CHAPTER 1
In Between: The Early Years
Davao City and Mindanao
Mama often told me that I couldn't have remembered events that I occasionally recounted to her, because in her mind, I was just too young to remember them. She was skeptical that I would remember events from those "too-young days." Perhaps, she often offered, I had simply heard specific stories from someone else and, over the passing of time that stretched into many years, I had somehow reinforced details enough to be convinced I had lived or witnessed such happenings. I discounted her explanations, however. Now recent research has shown that some kids start remembering early, while others recollect events at a much later stage of their lives, the latter of which is probably more common.
I remember well that Mama used to shout this epithet at us when we kids were young and grubby from playing outside: "You kids look like the skimmings of hell." We knew then that she had been momentarily frustrated by our activities and resulting unacceptable appearance. Now, if her premise is correct about me remembering later childhood events, not the early ones, how could I remember her observation of events that occurred before the war? Remember: I was born in 1937, so when Japanese troops invaded and occupied Davao City, Philippines, where we lived, I was only four and a half years old.
Marciana was a helper to our mama and also a nanny to us kids. Without her help, our whole tenure in Davao City would have been a bad deal, and likely our family would not have survived the war. When I was a child, she removed the scab from an old wound on my knee, perhaps generated a month before through some antic that kids of that age attempt. "It will heal faster," she told me, but the process of removing the scab hurt, and taking advantage of a childhood situation, I managed to create a picture of pain and discomfort accompanied by large tears.
As soon as the scab was removed, a passing fly immediately assumed ownership of the wound. Of course I shooed it away, but it was pesky and returned. I remember killing it with two hands, much as if I were clapping, because as Papa had shown me, two hands are much better than a quick overhead slap. No matter how quick one's hand is, a fly will jump sideways from under a slapping hand because it has pressure sensors on its back. Thus, a fly can tell when an object, such as a descending open hand, is above it. But it doesn't have sensors on its sides. That's a simple explanation of why a fly will invariably escape a downward whack with a flat hand but won't escape when two hands exert pressure upon its sides, which have no sensors. That is the secret of success in killing a fly: use two hands. I learned all this from my papa while I was just a young kid.
During my childhood development, I expressed frustration and anger with temper tantrums, during which I would pound my forehead on anything that was hard. Marciana used to commiserate with me, but Mama would laugh at my antics. I could hear her in the next room, stating, "Maybe he will pound some sense into his head!" Of course, that response would drive me to continue my childhood tantrums more vigorously. Excellent candidates included the hardwood floor and our wood table, the legs of which ended with hand-carved paws of a very large jungle cat. My papa once told me that the table was of narra wood from the interior of the Philippines and that the wood was the hardest and toughest in the world. I think he was right about narra wood.
Many years later, but still a youngster, I one day discovered a chunk of narra and attempted to drive a small new nail into it with a hammer. The nail bent and did not go into the wood; its fibrous grains are situated too close together to allow a foreign object, such as the point of the nail, to enter the space between them. Of course there exists a good probability that the youth in me was trying to prove a point, but I am convinced that narra is the toughest wood in the world.
Books and the Sunday comic pages were a fascination for me even before I could read them myself. One of my early memories from the colorful Sunday comics is lying on the floor and learning about a young girl and her friend, a mouse. She would speak magic words whenever she wished to join the small world of her friend, a mouse with a name and human characteristics who lived in a nice home of his own. I recall that I always wanted to join the girl and her mouse friend because I thought the mouse could possibly be a good friend for me too. The mouse was always dressed up and I thought he would be a wonderful partner for me to play with. Of course, the face of the little girl — human, huge, and startling — would appear on the other side of a windowpane in the mouse's home. She would be looking inside to see if her mouse friend was at home, and if so, she would speak her magic words: "Puff, puff, piffle!" and she would become small like the mouse. Marciana or Mama were reading these types of children's stories to us and sharing the Sunday newspaper comic pages in the days before my idealistic world crashed as a Japanese soldier's boots hammered up the back stairs and then kicked in the kitchen door at the start of WWII in Davao City. (But that's a story for chapter 2.)
On a Typically Hot Day
I once shared with Marciana an early incident I remembered, and she told me I would have been about fifteen months old when I experienced the details I related to her. Our black cars were traveling in a convoy from our Mapa/Jacinto home where we lived in Davao City to our farm. I must diverge a moment to explain — Mama often called the farm Catalunan Pequeño (literally "Little Catalonia"). I now think she did so because our farm was considerably smaller when it was compared to the one adjacent to it, which was named Catalunan Grande.
Much later during the war, we renamed our farm from Catalunan Pequeño to Sunny Brook Farm because of Becky, my little sister. "Becky" was a shortened name for her long name, which was "Rebecca," but we kids called her by her short name all the time. She was a toddler when Mama changed the name of the farm. I remember Mama saying to us, "Our doing that shouldn't confuse anyone." We kids were not confused at all, and we nodded our heads in agreement, fully knowing that to express something along the line of disagreement would be a simple waste of time — at least where our mama was concerned.
Mama insisted on changing the name of the farm to Sunny Brook because it had more meaning to everyone. After all that, she went on to explain that we also had a creek that ran through our farm. Well, yes, that was so if we wanted...
