42 BOOKS IN A YEAR

LAST year I’ve read 42 books, the most for any year since I have started reading pocketbooks when I was in grade school. And at the end of the year I still have 58 books in my shelf waiting to be read; almost all of which I bought from book stores and sidewalk shops that sell secondhand books. So far I’ve read four books last January, and this month I’m on my sixth book. And with this rate, I might finish reading all the books in my waiting list for this year.

Why the sudden surge of number of books read? My previous personal best was 17 books which I tallied in 2004 (I have been making a list of what I read since high school). I wasn’t really serious when I joined the Shelfari group, which dares members to read 50 books a year; I just wanted to try to measure up among the most voracious readers in the group, and to challenge myself as well. I almost made the cut last year. But with my target of 4 or 5 books a month, which I was able to achieve in the last two months, I think I am on track to finish more than 50 books for the year.

And I have been as voracious as I was in '04, in spite of my tight schedule of my workload in the office, my law studies, and freelance writing. And whenever I have a chance I squeeze on my time hunting for secondhand books. As if I got scared that I'll run out of good books to read!

I read any chance I get, and anywhere! I bring with me whatever book I am reading wherever I go, just in case I have a few minutes to wait for a ride, or my turn to pay in a grocery counter. Why not, a few minutes of waiting, is a few less minutes of boredom.

I can usually read even with distractions around. It depends on how good the book is! I read on my commute to work each day (about an hour each way). At work when I get bored, and sometimes on my lunch breaks, I would read a book. For the rest of the day especially before my class schedule I read my textbooks, assigned cases (photocopied from SCRA), and other law-related materials.

When I get home from work and definitely before bedtime, I devour more pages of the novel I am currently reading. And my favorite place to read is in bed with a comfortable pillow.

I remember one weekend during my college years, I practically did not rise from bed until lunchtime just to finish a John Grisham book. And some years earlier, while I was in high school in Narvacan, I would bring a book with me whenever I led my cow to graze in the pasture. I stayed under a tree or beside tall grasses while watching over my cow. But during those days, I only had a limited number of books to read. Most of the books were borrowed from someone else. I never owned a single book. I was only able to buy my first pocketbook ever, the classic Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, when I was l already working in my first job in Quezon City.

Now with my renewed interest (or addiction, according to my wife) in reading pocketbooks, I can now read classic and popular books that I never had a chance to read during my younger years. There are free sites for downloading e-books but I still prefer reading them on paperbacks. My extra pay from my freelance job had helped me shore up my budget for books. I believe that in my years of reading, my brain has become more robust and energized, as I began to appreciate life around me more than I used to. I’ve never been a social person, rightly now as a working student. How could I miss hanging out with friends or going to a party when I could ensconce myself anytime I want in any corner conducive to reading? A Sunday, of course, is a family day, and partly freelance-work day and partly reading day.

I consider these books out of the 42 which I read last year as the ones that gave me the mostest benefits of entertainment, wisdom and all: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Journey by James A. Michener, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy, The Cider House Rules by John Irving, and East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

And more to come in my waiting list.

STAYING HOME

CHRISTMAS season, particularly the holiday break, is by far the most joyous time of the year. Having an extended time off work and just taking things easy at home with my family make it more blissful for me.

From the 23rd to the 29th of December, I enjoyed hanging out at our own little house in Marilao, Bulacan than somewhere else. I wouldn't even get dressed. It was my day to relax and read and do housekeeping without time pressures.

First on my list was to organize my school and personal files on my work/study area and those in my desktop by saving my files on CDs as backup. Next was to deal with clutter and dirt all over the house. It’s amazing how much clutter can accumulate when you’re not paying attention to it.

I sorted through unused clothes, books and magazines, decorations, and kitchen wares. And while inspecting shelves, closets and kitchen racks, I discovered swarm of termites burrowing on a closet where my kids’ old school books and some of my school files are stacked. The termites must have found the books delicious that they crunched almost all of them and nibbled on some of my files. The rest of my files and other parts of the house would have been gobbled down had I failed to detect the silent insect invasion for a couple of months more.

My wife helped me in decluttering and keeping our home guest-ready. We had visitors on the 24th, mostly my in-laws from Malate, Manila. With additional work to deal with, like wrapping gifts and planning and actually preparing for the noche buena, keeping a clean home for the holiday can be a real challenge to her. She had to redo the decors on the Christmas tree and walls, and had to change the curtains and sofa covers.

