School Year 1978-1979
Grade Five was the year I first felt the uneasy pull of growing up. I was still playful and easily distracted by adventures, yet life had begun placing heavier expectations on me. There were responsibilities to carry, awkward feelings toward girls, the sting of being compared to others, and even a fistfight that ended with a bloody nose.
I stumbled often and made mistakes, slowly realizing that growing up was far messier than I had imagined. Yet amid the confusion were small victories, a high exam score, a teacher’s approving smile, a quiet nod of respect from an adult. To others, these moments may have seemed ordinary, but to a boy still searching for his place in the world, they felt deeply meaningful.
That school year brought with it a quiet but meaningful triumph, one I had hoped for deeply, though never fully expected. I was promoted to Section One. For the first time, I would attend morning classes alongside the top students. Each day, I walked to school with my brother Junjun carrying a quiet sense of pride that made me feel a little taller with every step. At last, I was entering the main building not as a curious child looking in from the outside, but as someone who finally belonged there.
Our teacher-adviser was Mrs. Cagigas, and from the very first week, stories about her drifted through the classroom like forbidden gossip. Some classmates insisted she was a witch. They pointed to her pale complexion and claimed that her eyes occasionally turned red, offering these details as undeniable proof with the complete confidence only grade-school children can possess.
At that age, I could not entirely dismiss the stories. The world still felt mysterious enough for such things to seem possible. Yet whatever she may have been in the frightened imaginations of children, inside the classroom she was undeniably exceptional, strict, intelligent, disciplined, and deeply respected.
She taught Reading, Phonics, and English with remarkable proficiency. Her classes demanded attention. Under her watch, wandering minds rarely survived for long. Every lesson carried a seriousness that made even restless children sit a little straighter.
My brother Glenn had already warned me about her long before I entered her classroom. He often retold the story of the day she lightly struck his head with a hardbound textbook after he failed to answer a question. He told it with enough drama to leave me genuinely cautious and always ready. Because of that, I entered her class determined to stay alert and prepared at all times. I listened carefully, kept my eyes fixed on the board, and studied her lessons with the seriousness of a boy who had no desire whatsoever to experience the weight of that textbook himself.
I made it a habit to greet Mrs. Cagigas whenever our paths crossed. It was not simply out of politeness, though I tried to be polite, but because I genuinely respected her. If I am being honest, there was also a small hope that she might notice me, or at least remember my name. Most often, we saw each other at the marketplace, that noisy little world filled with haggling voices, clattering baskets, and the sharp smell of fish and vegetables under the morning sun.
One day, she stopped what she was doing, turned toward me, and looked at me with what seemed like approval.
“Good boy,” she said. “You’re the one who runs the market errands, aren’t you?”
I straightened a little at once, trying not to look too pleased. “Yes, ma’am.”
She nodded lightly, and somehow that small gesture felt enormous to me. More than enough.
By then, I had already become Mama’s most trusted errand runner. I knew how to choose good fish the way experienced buyers did, pressing the flesh gently, checking the clarity of the eyes, and redness of the gills. It was knowledge learned through repetition, through mornings spent between crowded stalls with coins folded tightly in my hand.
I could also tell which vegetables were still fresh and which had wilted too long under the heat. My brothers and sisters never quite learned those things. But Mama had taught me carefully, and I carried that quiet competence with pride, like an invisible badge I never needed to show off because I already felt it resting there.
At home, my brothers and sisters loved teasing me. They called me a sissy, and honestly, I never quite knew how to defend myself from it. But something happened in Grade Five that quietly changed the way I saw myself, at least in the private corners of my boyhood: for the first time, I had a crush.
Her name I will leave undisclosed out of respect for privacy. She had fair skin and came to school every day looking effortlessly neat, as though she had somehow figured out life long before the rest of us had even learned how to comb our hair properly. Around her, everyone else seemed a little dusty and disheveled. I was completely smitten.
One afternoon, I saw her at the market. Before I could hide or prepare myself, she noticed me and cheerfully called out my name. Instantly, my face burned red. My mouth, the same mouth that never ran out of things to say while playing with friends, suddenly forgot how to work. I just stood there, frozen in embarrassment, while she smiled politely and continued on her way. I remember feeling as though my entire body had betrayed me.
There were two other girls who caught my attention that year as well, both of them daughters of teachers. One already carried herself with a maturity that made her seem older than the rest of us. Some classmates even whispered that she already had a boyfriend, a detail that, to my young mind, made her feel impossibly distant and far beyond my reach.
