Bapa's Notes: family concern

family concern

01/09/2014

Selfie

Modernity always imagined

Crude past disowned

The ancient pundits are forsaken

All silent and entombed

Their wise edicts

Are all forgotten unknown

A new breed of mutants emerge

These gluttons of fame and fortune

Best known as

sons and daughters of Narcissus

New citizens of the world

Selfie stick is their tool

Thriving in multitude

In this ubiquitous cyber world

Transcending time and distance

Singing their ageless anthem

With interminably repeated lyrics of:

Me, me, me and endless words of me!

Consider not this poet manqué

A noisy misanthrope

Or a misfit dilettante

That loves to quack and croak

Asked I this question:

From here where do we go?

If countless me care not

For the suffering of many souls

These me only care

for fame and fortunes

Forever intoxicated

In the sea of delusion

Eternally babbling and crawling

Towards their grave

Endlessly lisping,

Me, me, me and uncountable words of me!

Posted at 09:28 PM in artists, children, Current Affairs, facebook, family concern, Internet, metaphor, Religion, selfie, twitter, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/30/2013

Music rhymes and lyrics have brought me to nostalgic past. Songs like Always Somewhere by Scorpions and El DeBarge’s Starlight Express were my old-time favorites. I was in grade school when these songs hit the airwaves. We goofed around a One- Speaker Sony Cassette Player owned by a hippie neighbor. Then and there, we endlessly listened to recordings from vinyl cassette tapes, played from Side A to Side B.

Anybody who owns a portable cassette player with AM/FM Radio during those days was considered "in". Those hit songs like Hotel California of Eagles, and House of the Rising Sun by Animals, all these had dominated the airwaves played from few FM stations during those times.

The only drawback those songs were permanently identified was its non- conformity to the standard of the music industry’s avant-garde then. The negative image constantly attached to those hyper-active punk rock artists. And those metallic songs were brazenly unacceptable to many of our conservative adults. Because our guardians have loved their Beatles, their Abba and their Bee Gees, our particular choice of music then was a perpetual suspect to them as the bad influence towards us young people then.

Our parents were reluctant to give us their approval of the music we had chosen. They were contemptuous to our seemingly irrational patronage of weird music artists like Duran Duran, Pink Floyd and Spandau Ballet. Adults had criticized us over our blind loyalty to our chosen music icons, we even copied those weird hairstyles of Spandau Ballet and we had defended our icons from conservative critics’ tireless name calling.

Today, we are now becoming parents to growing kids. Our choice of music is no longer appealing to our millennial kids. We need to co-exist with them and show some level of tolerance to the kind of music they love to play. Defining their own arts and music could be more important than making them dumb robots.

Posted at 11:26 AM in artists, children, Current Affairs, family concern, Internet, memories, metaphor, Music, Parenting | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/10/2013

Green Sanctuary

At nighttime, and as kids back then, we enjoyed our endless exchange of stories. Under a full moonlight, and graced by flickering fireflies that adorned the towering bamboo grasses nearby, our nights as kids in the farm always exude creativity and learning. With a kerosene lamp lighted in the midst, the flow of authentic and sincere stories that were unveiled and told from a child’s heart seems incessant. Sitting on the wooden floor and in semicircle, we laughed over local stories that never lacked actions by those listless characters from among the group. We talked until the wee hours with unusual soundtracks, the soothing rhymes and a cappella songs of nocturnal insects-the crickets, the annoying mosquitoes and the croaking frogs and then that concerto was abruptly ended by a somber note sung by a helpless fowl, constricted by a predator reptile that broke inside our bamboo cage below the house.

We crafted our own scary evening surprises. Under those dark footpaths leading to the rice paddies, we constructed our bobby traps of luminous mushrooms (jack-o-lantern) along the way, usually gathered from rotten stumps of dying trees; these were aimed to terrify any bypassers. We too were once victims of those homemade scarecrows and trappings from indigenous plants, concocted by our unrelenting cousins aiming to get even at us. And we had lots of laughter as turbulent kids on that forgotten rice farm then.

In 1991, that rice farm was dismantled to give way for the more promising banana plantation. All growing seeds, tall fruit trees, and the rice paddies were razed down to oblivion. Now, only a few family photos are left as mementos of that memorable rice field that we all grew up with. The sight of birds at the back of a buffalo that was in respite, after its daylong toil, this was captured in this child’s memory. The swarm of migratory birds’ clinging like canopies of trees is vividly stored inside memory disk. There was no camera then, no digital device to capture all those irretrievable natural sights. The details were sensibly captured from our past youthful days; these were embedded permanently and unraveled only this time.