Staying home also means helping with the laundry and sharing with cooking chores. But this time, as if in an extended family weekend, I do most of the cooking. Of course, I enjoyed most of it, especially when I see my kids anticipating my mostly Ilocano recipes that I served on the table.

And during my free time (no household chores to do), I see to it that my kids are entertained every second of the day, otherwise, you would hear from them “I’m bored” or “When are we going out?” I let them watch DVD movies with me and my wife. They were happy watching old movies and some cartoons.

I gave my kids extended time for play which I wouldn’t normally do during school days. I allowed them to play with their playmates in the street, especially in the afternoon. My two boys played basketball in the plaza near our place every morning. My six-year-old girl was content playing with her new Barbie doll and her cash register toy. I allowed them to swim with their cousins in the club house pool on Christmas day, and we flew kites on the next day.

My kids thought that the holidays were just fine, even with my cancellation of any plans of a holiday getaway. Good enough, even while they were home, they got what they requested from Santa, and had received the gifts and even cash sent to them by their godparents and relatives.

I told them that going to Star City during this time is out of the question, because with the monstrous crowd at its peak season they might not get their money’s worth as they had to endure long queues for their favorite theme park rides.

Going to the mall is also out of the plan. I would not willingly drag my kids during holiday madness through wandering mall traffic, and multitudes of shoppers darting and dashing between clumps of regular stalls and those mini tiangges! How I hate long queues for security checks at narrow entrances and those Christmas carols playing non-stop! I don’t think I could endure long lines on counters and even on restroom. And best of all, I intentionally blocked the temptation of spending too much by shunning shopping malls during this season.

Surprisingly, though, we all found out that we gained so much fun even without going outside our home during the holiday break. Call me shallow, but being with my family for seven straight days at home was a rare and exhilarating experience. I wouldn’t exchange that for any material gift for this season.

REMEMBERING OUR DEAD

DEATH is a natural cycle. It is normal as there is birth, baptismal, wedding, rejoicing or celebration; as regular as the night reigning supreme over the sun’s realm but only for half of the day. This is not a big surprise, since no one lives forever. Everyone who comes to this world has to leave. All of us will die.

But yet death can be so heart-wrenchingly shattering, especially when it happens in the family. It isn’t anything anyone wants to think about, yet it is part of our life. This is the bitter awakening of what we are fated for, what we should be living for. It’s a realization that when death knocks at our door, in spite of the fullness of life, we must give in, as a sleepy man must not, as it is useless, to resist sleep after a tiring day.

And to remember our relatives and loved ones who are dead, we light a candle for them, offer flowers and prayers at their grave. We now love them in their absence as we did in their presence. We mourn for losing them, but we can smile with the thought that there was rejoicing in heaven for having them now.

My own first experience of death came when I was about six. It was my first memory of a close relative leaving us. Minutes before his tragic death, I saw Uncle Erning enter the house that night just to inform my parents that he was going home to the barrio after closing their stall at the market. My mother invited him to stay and have his dinner but he declined. He said my cousins Edwin and Danny who were in the tricycle, were in a hurry to go home. But minutes after he left, he got into an accident that caused him his life. A van collided with his tricycle as they negotiated a junction just a kilometer away from our house. My two cousins were spared. I remember my Aunt Colling the next morning screaming, kicking and shaking, and wailing to high heavens “Why?” I felt sad that this was happening. My uncle was so alive when I saw him that night. This was unfair. I knew how hurt my aunt was.

But prior to Uncle Erning’s death, our own family had suffered two deaths. A brother and a sister both died when they were born (our youngest, my mother’s 10th child, was also stillbirth when she came out years later). When I was a boy, their graves were the ones we visited in the cemetery. I remember them only how they died, but not how they looked as I never had the chance to look at their faces or to hold them.

I was in elementary school when another death came in our family. And I was a witness how it came about. When my lolo sa tuhod, my maternal grandmother’s father, breathed his last on his death bed, I was with some of my cousins, aunts and an uncle who was especially summoned to Apong Casio’s side. I saw my uncle’s hand clasped with that of my great-grandfather, as the latter started to jerk, gasped and then he went off. There was a symphony of wailing around the house. The wake was held in our house, and it was more of a reunion than anything else because of multitude of relatives, most of whom my parents had not seen for years, some of them from Hawaii, to attend the wake.