The other girl was also fair-skinned, with a slender frame and a quiet presence that never demanded attention yet somehow lingered long after she had passed by. There was something gentle and unforgettable about her. Years later, I learned that she had died in a car accident. The news reached me long after it had happened, and it settled inside me in a strange and heavy way, one of those quiet sorrows that arrive late but never completely leave.
Section One meant sharper competition, and I learned quickly to move through it with care. I respected most of my teachers deeply, Mr. Jaca for Health and Science, Mrs. Baklay for Mathematics, and Mrs. Cagigas for English. But the teacher who challenged me most was Mrs. Bacasmas, who taught Filipino.
The trouble began with a writing assignment. We were asked to write a Kathang Pormal specifically on the theme "Ang Aking Talambuhay", a formal composition, about me, including my parents. I knew that my father worked with the Philippine Constabulary, the military police, but the exact nature of his job had never been clearly explained to me. What I understood from bits of conversation overheard at home was that he operated radio equipment of some kind. So, with the confidence of a child filling in the gaps of his own understanding, I wrote that my father was a radio operator.
When Mrs. Bacasmas read my essay, she immediately accused me of copying. My seatmate’s father happened to be a radio operator-seaman, and to her the similarity seemed too convenient to be accidental. In front of the class, she said she knew my parents well and insisted that my father was a soldier in the Philippine Constabulary, not a radio operator. Then, with the swift certainty teachers sometimes wield without realizing the damage they leave behind, she remarked that I was not as intelligent as my older siblings, May and Glenn.
The words struck me with painful blow. I sat there quietly, trying to swallow the embarrassment while forty pairs of eyes remained fixed on me. Yet even in my confusion, some stubborn part of me resisted her judgment. I knew I had not lied. My father did work with radio communications; Morse code transmissions and field communications were part of his duties. My mistake was not dishonesty, but incompleteness. Still, at ten years old, I did not yet possess the language or confidence to defend that distinction. So I simply sat there, carrying the weight of a comparison I had never asked for, feeling smaller with every passing second.
Whatever doubts Mrs. Bacasmas may have had about me seemed to quiet down when the results of the periodical test came out. I scored 96 out of 100, making only two mistakes and earning the highest mark in her class. I never boasted about it, but deep inside, the score felt like a small personal vindication, proof that I was more capable than she had first believed, and perhaps more capable than I had begun to fear myself.
Our classroom sat directly across from the office of the school supervisor, Mr. Gantuangco, a quiet, observant man who seemed to notice more than he ever said. When he learned that I was Mama Tancing’s nephew who ran a small carinderia near school, I quietly became one of his trusted food runners, sent out whenever he needed meals during the school day at noontime.
Mrs. Cagigas also occasionally sent me on food errands too, most often to buy a steaming bowl of linat-an, a beef broth that teachers favored for its taste and affordability. I carried out these small tasks without complaint, moving between the school and nearby stalls with the practiced efficiency of someone who understood that usefulness, even in its simplest form, earned a certain kind of trust.
And that trust mattered to me more than I could explain then. In a world that did not always hand it out freely, I held onto it quietly, like something earned and carefully kept.
A dim, cobweb-covered house standing beneath a canopy of towering old trees was exactly the kind of place where a witch would live, so my ten-year-old mind concluded. At that age, no other explanation seemed remotely possible.
One noontime, shortly after our morning classes had ended, Mrs. Cagigas asked me to buy food from my aunt’s carinderia and deliver it to her home, which was located just beside our school. She gave me the address, but no one had prepared me for the sight of the house itself.
Even at midday, the house sat in deep shadow beneath thick branches that blocked much of the sunlight. Cobwebs clung to its walls and corners, glistening faintly as if they had been arranged there on purpose. To my young imagination, the scene seemed almost theatrical, as though the house had been designed specifically to frighten visitors. My mind wasted no time reaching its dramatic verdict: this was a witch’s house. Every childhood suspicion I had ever harbored about witches suddenly felt validated.
I approached the door cautiously and saw Mrs. Cagigas smiling as she came out to receive the food. She looked perfectly normal, though her unusually pale complexion briefly tempted me to cling to my ridiculous theory. Not wanting to linger long enough to gather further evidence, I handed over the food, turned around, and headed back as quickly as possible, moving at a pace somewhere between brisk walking and outright fleeing, while trying to preserve what little dignity remained.
That house reminded me of another place that fueled countless stories in our neighborhood, a dark, tree-shrouded home near Tagonol owned by a man named Quirino. Rumor had it that he was a male witch, assuming such a thing even existed. Beside his house stood an old well, and we children were absolutely convinced, in the wonderfully irrational way that children often are, that it served as the final resting place for his unfortunate victims.