Old laughter is still inside us, and like a chrysalis of worm inside its cocoon, every time we get into our family gatherings, the dormant stories, and those memories of youthful adventures that took place on that lost paradise, suddenly it reappear like a colorful butterfly. Our grandparents are no longer around to laugh with us, but every time the endless bantering of jokes and laughter begins to fill the air, we know by heart that Lolo and Lola are always there to laugh with us. At the reeling of those animated childhood adventures, projected and viewed on that imaginary wide screen, the nostalgia about the farm brings joy and tears, and some trivial family feuds are momentarily mortified and perhaps buried towards eternity which time alone can tell.

Posted at 04:31 PM in Adventures, agriculture, children, environmental issues, family concern, friendship, genealogy, health, life, local history, memories, Mindanao, Music, Sustainable Agriculture, tagum, wildlife | Permalink | Comments (0)

09/07/2013

Lola Minak

Farmers from the upland places of Callawa and Gatungan in Davao City, others from Katualan, Kiotoy and Polipog, all of Panabo, they were familiar with the diminutive lady they called Minak during those days. Minak’s store became the meeting place of those farmers coming from the highland northern parts of Davao City. They have their usual stop over back then at Minak’s store for a bottle of soft drinks which they mispronounced as "Koks".

They all started their trek from Katualan at 1:00 o’clock midnight, and burned some crisp-dried coconut leaves which they used as torches to light them along the way. They all moved downhill in groups, accosted by their sledge-pulling local bred buffaloes, and they brought down their farm products to be sold at the busy coastal marketplace in Panacan. From Katualan, down to Callawa and by 7:00 o’clock in the morning they reached and pulled over at Minak’s store in Lower Mahayag.

They were in high spirit as they pulled out their baons, which consisted of cooked and milled corn grains, fried dried fish and boiled sweet potatoes. They poured them over sanitized banana leaves which they placed in the middle of the ground; it was geared for that familiar camaraderie ceremony of military men’s boodle fight.

They all squatted under the shades of an old Mango tree just beside Minak’s store and enjoyed their sumptuous breakfast. After their rest and washing of their mud covered sledges, they moved again in groups together with their sledge- pulling animals.

From Minak’s store of Lower Mahayag, they moved fast towards Sitio Liloan of Tibungco, then again moved downward through Buhisan, part of Tibungco, Davao City and their plodding finally ended at the Philippine-Japan Friendship highway, later renamed by then President McCoy as the Maharlika Highway. Maximina Sevilla Masillones was fondly called by many of those farmers in the late 50’s until the early 60’s as Minak of Lower Mahayag, Davao City. Many of us wondered about the greatness of those past forgotten days, perhaps their classic songs coupled by our fond memories of those departed love ones. These are the surviving treasures that testify about their unsophisticated and nostalgic times.

Posted at 12:33 AM in family concern, genealogy, local history, memories, mothers, Music | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

08/24/2013

2488

It sounds a gambling, huh? Nope, these combined numbers had something to do with good old days. Numbers 2488 was our house number of our past residence. The Post Office was once the most popular and well patronized service provider of sending and receiving correspondences, this includes love letters to some distant girlfriends while some have kept their pen pals from abroad, congratulatory notes, and also notes from confidantes trying to diffuse their ballooning inner emotional turmoils. Letters from friends, from distant nephews and nieces, it had kept my mailbox 2488 brimful every month.

It was fun writing letters. It was the traditional as well as the ancient way of communicating our messages to other human beings. Letters were so personalized that it was difficult to plagiarize. We communicated our thoughts and feelings through those written languages by our own penmanship and readers have deciphered those written codes just like listening to a monologue from our preachers and lecturers.

Unlike this present electronic age, sending a message via SMS was becoming very impersonal and sometimes disturbingly offensive. Somebody may sent you an SMS message like I LOVE YOU and later recanted by texting you: "Sorry wrong sent", this sounds weird. There was a time when writing letters was considered as a university degree and the graduate becomes a “man of letters”. We know this from our Philippine history that many of our national heroes, those mestizos who were sent to study in great universities of Spain and took on courses like Philosophy and Letters.

As we compose letters, our foremost objective was to transmit our thoughts clearly to readers. It was always compensating to receive a reply to the letters we sent. I have devoted regular hours each week to compose those countless letters and sent them to my web of friends. It was a metaphor. The cellphone texting came and had been made public almost 10 years later. Since then, the craze of writing letters just waned and many were agog with the new technology that almost desecrated and ravaged our instruments of communication. It's true that technolgy helps connect people from accross the globe. But it is also true that technoolgy had slaughtered our long cherish respect for proper spelling of the languages we used. It was "Jejemon" texting that our kids and many adults are becoming familiar with.

Back on my 2488 mailbox, I boldly wrote those numbers at the top of my mailbox where the postman could easily locate. That mailbox 2488 had contained countless letters from acquaintances, from school friends, from relatives and even from a hermit whose simple rural living had made me aware of his contentment and resilience in the concentrated and remote place inside the jungles of New Corella. These experiences have kept me moving, writing and writing all the more, but it’s no longer for mailing, it’s now for blogging.