But the saddest part was when my maternal grandfather died in 1990 due to a lingering illness. I received the news while I was in the boarding house near the university where I was a college freshman. My brother Romel and I were both stunned. Apong Angel was very close to all his grandchildren, as he was the very reason why we always had reunions during Christmas and some family celebrations. He was the venerable patriarch, enforcer of discipline, a referee in some fights with my siblings and cousins, but a storyteller par excellence. My brother and I hurriedly went to the barrio that afternoon and we were able to see our grandfather still on his death bed, as the coffin had yet to arrive.

I will never forget the two weeks that followed. The gloom hung like a cloud over everything, and whenever I think of that time, the gloom comes back to me (as when I was writing this blog, I felt a lump in my throat). My mother, aunts and uncles, my mother’s siblings, and my cousins were inconsolable, but everyone stuck to one another in grief. It’s all for our beloved apong lakay (grandfather).

Apong Ansang, my paternal grandmother, died when I was already married and working in Manila. She was bedridden for the longest time as she was already sick and old when I visited her during summer, in one of my rare vacations in my hometown in Ilocos. She was staying in an uncle’s house just a block away from ours. She found difficulty recognizing me. And when she got my name right, she requested for a pasayan (prawn) for her dinner, at least, as she told me, before death could overtake her. I told father about it but he replied that my grandmother was only acting out just to be pitied. In short, I must not be bothered about it. I know father was not close to her mother because when she got a second family after grandfather died, my father and his siblings when they were young were left with the care of their spinster aunt and a very stern grandfather. That perhaps started the estrangement, or aloofness, even when death beckons her mother.

A month after I went back to Manila, Apong Ansang passed away. I went to her wake with a heavy heart, not just for the loss, but for the prawns that I was not able to buy for her.

The death of my maternal grandmother, Apong Lumen in 2003, brought the same gloom as when Apong Angel, her husband, died 12 years earlier. Only that the whole Escobar clan had matured then, and we knew that death is inevitable for her advance age. And everyone accepted the fact that her death made way for my mother and her siblings to settle whatever differences and misunderstanding they had before, and for them to account for the estate.

But there’s one scene during the funeral that I will never forget. Milton, my eldest brother and one having the distinction as the unang apo (first grandson), was very silent during the wake and the funeral mass after that. After the mass, as it was the tradition, all of us relatives, went near the coffin for our final respect and for pictorials. Milton maintained his stoic stance unlike most of us who are either sobbing and moaning and gasping for breath. When it was time to close the coffin , my brother asked the procession to stop for a brief moment. He went near the coffin, embraced it, and it was only then that I heard his most mournful cry to date.

There were other deaths in the family, most of them close relatives, but rarely did I attend the wake or funeral. But I couldn’t cry as I did when I was young. Death would just come and go. And for this year, my mother’s cousin who was living in Hawaii died of stroke, and my paternal granduncle died of old age.

But the death early this year of my sister-in-law’s husband due to heatstroke was one of my saddest times. It was so sudden. Only a month earlier, Kuya Rudy was in our house to celebrate with his granddaughter who, with her mother, lived with us in Bulacan in the duration of the young girl’s daycare education. Our family had a good time with him in SM Marilao for my children’s recognition day. He had been very helpful in times of our need, like when we needed a repairman for our electrical connections in the house, or a helping hand during a handaan (party) for some important occasion.

But with his funeral, I didn’t cry for him, because I know he’s in a very peaceful place now. My stifled cry went for those he left behind. His wife, who was now left alone to tend for the family. A daughter and a daughter-in-law who were both pregnant that time, their unborn no longer have the opportunity to see their grandfather alive.

It was Kuya Rudy’s grave, along with my father-in-law’s, in South Cemetery in Makati that my wife, my three kids and I visited yesterday, a day earlier than the usual time for the observance of All Soul’s day. Only a year ago, in this same cemetery, Kuya Rudy was with us, so full of life, while the whole family lit candles for our dead. Now he’s on the other side, and the thought of it made me really sad.

But the melancholy will not last forever, I’m pretty sure. And our natural course is to live and then wait for our own time to depart this life. Why not, if we the living live deeply enough, then we have no fear of death.

