Marikina with the Papa

From inside a car on a sunny Sunday morning, I saw how time can change things: fix the road from potholed asphalt to smooth concrete, rename buildings or weather them down, add stoplights, and wash away homes; so that when one comes back to it, what was once home is now unrecognizable.

Dad had long wanted to visit his hometown Marikina City. He had hinted at it every time he had the chance to at dinnertime. Somehow, Mom, Nico or I would bring up something to make Dad wax nostalgic; and, over fried chicken and rice, we would begin hearing stories about his neighborhood antics. 

With a travel writing assignment due in three days, getting Dad to bring me to Marikina was, as the cliché goes, like killing two birds with one stone: Dad would get to quell his nostalgia, and I would get my story done. So off we went on the family’s Montero with Dad behind the wheel, raring to show me the nooks and crannies of his youth; and I, pen and paper in hand, ready to write everything down.

As we drove along the now-paved roads of his hometown, Dad would often exclaim how different the present Marikina City was from how he knew it in his boyhood. Street names had changed, and some buildings were torn down and replaced. We had just passed Marist Village and were on our way to Rancho Estate, an open subdivision where the streets—Branding Iron, Corral, Rodeo, Stirrup, Saddle, Chaparral and so on—paid homage to the village’s horse ranch past. Back when Dad was 10 and Rancho’s hills were still filled with tall cogon grass and empty lots, he and Lolo would take the .22 Winchester and go hunting for labuyo (wild chickens).

Stalking behind the cogon, they would silently await for their prey—Dad with the Winchester; Lolo with his pistol—to haplessly waddle within their range.  A kill would garner celebratory cheers (“Yes!”) from under their breaths; it was a private victory between the only men in a family of six.

 

But Time, unrelenting, surged on. By the ‘70s, the hunting grounds gave way to homes; and the labuyo hunting days were gone, leaving only a black and white photograph of father, son and Winchester for posterity. Dad moved on, as well. He was a young man, after all, and a young man has his buddies to preoccupy him.

In Rancho he had Dascel, whom he’d meet on those “precious weekends” when homework was of secondary importance and milking youth for all its worth was paramount.

“Dascel was one of my closest friends,” Dad said. “On weekends, I would go over her house, and we would talk or drink.”

 Hanging out was different then, he recalled. There were no Internet games or online chat rooms that could replace meeting face to face. Either you went to someone’s house or the nearest tambayan (hang-out spot) or you were stuck at home with nothing to do.

Dad went on about how he and Dascel were friends from high school and all throughout his 20s; and as we turned toward the nth street in search of her old house, he mentioned they had lost touch around the time I was born and he and Mom moved southward—away from Marikina.

“But that’s life,” he would always say every time he talked about how little he now hears from his old friends. “You graduate then move on to do your own things.”

I stopped counting after six streets. Dad was still trying to find Dascel’s house. An hour earlier, after we had passed my baptismal church on Concepcion, he had happily said, “I still know my way around Marikina pala; you just need to get your bearings.” But there were a lot of places in his hometown Dad did not recognize anymore, a lot of places that were no longer there; and when we met a dead end at Chaparral Street, Dad gave up: 

“I don’t remember where she lives anymore.”

Silence followed. It was the kind of solemnity that had earlier engulfed the car when we drove inside the Holy Family Village at Provident. The area was one of the most devastated places in Metro Manila after the flood from last year’s Typhoon Ondoy caused the Marikina River to overflow and rage past the adjacent dike, taking homes and lives with it.

Dad was silent then, seeing how some houses never truly recovered, like that one pink house by the river: Gate sagging to the right, cement crumbling at its feet, plants reclaiming the space the now grimy walls had once taken—we knew even with the “for sale” sign stuck to the wall it would never be sold. 

Devastation and lost lives will never compare to realizing what we have lost to Time, but the sadness was still there when Dad gave up his search for Dascel’s house. It was as if Time, too, had swept away his happy youth from him forever.

I looked forward as we moved downhill back to C&B Circle Mall, past Dad’s old school and his best friend Rocky’s old house—now empty and up for sale—past Gen. Ordonez St., where Dad’s home once stood before the lot was sold to a bank, and the road was still called Molave. I realized Time had seeped through the car windows and eaten away at our morning frappucinos and at the weeks I had left before my 20^th birthday. 

No one can ever avoid growing up and living life. We drove on.

Dad’s old drinking spots on Ivory and Aquamarine Streets were no longer there, and his friends living on those roads at SSS Village had long migrated to the United States. They used to drink by the sari-sari stores there as tambays (lollygaggers) who young ladies’ fathers thought would never make anything out of their lives. Now two are living comfortably abroad; two others are running their own businesses; and Dad’s a boss in the corporate world.

On the way home we ran into his old friends, and for a few minutes Dad was 21 again, giving the high fives and chummy greetings sprinkled with expletives like my own buddies. There were plans for another drinking session and nostalgic recollections of how they all used to look forward to the Fridays after work when they would drink beer and watch Voltes V together—but Dad cut the reunion short. 

I still had a deadline to beat, he said, and I was already running out of time. 

Just like that we were on the road southward again—Dad looking forward and I looking back at Marikina, and the glimpse of the changes Time may lay ahead for me in 30 years. On the radio an Eraserheads song played, speaking of friendship, songs and drunken nights under the moon, and how everything must come to an end, leaving only memories behind:

Minsan ay hindi ko na alam ang nangyayari
Kahit na anong gawin
Lahat ng bagay ay merong hangganan
Dahil ngayon tayo ay nilimot ng kahapon
Di na mapipilitang buhayin ang ating pinagsamahan
Ngunit kung sakaling mapadaan baka
Ikaw ay aking tawagan
Dahil minsan tayo ay naging
Tunay na magkaibigan