The ritual is familiar.

            In the not-so-distant past, you get urgent message through the paid telephones, telegrams, then the beepers and now the cell phone, email, facebook, twitters and variations of same.

            Past and present notices remain simple and to the point:

            Papa is gone (a brother’s message in 1996).

            Mama has passed away (a brother’s message) in 2000).

            Dai na si Papa (a nephew’s text message on June 1, 2012 saying my only brother has gone to the great beyond as well).

            When you last visited your only brother at the Kidney Center, you refused to admit his condition. But as you could clearly  see, he was suffering and you couldn’t do anything about it. You helped  raise the funds for hospital bills but each time you saw him in that hopeless condition, something kept telling you at the back of your mind, “Dear brother, you deserve to rest. You have been suffering for 11 years.”

            After a month of hospitalization, my brother went home to the island and two weeks later, your nephew sent you a text message to confirm your only brother was gone.

            True, death in the family is the only (and the usual)  compelling reason why you have to go home.

            Home is Catanduanes in Bicol just an hour away by plane from Manila.

            In the past, I start my visit with a trip to the cemetery to visit my parents’ grave.

            From the airport, I proceed to the lovely garden house of Tess and Anna Bagadiong (daughters of the island writer-poet, Benito Bagadiong) and proceed straight to Moonwalk Village to see what was left of my brother.

            In that coffin, you come to grip with another reality: you are the only surviving member of the family.

            Meanwhile, change has transformed the island in all aspects.

            The last few  vestiges of the Alberto political clan is gone except for the town mayor, the Catanduanes Theater where I used to watch FPJ-Susan Roces and Charito Solis  movies has disappeared, a victim of the CD and DVD revolution.

            In front of it is the first Jollibee branch in the island and the first Mercury Drug store.

            The island poets (Jose Tablizo and Benito Bagadiong) I used to read are gone; the parish Monsignor (Fr. Ping Molina) I highly revere has passed away as well. Before he passed away, he interrupted his Sunday mass homily to thank me for inviting a soprano (Luz Morete) and a pianist (Najib Ismail, a Muslim) to interpret Santiago’s Ave Maria during the mass. After which he asked the churchgoers to give me a standing ovation for bringing back classical music in the island. That gesture was I thought more touching than the plaque and trophy I got during one of the island’s celebration of foundation day.

            The old building of the Farmacia Guerrero, the first drug store in the island is still there but  already closed for good  and still maintained by the surviving owner, Ms. Adelaida Guerrero Morales from whom I heard a classic line, “Maski magsila ako ng hinilam na baybay basta malinig ang conciensiya ko (I don’t mind living on sautéed sand as long as I have a clean conscience).”

            In  barangay Sta. Cruz, I used to seek the writing  advice of  one Efigenia Gianan who used to write the column,  Catanduanes Terminal,  in  the old Manila Chronicle where I became cultural columnist many years  later) and later Frediswindo Gianan (founder of the Catanduanes Tribune) and later Romulo Lofamia when I ventured into fiction writing.

            I used to type my very first articles for the CNHS high school paper in the old provincial capitol building  where my mother used to work as a casual employee

            With a week to go before the internment, I hastened to visit my hometown, Baras, where I was born in seaside barrio called Tilod. I took a jeepney that left at noontime when the first ferryboat from the mainland (Albay) arrived.

            Inside the jeep, you pick up  the old dialect again with island words and lingo   you have not heard in a long, long time such as: habungal (literally swallow hook line and sinker), timo-timo (nibble), dusta (obscene),  boa (crazy), sutil (hard-headed),  etc.

            On a trip to Baras, I see that the roads are finally paved and sari-sari stores  by the roadside now sell cell phone loads.

            The façade of the church where I used to be an altar boy is now painted light  blue like a new apartment, its patios secured by steel fences and locked. I used to fetch water in the artesian well near the convent and we used to take a boat-ride to nearby sitio Lini near Putsan barrio for our drinking water.         

            The old houses --  notably of the Magistrados, the Vergaras, the Tolledos and the Josons --  are gone and the familiar houses by the sea where we (and my cousins) used to live --  are gone as well.

            My Uncle Ben and Tia Conching used to teach in nearby Putsan barrio and that’s where I heard my first Neapolitan song (O sole mio) being sung live by my uncle.  I experienced the worst typhoons in the island (the 210-or- more kilometers per hour variety) in that house by the sea. The dike is still intact with a new reinforcement. That’s where my mother used to dump old sample ballots by the sea after elections (my father was a small-town politician and was former Vice-Mayor of the town).

            Only the small island by the sea we call Minabalay remains a poignant reminder of the past.

            That island used to be our picnic site. Later, a bus line owner in the town reportedly bought it and built a  make-shift house on it. A strong typhoon washed the house away. It probably didn’t want  any overstaying intruder. Last year, a brother of my grade school classmate drowned while fishing near the island.

            I  have an eerie recollection of the town cemetery on a hill overlooking the sea.

            In one  All Soul’s Day visit in the past during  my grade school years, I saw my grandfather’s tomb and looking down,   I felt my hair stand on end: my name was on it.

            That was so --  simply because I carried my grandfather’s name.

            On my last hour in Baras, I hired a tricycle and asked the driver to take me to all the streets of my hometown.

            I am not sure if I miss the place or I just miss my past.

            I feel the urge to come back, re-live the past but I know it’s not possible.

            Writer Thomas Wolfe  maybe  right over and over again: 

            "You can't go back home (again)  to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

 

 

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