BEST GIFTS

IN my birthday last week, my kids surprised me with their personally made birthday cards, which they handed me with hugs, kisses and chuckles early in the morning on the 21st. That’s what I meant in my previous blog that there are good reasons to celebrate your birthday, just as there many reasons to establish a good attitude in life. Let me say then that receiving greeting cards from the kids is the best gift ever a father could have on his birthday. 

My three kids are a good bunch of inspiration for me. Seeing them in the morning completes my arsenal for staying on, moving on, and hanging on in every setting of my life. Of course, I flare up sometimes, scold them, and find less time with them. But I will not dwell on that. A child is a child, sometimes naughty, demanding, and sometimes sweet; as father must always be a father, and always in him a soft spot or a weak spot. As a father, I could be so busy with my daily schedule and routine that I could have become so clueless.

To my kids, there’s no better way to express their love than to put them in words and colorful artworks. Here are my kids’ recent masterpieces.

This one is from N-yel, my eldest.

Yes, that two photos are Manny Pacquiao’s which he (or with Mom as co-conspirator) had clipped from an old newspaper. My wife and my kids love to tease me that the world-renowned boxing champion and I are like peas in a pod, especially when I sport long hair with a split on the middle and bangs hanging on the sides, and when I made myself unshaved for two or three weeks. But read on, did my son scribble the word handsome? But I rather take the whole message to mean, “Hey, my dad’s the champ!”

This one is from Dudoy, my second child.

This boy hasn’t grown up his love for dinosaurs. Not yet. He still loves to collect dinosaurs, to watch dinosaur movies, to read about dinosaurs, act like dinosaurs, and think like dinosaurs. So what do you expect when he thought of something to represent me on my birthday card? A T-rex with a big mouth ready to devour its prey would be it (but instead he cropped my picture and drew a cake as prey this time). Now I realized my dinosaur lover of a son loves burger than anything else. But for “dinosauring” me, I won’t treat him not even a bite of his burger. Just joking.

And this one is from Eya, my youngest.

My girl with a toothless grin loves to write love notes and to doodle on paper scraps and on pages of her notebook. (Last time, I heard her Mom telling her to stop sending sweet-nothings to her classmates, one of them a boy.) And for this one from her, she used a colored paper and a scented pen for a change (why not, it’s her dad’s special day). The erasures must have been due to her brother’s editing. And the unusual cut on the corner must be hers, because she still messes up her artwork with the scissors.

Just like their other letters and impromptu cards I received from them, I will keep these cards in my personal drawer. I know that anytime soon, they no longer do this for me or for their Mom. One day they will no longer recognize themselves in what they wrote. The he-he-he’s and emoticons, the dinosaurs, and scented notes with erasures may soon be a thing of the past, and they may not be as sweet as they do now. And like many of my fondest memories, they’ll be anchored on things that no longer exist. But I just hope they won’t stop sending me those handwritten cards.

My kids love to write sweet-nothings and flaunt their creativity when they make cards for their Mom on her birthday or on a Mother’s day, and for each one’s birthday, and during Christmas. Even when there is no occasion at all. My youngest, when she has the mood, draws stick figures with I love you’s and I miss you’s naturally matched with heart shapes and smileys. Then, pointing at the figures for me to see, she chatters with her sweet little voice “This one is you, Daddy, this one is Mommy, this is Love, this is our house, etc.”

A BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION

A GOOD music in the morning to pep me up, a hearty breakfast with steaming black coffee, hugs and kisses from my wife and kids, the smiles of neighbors you meet in the street. I try hard to establish that attitude of joy in my life, because I want a day that is filled with happiness, not sorrow. Especially when it is my birthday.

And that will be tomorrow September 21.

I was born exactly a month before the Plaza Miranda bombing in Quiapo, Manila, and exactly a year before President Marcos declared Martial Law in the country. But the later event is more significant. The presidential declaration is considered as the most crucial episode in our history that ushered in the long reign of Marcos dictatorship. Since then, September 21 has become a very memorable date in the country, and just like those birthdates that fall on holidays or any historical date, it has an easy recall.

But do I really need to celebrate for all the world to know? Is it supposed to be a purely personal celebration?

For the first time in many years, right before I write this blog, I remember my former boss (God bless her soul) and her antipathy on birthday celebrations.

