Educator, Mermaid and Sailor

Every time I think about my hometown, Calatagan Batangas, there were some particular things that registers to my mind, the smell of wooden furniture mixed together with chicken feeds and the never ending smoke coming from the cooking pots. Back then we used to call the house in which we lived for a couple of years as our ancestral house before it was handed down by my late grandfather to my late uncle. All I can remember are blissful thoughts. Starting from having my first ambition of being a teacher where I used to write on wooden cabinets of my grandmother using stones which I picked outside the house and imagined that my students were pillows dressed in school uniforms. To the dusty, rocky street roads which I used to play in what I so called intense biking that cause me a lot of marks. Till to the flavor that my tummy really loved back then was a seafood called “Sikad” It is a seashell with a soft body inside and the only way to get the body out is to get a “panungkit” and on our case we use safety pins, it takes a lot of effort to get the body out of its shell but trust me it is all worth it! I barely new anyone from our neighborhood not because the people there are not welcoming it is because our land was quite big enough for me to get entertained. It was a sight consist of greens everywhere, flowers all over the greens and a nice nipa hut right across our concrete house. My favorite spot where I used to play with was a rubber swing tied on a sturdy Mango tree surrounded by rocks, before I used to pretend like I am a mermaid sitting on top of a rock with my hair swaying through the wind and some sailor would see my unusual feature and would get amazed by how wonderful I was. The only people that I have connected with who are completely strangers are those people uttering this words  "Tao po, Pabili po ng ________". 

My grandmother owned a sari-sari store and I used to be the one who entertain strangers, I used to be wise in terms of money handling and giving the right amount of change to my grandmother’s customers but that was before I discovered that I sucked in Mathematics, that all I believed was right before was completely wrong. Another ambition that occurred to me when I was back there was to be a sailor. I used to play on a long sofa in our living room, pretending that we (my cousins and I) were on a boat and we are sailing through the storm with sharks surrounding us. Imagining a wooden stick as a paddle and scratching it through our red tiled floor as if we are paddling extremely hard.   Our area was surrounded by large body of water where we used to swim every summer and get fried under the sun that was before the open beach was turned into a fancy resort. (Stories from townspeople stated that Calatagan, Batangas will be the next city.) Apart from that I remembered how we used to celebrate feast of Calatagan during the last days of April. Back to the feast days our wake up call was a loud cry from a pig, chicken and sometimes goat as a curious child I looked to our windowpane and saw some of my relatives particularly males from around their thirties slaughtering the poor and helpless animals. It was quite a scene to watch, I remember saying, “I won’t eat anything, especially not Goaty” (Goaty was my pet name for our goat.) But I ate Goaty because he was one of the main attractions in our banquet for the feast, Goaty was transformed into a Goat Kaldereta, though I didn’t really like the taste of it I ate it because my dad told that if I love Goaty I must respect what he is made for. Guests kept coming to celebrate the feast of Calatagan with us, some were close relatives but most of them, I have no clue who they are but that is the essence of our fiesta people just walk in your house and celebrate with you.

One thing that separates my hometown from the others were the blissful memories that I spent there and how I grew up together with the place that took care of me.

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