse it would rain regularly in the morning. My father would get up from his makeshift bed on the bus he was driving on a daily route from Mangagoy to Davao and back, put something warm in his stomach while I wondered if this place was ever dry.

After dark is when the chorus would find itself into the lives of these highway warriors where I would lose my father suddenly in the bewitching shadows that seemed to conduct the orchestra of the grand scheme of things in the world of adults. Nevertheless, I would find contentment munching on a chicken neck barbecue for one peso before falling asleep on one of the bus seats guarded by a lighted katol glowing in the dark, like a lifetime plan for light years away like today. He would show up later drunk, pass out, and wake up tipsy the following morning, repeating a ritual that is played out in every worker's lifetime.

On the day he died, not having an inkling that his end was near, he said to me quite seriously, "You need a new pair of shoes."

But he did not say, "Okay, I give up liquor."

He was full of joy and ambition and stories and he lived his life to the full, in the small cup that he was brought to this world with and he dreamed that one day I will "not be just a bus driver" like himself.

It was a peculiar thing to hear because those trips when he took me with him were the highlight of my life before I was of school age. He would allow me to operate the horn which was off to his left as the bus approached a bend, to warn oncoming traffic. I was his navigator, and it was a better pleasure than say, "geography, arithmetic, history and grammar."

Only much later did I get a notion of what he meant, when he would stumble home tired, smelling of Tanduay, and my mother's yelling would rise to an awful crescendo as we kids froze in the dark fearful of something we were unsure of, not seeing anything but hearing everything. He was not one to employ defense or apology; instead he was single-minded in opting to extricate himself with funny comments while under investigation, sometimes so silly that my mother could not keep a straight face while dishing her daggers. But some nights he did not come home at all, and there were rumors. She and my siblings went home to her mother in Digos, and rebuked me for refusing to go with her.

"I would like to finish the school year," was my quiet but firm excuse— although unsaid, it was really: "If I go with you, we will never see this house again."

On nights when the moon did not come, the lone lighted candle and I had the house to ourselves in a routine that culminated in me eventually finishing grade three, rather enjoying my independence to linger longer at the komiks rental inside Carmen Market after school. He would pop in from time to time bringing corn grits and dried fish. A school year passed and she and my siblings were suddenly there, standing tentatively on our bamboo floor, surveying if anything was amiss. This was the summer when I was sent to Mangagoy to keep an eye on his shenanigans, but I did not mind because the food on the road was a hundred times better than dried fish.