She wasn’t keen on celebrating birthdays. If she had her way, she didn’t want us in our department to greet her with lavish gifts or throw a party for her, much more to celebrate on her birthday. A birthday to her is purely personal thing, a time for her to introspect and evaluate her life, so why throw a party just to have fun and tell the whole world that it is her birthday. Once, when we invited her to attend one sumptuous party for an officemate who was celebrating her birthday, she naturally declined the invitation.

My former boss was one of my mentors when I first worked in Rex Publishing, but her stance on birthday celebrations didn’t suit me well. I had theories why she hated it: she might have an unhappy memory about birthdays, she had no family of her own as she was unmarried, or she didn’t want obsequious people to use her natal day to strut their skills on her. Or she just tried to rationalize things in her or the company’s favor, that when we do a party we are practically cutting our working time in the office.

That started then my own introspection and reflection during my birthday. I began to reflect on purely personal terms the significance of my natal day.

To me a birthday is a cause of celebration. There's always a certain expectation and significance for it. Just like anything good that happens to you, a good report card from your kids, a great day at work. I believe that life is about rejoicing. Every good thing is significant and always a cause of celebration and you want to share that with your family and friends. We are all for a party, anytime.

So when one celebrates his or her birthday, it’s one way of saying, Hey, I live for another year in this planet and let’s hope for more years to come. Who cares if a birthday would just add another year to your age? You grow old year by year, even if you don’t celebrate your birthday anyway.

I rather think of another year passing, what I have accomplished so far and what I haven't. I tend to focus on the first. And this gives me some reason to make merry. There must be good reasons to celebrate.

I don’t usually have particular plans for my birthday; except that, I must be sure that I will have a nourishing dinner or lunch with my wife and kids. Last year I treated them with an early dinner at KFC in Caloocan, just that one, and then we went home.

Because it is non-working holiday tomorrow (this year it falls on a Ramadan, now a national holidays upon the official declaration by Malacañang), I might have a real party this time. It means I have more time with my kids; and I expect some important guests, particularly my brother and two sisters, and some of my in-laws from Malate to come over.

I’m not twenty-one anymore but I can still pretend I am. I can always think of my birthday as a milestone, another marking up of my chronological age, but not my outlook in life. Grow old, and grow wiser than ever before, seems to me a good dictum.

A RENEWED PASSION

SOMEONE has said that human nature is so weak in the bookstore.

There’s truth to that, with what happened to me one Wednesday morning while I was in a bookstore that exclusively sells secondhand books, at Waltermart near Muñoz Market in Quezon City.

It’s 11:30 a.m. on my watch, and I still had 30 minutes to spare before I go to work. But that half-hour dragged on until past 12. I knew I would be late, but I had not yet decided which book or books I must buy. And worse, I only have P400 in my wallet for the rest of the week.

With a very limited time and budget, I must pick with any one or two of many books that I had selected. Dammit, there’s so many for picking that morning when in some regular days, I could only see two or three good ones for me. I picked up Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (P65), John Lennon by Alan Clayton (P180), East of Eden by John Steinbeck (P180), Mitla Pass by Leon Uris (P45), Mexico by James A. Michener (P65), and Presumed Innocence by Scott Turow (P85). But I must choose only one or two if I hold on to the more expensive titles, or at least three if I chose the less expensive ones. The clock was ticking very fast.

To think that a day before that I also ransacked a stall of secondhand books at a lobby in Trinoma, another mall along EDSA within the city. For almost an hour of rummaging, I was able to bring home five good books: Got Shorty by Elmore Leonard, The Cider House Rules by John Irving, and Roger’s Version by John Updike, a Magic Tree House’s Dingoes at Dinnertime, and Happy Feet (junior novelization of an animation movie)—the last two were for my two boys who have also been fond of reading pocketbooks.

For the past few months I have been buying an average of one book a week, all second-hand books. With my limited budget (look, I am a father of three, have a part-time job, and a law degree to complete), I couldn’t afford to buy expensive new releases, all bestsellers, on display in National Bookstore. Even when I buy one if I got extra money to spare, I would still have second thoughts shelling out P300 or P400 for a new book. I might rather use that amount for four or five secondhand books from Booksale. Why not, I don’t exactly need new releases when there are myriads of good old books out there that I couldn’t even read a fraction of them in my lifetime.