Quirino himself did little to dispel our fears. He was a large, pale man who moved slowly and spoke very little. To us, his silence only deepened the mystery. Every ordinary detail became another piece of evidence supporting the frightening stories we had created in our minds.
Eventually, however, our fears began to fade. My brother Elmer and I became friends with Quirino’s nephew and started visiting their house regularly. Unsurprisingly, Quirino never displayed any supernatural powers, never cast a spell, and never harmed anyone. His eyes, we eventually discovered, were not red at all. The old well was simply an old well. Like so many monsters born from childhood imagination, the terrifying figure we had created turned out to be nothing more than an ordinary man living in a house that happened to fit the stories we wanted to believe.
Looking back, I realize that the real magic was not in those houses or in the people who lived there, but in the boundless imagination of childhood. Given a few shadows, a cluster of cobwebs, and a whispered rumor, our minds could create mysteries far more convincing than reality ever could.
Our sari-sari store was one of the small but dependable pillars of our household economy. By then, Mama Presing, my spinster aunt, had left to help Mama Tancing (another aunt) manage her food business. With her departure, my mother, Mama Asyon, assumed responsibility for running the store.
I often felt sorry for Mama Presing. At night, I could hear her coughing from across the house, a deep, persistent rattle that eventually became part of the soundtrack of our evenings. Beside her bed sat a small can where she spat the phlegm she coughed up. We children were repeatedly warned never to go near it.
What remains with me now is the quiet dignity with which she endured her illness. She never complained, never asked to see a doctor, and seemed to accept our circumstances with a silent understanding that feels heartbreaking when I look back on it today. We simply could not afford medical care, and she knew it. Rather than add to the family's burdens, she endured her suffering without asking for help she believed we could not provide.
Restocking the store had once been Papa’s responsibility. He regularly traveled to Carbon Market to buy merchandise, sometimes obtaining supplies on credit when money was scarce. But that arrangement ended when Mama discovered that he had been using some of the store’s earnings to place bets on jai alai. Once her trust was broken, she decided that someone else would have to take over.
That someone turned out to be me.
I was only ten years old, yet Mama began sending me alone to a market nearby with money carefully folded into my pocket, a handwritten shopping list in my hand, and another list committed to memory. I was expected to return with exactly what the store needed and nothing more. Looking back, those trips became one of my earliest lessons in responsibility, accountability, and the quiet pressures that scarcity places on even the youngest members of a family.
That same year, a new family moved into the house next door, which had previously been occupied by Bebe and Canor, our school's janitor. The newcomers were Mery’s family: her parents, Conching and Peping, and her siblings Tatang, Odong, Cendil (whose real name was Glendale) Ojet (Roger), Mery herself, Mater, Boy, and Belen.
From the very beginning, they felt less like neighbors and more like relatives we had somehow forgotten we already had. We never quarreled. Their arrival filled the space beside our home with laughter, constant activity, and the comforting warmth of people who seemed destined to become part of our lives. Before long, it felt as though they had always been there.
Outside of school, I was growing bigger, stronger, and far more confident. I had developed a stubborn determination and spent most of my free time outdoors, playing games that required little more than imagination, a patch of ground, and enough neighborhood children willing to join in.
Our days revolved around card games, chess, marbles, bingo, hantak, a coin-toss gambling game, luthang (bamboo guns), tutho (blowpipes made from papaya stalks), spider fighting, basketball, chin-up bar contests, and whatever else could keep a group of energetic children occupied until sunset.
We played everything, both the noisy games and the quiet ones, the games that left us covered in dust and the games that sharpened our minds. It was during one of those otherwise ordinary afternoons that my third childhood fistfight erupted.
My opponent was Ayen, Nat’s younger brother and one of my regular playmates. During a game, he committed an offense that, in my ten-year-old mind, seemed completely unforgivable. Children have a remarkable ability to treat the rules of a game as sacred law, and any violation can feel like a grave injustice. Harsh words were exchanged, tempers flared, and before long, fists replaced arguments.
Nat, being the older brother, naturally rushed in to defend Ayen. Suddenly, I found myself facing both Cabaluna brothers at once. In the confusion and excitement, one of them ended up with a bloody nose. The fight ended almost as quickly as it had begun, but once the adrenaline faded, guilt settled over me. Whatever had seemed worth fighting for moments earlier now appeared foolish and insignificant.
Fortunately, childhood anger rarely lasted long in our neighborhood. Our families were close, and grudges seldom survived beyond a day or two. Bruises healed, wounded pride recovered even faster, and before long we were back in the same yard beneath the same afternoon sky, playing together as though nothing had happened.
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