His people have a way of bundling themselves up like little babies in the early morning by the rural roadside when they waited for the morning bus. They squat a particular way to keep out the cold, arms wrapped around knees squeezed into each other. They huddled this way against the sea wind becoming little balls of clothing with only little feet, arms and hair showing.
He sees them this way only when they were themselves traveling; mostly to the city with his father or mother or siblings. One particular trip he remembers quite with great fondness. It was his father’s payday. He decided to bring him along to the city. Him, not his little brother who was his clear favorite.
They once lived in an ancient old house 70 or so kilometers South from the city. His father traveled this distance daily to his work in the city demonstrating if nothing else how this could be done even in 1962 when the buses were still called Cebu Autobus, colored an odd yellow, and the roads were narrow 2-lane asphalt affairs perennially works in progress when they were not gutted by the yearly monsoon. The trip took at least 3 hours. Longer, if they blew a tire. He would have been 7.
All the family woke up to send the father off to work. They ate first breakfast, mostly coffee and bread, at 4 in the morning. And yes, even the little children drank coffee. It was a small luxury they could afford, the elixir to wake up the spirits in the early dawn before the sun came up.
It was the mark of their social standing in the community that they never had to wait outside for the bus. The bus came around to pick them up. Honking its horn to signal the impending departure. But they never had to make the first honking. What the bus did was to honk a first time.
Then it would make the rounds of the town picking up passengers honking its horn at particular intervals almost musical as it went. They rode the bus only on its second round. This way they could still get a good window seat.
But there had been times when the bus made the third round and the father was not yet ready. And there would be panic in the household. As at one time, when his belt could not be found and the bus horn was blaring away a third time.
And so everyone searched for what in his mind he called “the stupid belt”, the marker of his father’s outdated theory for shaping his children. He had not read Freud back then but he might have thought the belt was lost because everyone wanted it to be lost, forever, if possible. But his father’s pants had to be held up. And he was fuming and cursing into the wind in between honks which clearly signaled the driver’s growing impatience.
And the father had not even had his coffee yet. And after all this fuming and cursing, the belt is finally found nested snugly over his neck.
Great jubilation! To drink the coffee then. It will have to be in one big gulp. We might all have been smiling with great relief, expecting him to finally be off on his way. One big gulp and then the coffee rebounded from his mouth in one giant spray of warm black fluid, followed in mid-trajectory by the mother of all the day’s curses. “Yawa!”
He had sugared his coffee with salt! Oops! Too late now to make another cup. He rushes off in a huff, his day already ruined even before it even began. His father was a funny man. Hard to love, but in his own way lovable. While he was quite capable, was even prone to, a quirky meanness, he was a funny man. And he made people laugh, especially his own children; who even now, he leaves with a mix of emotions, at least half of which is laughter.
He remembers that trip with his father in a haze of magic, half wondering now of its reality. He remembers the way home, passing by Visayan Restaurant for 2 bundles of Pansit Canton Special. They walk their way to where the bus waited somewhere near to where Lane Theater still is now.
They pass by Elite Bakery in Colon street where once and only you could buy “Pransis”, which was the local interpretation of French bread, unequalled now in this day and age. It also sold guava jelly always in a small bottle. He slept on his father’s lap on the way home.
He remembers his family keeping awake for their arrival. By these bundled treasures he brought home with him from the city, on occasion, his family forgave their father all his sins.
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