I haven’t read the other books—around 20 of them—that I have bought since June. But I don’t mind looking at my unread books, and that, once I’ve finished reading one, I can immediately browse at them, thus giving me a choice from which I can select the next one.

My passion for reading has been increasing since middle of last year. It all started when I got invited by a friend to open a Shelfari account. I felt good downloading from my memory box those titles, from children’s storybook to romance and bestsellers to classic novels that I have read, and compiled them in a list, complete with pictures of familiar covers and some important details. Then I began to think of those books I haven’t read so far. It was then that I realized I have missed so many books since I faltered from reading and collecting books some years ago, thanks to termites which gobbled most of my first collection of pocketbooks, in our rented place near Muñoz market.

Now to catch up on my reading, I read while in a vehicle as I commute from our home in Marilao, Bulacan to our office in Quezon City, which is a one-and a-half-hour travel. And during office hours, I stole some time beyond coffee break to read pages of my book. And I’d formed the habit of reading more pages before going to sleep. So in those terms, I'm on track!

But one side effect though is that, my allocated time for my law course was now at a minimal because I have been spending more time reading fictions than reading my codals and textbooks on Taxation and Civil Procedure. So most of the time I cram in these subjects.

I don’t think it is a belated passion for reading. I haven’t stopped reading pocketbooks since high school but not as this rate that I am having now. I am starting to build up my library at home. It was my second attempt to put up another collection after that sad incidence with the termites.

Going back to Booksale, I settled on the more expensive ones: John Lennon and East of Eden. They were rare titles in a second-hand store as this one, and the copies were in good condition as if they had not been used at all by their first owners. That cost me P360, and one-hour salary less (due to tardiness) from what I would earn that day. Now you call that a sign of a weak human nature!

But it’s nice to think that when I get home I have new materials to read. Then that would inspire me to finish the one I am reading now, The Sandman: Book of Dreams, and have vowed to complete one more book by the end of the week.



My latest Shelfari account on books read

POLITICAL

I AM an apolitical grade schooler when Senator Ninoy Aquino died on August 21, 1983. But I was aware of that event early on. I could feel that most if not all people of Ilocandia (the Ilocos Region) just shrugged the event off as nothing serious as to distract President Marcos—yes, the Apo Marcos of us Ilocanos. And the old folks wouldn’t care! The Apo is a strong man, they said. That settled things then, the event would never be a distraction, even children of my age would agree.

But more than two years after Ninoy’s assassination, the “event” would lead to a monumental uprising, no longer a mere distraction of the strongman’s rule. After the snap election pitting Marcos against Cory, Ninoy’s grieving widow and a political neophyte, crucial episodes of our history unfolded before us. When the regime’s Defense Secretary and one of his trusted generals defected, citing massive cheating in the election as one of their reasons for their heroic act, hundreds of thousands of people had began to gather in EDSA to support them.

I remember that fateful day of February 25, 1986. It was wee hour of the morning. I was stirred from my slumber by a neighbor calling on my father to go out and hear for himself a very important scope. “Awanen ni Marcos! Pimmanawen! (Marcos is gone! He’s left!)”

As I had been a captive listener to my grandfather’s radio and to gossips and serious conversations of adults who had been following the developments in EDSA since day one, I was interested to know the outcome of the said rebellion or revolution (whatever side you were in then). My grandfather was hoping early on that these rebel soldiers and oppositionists and opportunists alike, including the Catholic Church hierarchy, would eventually see the light and concede to the Apo’s election victory. My father, my neighbors and almost all Ilocanos shared the same sentiment, at least during those troubled times.

But now the Apo had given up the fight. I hurriedly went out with my father and proceeded to our neighbor’s house. Heard over the radio in crackling signals was a report about a US helicopter slipping Marcos out of the country while nobody was looking.

My father was speechless for a moment, so with our neighbor, and his sons who were also stirred from sleep like me. It was as if a light went off and a breath of life snuffed out. It was sad for my grandfather, my father, my neighbor and the rest of the Ilocanos.

