WHAT I REMEMBER: A FICTIOAUTOBIOGRAPHY

FOREWORD

"There are things we actually remember, there are things we don't, and then there are the ones we think we remember ."

                                                                                                                                                                            -me-

The miserable childhood does not simply happen. It is brought about.

- Frank McCourt –

In his third book, Teacher Man, McCourt apparently forgives the Pope, the English, and many other people for his miserable childhood.

It made me think: should I also blame my Aeta ancestors, for teaching us the way of the mountains and just live there respecting all nature when we could have bulldozed everything and created a much better city than New York? Or maybe my Indones ancestors for my chinky eyes and yet brown skin when I could have the better skin of the Koreans? Or the Malay ancestors for choosing this small- more- than- 1700- islands for home? (Although I couldn't imagine living in the hot Australia, or fading into nothingness like the Mohicans or living in war in Great Zimbabwe). Or should I also blame the haughty Spaniards, the loud Americans or the angry Japanese for instilling into us Filipinos our greatest fault, the corruption of the weak? (Although of course, the religion, the language and the diligence gave us a culture so rich it couldn't be painted in a mural) . Or maybe I could lay blame to the President Marcos at the time I was born and at the time I was growing up, Aquino ( whose spouses' control are so overwhelming one brought the rise, the other the fall) for their indifference to what the country needs at the time ( err, a great leader?) Maybe I should lay blame to my elementary teachers for not insisting that I enter school ? ( Maybe the complete education would have made me so intelligent I could have been a Senator by now). Better yet, why not blame Adam and Eve or the dinosaurs (whoever came first) for choosing such a lousy planet for us to live in (Maybe Mars or Pluto could have been a better place to live in).

But well, I couldn't. Because I do not know the mountains they climbed, the dragons they slew nor the stepsisters they've had.

So even if I have so much respect for Old Frankie ( You are my mentor even when you did not know me ), I'll have to say, I beg to disagree.

All we could do in this life is live. And learn the lessons. Then enjoy the memories.

PROLOGUE I

"He took him outside and said: Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can. Just so, he added, " shall your descendants be."

-The Book of Genesis 15:5-

Natonin, Mountain Province- Carlos stood both agitated and scared outside the hut. His wife is inside, moaning her pain in cadence with the voice of the mangngillot. The wife is giving birth to her third child, no, make that fourth. The first child died at birth, they named her Marlyn, and buried her on a small plot beside their hut in Kachakran.

The wife was inconsolable after the death and they just had to get away from where the baby died so they migrated from Kachakran to where they are now, Natonin. The grief was only appeased after a baby boy was born, and then followed by another. But there are nights when he finds her outside, hiding her laments. She did truly grieve for that baby girl and he had to be strong for her. But he also grieved. She was his first child, too. His baby girl.