School Year 1978-1979
Grade Five was more than just another step forward in school, it was the year I began to feel the uneasy pull of growing up. I was still playful, curious, and easily distracted by games and adventures, but life had started placing heavier expectations on my shoulders. There were errands to run and responsibilities to carry. There were the awkward first stirrings of attraction toward girls, the sting of being compared to others by a teacher, and even a fistfight that ended with a bloody nose.
I stumbled often that year. I made mistakes, left with guilt, and slowly realized that growing up was far messier and less graceful than I had imagined. Yet hidden within those awkward moments were small victories that quietly stayed with me: a high exam score, a teacher’s approving smile, a brief nod of respect from an adult.
To anyone else, those moments may have seemed ordinary and forgettable. But to a boy still trying to understand who he was becoming, they felt enormous, small flashes of reassurance that perhaps, despite all the confusion, I was beginning to find my place in the world.
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, a formal composition, about our fathers’ occupations. 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 stood beneath a canopy of towering old trees is the exact kind of place a witch would live in. At least, that was the only explanation my ten-year-old mind could come up with.
And so, one afternoon I was asked to deliver food to Mrs. Cagigas at her home. I had been given the address, but no one had prepared me for the house itself.
It sat in deep shade even at noon, hidden beneath thick branches that blocked the sunlight. Cobwebs clung to the walls and corners, catching the light in a way that felt strangely intentional, as if the house had been designed to scare visitors. My imagination, already far too active for its own good, seized the moment instantly and reached its dramatic conclusion: this was a witch’s house. Every childhood suspicion I had ever entertained suddenly felt confirmed.
I carefully placed the food by the door, turned around, and walked away as fast as I could, moving at a speed somewhere between brisk walking and outright fleeing, while trying very hard to preserve what little dignity I had left.
That house reminded me of another place that haunted our neighborhood stories: a dark, tree-shadowed home near Tagonol owned by a man named Quirino. Rumor had it that he was a male witch, if such a thing even existed. Beside his house stood an old well, and we children were completely convinced, in the wonderfully irrational way children often are, that it was where he disposed of his victims.
Quirino himself did little to calm our fears. He was a large, pale man who moved slowly and rarely spoke. To us, that silence only strengthened the mystery. Every ordinary detail became evidence supporting the stories we had invented.
The fear eventually faded when my brother Elmer and I became friends with Quirino’s nephew. We started visiting the house often. And, unsurprisingly, Quirino never did anything remotely supernatural. His eyes, we eventually noticed, were not red at all. The old well was simply a well. Like many childhood monsters, the terrifying figure we had imagined turned out to be an ordinary man living in a house that happened to fit the stories in our heads.
The sari-sari store was one small but steady source of our household economy. By then, Mama Presing (my old maid aunt) had already left to help Mama Tancing (my other aunt) with her food business, and my mother (Mama Asyon) took over managing the store.
I felt sorry for Mama Presing. At night, I could hear her coughing from across the house, a deep, persistent rattling that eventually became part of the rhythm of our evenings. She kept a small can beside her bed for the phlegm she spat out. We children were told never to go near it.
What stays with me now is how quietly she carried her illness. She never complained, never asked to see a doctor, and seemed to understand our financial situation with a kind of silent acceptance that feels heartbreaking in retrospect. We could not afford medical care, and she knew it. She would never make our burden heavier by asking for something she believed we could not give.
Restocking the store had once been Papa’s responsibility, until Mama discovered that he had been using the store’s money to gamble on jai alai. Before that, he had always managed to bring home supplies, sometimes buying goods on credit from Carbon Market when cash was short. But once trust was broken, the responsibility passed to me.
I was only ten years old, yet Mama now sent me alone to the market with money folded carefully into my pocket, a handwritten list in my hand, and another list committed to memory. I was expected to return with everything the store needed and nothing unnecessary. In many ways, it was my first lesson in responsibility, accountability, and the quiet pressures of poverty.
That same year, a new family moved into the house next door, the one previously occupied by Bebe and Canor, the school janitor. They were Mery’s family: her parents, Conching and Peping, and her siblings Tatang, Odong, Cendil, whose real name is Glendale, Ojet (Roger), Mery herself, Mater, Boy, and Belen.
From the very beginning, they felt less like neighbors and more like an extension of our own family. We never quarreled. Their arrival filled the space beside our home with laughter, constant noise, and the comforting warmth of people who seemed to belong naturally in our lives, as though they had always been there.
Outside of school, I was growing bigger, stronger, and far more confident. I had developed an unwavering determination and spent most of my free time outdoors, playing games that required little more than imagination, a patch of ground, and a group of children willing to join in.
Our days revolved around card games, chess, marbles, bingo, hantak (a coin-toss gambling game), luthang (bamboo guns), tutho (papaya stalk blowpipes), spider fighting, basketball, chin-up bar exercises, and whatever else could keep a neighborhood full of children occupied until sunset.
We played everything, the noisy games and the quiet ones, the games that left us covered in dirt and the ones that sharpened our thinking. It was during one of those ordinary afternoons that my third childhood fistfight broke out.
His name was Ayen, Nat’s younger brother and one of my usual playmates. During a game, he did something that, at the time, felt completely unforgivable. Children have a way of treating the rules of a game as sacred law, and any violation feels like a personal betrayal. Harsh words were exchanged, tempers flared, and before long, we were fighting.
Nat, being the older brother, quickly stepped in to defend Ayen. Suddenly, I found myself fighting both Cabaluna brothers alone. In the chaos, one of them ended up with a bloody nose. The fight ended almost as quickly as it began, but afterward, guilt settled heavily on me. What had seemed so important moments earlier now felt foolish and unnecessary.
Fortunately, the anger did not last. Our families were close, and childhood grudges rarely survived beyond a day in our neighborhood. Wounds healed quickly, pride recovered even faster, and by the following afternoon we were likely back in the same yard, under the same sky, playing together again with the effortless forgiveness children possess before adulthood teaches them how to hold on to resentment.
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