When I went to school, where I was a high school freshman, an overcast air is evident in the campus. I could sense the somber mood among the students, teachers and school administrators while they discussed about our future. The school owner, a staunch Marcos supporter, after a moment of gloom would eventually shift its loyalty to Cory, as there was no more chance for the Marcos loyalists to fight back, and a support from the new government would be necessary for the survival of the private school. But even months after EDSA, political discussion would rather center on Cory as usurper of power; otherwise, Marcos loyalists, most if not all of them in Ilocos, would rather not talk about it. So I finished high school with no politics bothering my life again.

But my self-imposed ignorance was only short-lived. By the time I entered college, the Cory administration had been fighting tooth and nail to ward off rebel soldiers. The bloodiest of this series of coups happened in 1989 during my first year in college.

By then, I know what’s good and bad for our government. I had learned enough what Marcos had done to our democracy, and the excesses of the dictatorial regime. I would know then that the military cannot just grab the government from Cory. It helped that I regularly read the Free Press, which I bought almost every week with whatever I could save from my allowance. I started subscribing to the opinions of Teddy Locsin and other magazine contributors in their defense of democracy and the Cory administration, and their aversion to dictatorship and its clones. Gen. Rodolfo Biazon, the Marines commander during the series of Honasan-led coups, would become my hero for successfully defending the State against power grabbers.

There wasn’t a time that Cory became popular among us, at least in Ilocos. I heard people mumbling that they’re better off with Marcos, and they thought that if life wasn’t as easy as before, why would they have to embrace a new regime. Marcos was still and always be their guy.

But to those moderates, or those who would rather embrace Cory administration and its shortfall than to revert to martial rule, believed that there were other factors beyond the control of the Cory administration that kept us from progressing as a nation, such as these tragic calamities (Mt. Pinatubo eruptions, earthquakes), series of coups, and the fact that Cory inherited a bankrupt government. That Cory wasn’t popular in the region was also true at least with student leaders and campus activists. For them Cory was a “tuta ng Kano” because she had wanted to extend the stay of the US bases in the country. But the magnificent 12 in the senate, headed by then Senate President Jovito Salonga, thwarted her when they rejected a proposed bases treaty that would have given the U.S. more years to maintain its bases here.

While in college, I also joined some student movements, campus demonstrations and forums against US bases and everything that stinks of neocolonialism. As part of the student publication, I became a member of a militant writers’ group.

Immediately after college, I went back to my high school alma mater to teach for a year. There my third year students would remind me of the usual apathy that most Ilocanos had for Cory. I remember that class we had in February that year. A day earlier, the Ramos government had just declared the EDSA anniversary as non-working holiday. Now my brief discussion on the date as part of my motivation for the lesson, turned out to be a question-and-answer forum. “Do we really need to celebrate the People Power?” somebody asked. That started it all. Then they barraged me with questions centering on Ninoy, Marcos and Cory. Is Ninoy a hero? Was Marcos really bad? Did he really order the assassination of Ninoy? Or was it Imelda? Why a revolution happened in the first place?

I was surprised that I could tell them in simple words and with conviction about what I know and felt about the People Power. I narrated the events that preceded it, and saying in summary that Marcos was bad, that Ninoy had good reasons to go against Marcos, and that Cory was brought to the fight, by a stroke of God’s hand, to save our democracy from the dark reign of a dictator.

From that day on, I affirmed my admiration for Cory and my political conviction, that everything contrary to democracy is bad.

That, I admit, must have started my real political awakening, and the burden that I must bear until now. It pains me to see our country still wallowing in extreme poverty many years after that euphoria and exhilaration of the success of People Power of 1986. I feel nothing but utter disdain to our present leaders. It upsets me to see politicians doing everything to perpetuate themselves in power, obviously by nepotistic and patronage type of politics, and by charter change. It disturbs me to see leaders of rebel soldiers who wanted to grab power by force, disregarding our Constitution in the process, but who are now so eager to join democratic elections just to continue their greed for power.

But what disturbs me more is to see deposed President Erap Estrada raring to run for president again. Erap even becomes an admirer of Cory, something he didn’t hide during the wake of the former president. He even extolled the heroism of Ninoy and his ideals. Now this pardoned convict wants to run again. For what? To go back to the government that he plundered from 1998 to 2001?

Well, we are in a democratic country. It’s damn complicated living on it. But even with the kind of political leaders that we have right now, I never regret living with this country. There’s always hope, as Cory, the plain housewife, had shown us during trying times after the death of her husband.