School Year 1974-1975
My story continues here. Tonight, in the stillness of this same room in Sampaloc, Manila, I continue to write in the quiet moments before sleep takes hold.
This was about the year I began my formal schooling, a year that would shape me in ways I could not yet comprehend.
What first felt like a humiliating transfer quietly unfolded into one of the greatest gifts of my childhood.
I came to understand that kindness, friendship, and growth often bloom in the most unlikely places that a child does not need to stand among the top to truly flourish.
He only needs people who see him not as a problem, but as a soul finding his way.
In the early days of June 1974, I stepped through the gates of Pardo Elementary School for the very first time, a chubby, wide-eyed six-year-old, vibrating with excitement and hungry for the world.
I was enrolled in Grade One, Section 1, a section typically reserved for pupils from relatively upper level families. It may not be common knowledge, but that is how it appeared to me as a young boy.
My teacher was Mrs. Andales, a strict, no-nonsense woman who would soon discover that managing a room full of children was one thing; managing me was quite another.
(photo above: taken in 1974, with my mother and other siblings: May, Glenn, Artemio Jr., and Elmer - the youngest)
For reasons I could not understand, I was unable to keep still.
From the moment I stepped into the classroom, I became like a whirlwind, drifting from desk to desk, whispering, sparking laughter at the most inopportune moments, and introducing myself to anyone within reach.
I talked endlessly, as though words themselves could not be contained within me.
Whenever Mrs. Andales called on me to recite, my mind, once wandering freely through distant imaginings would return empty. I could not even recite the vowels properly.
It did not take long before I was labeled a problem child.
There was, however, one subject in which no one could question me.
In art class, I excelled. My pencil moved with a confidence my voice could never summon, and I earned perfect scores of 100 percent, every single time.
Yet even that quiet triumph was often buried beneath the noise of my restlessness.
One day, the teacher clipped a paper clamp over my lips and made me sit in silence until the class ended. The humiliation lingered, churning quietly inside me.
Afterward, she pulled my mother aside and reported everything.
In faint, strained voices, I heard her accuse my mother of lying about my age, insisting that I was only six, not seven, as declared at enrollment.
Perhaps it was because I would turn seven by October, making the difference seem negligible. But to Mrs. Andales, it was one more fault she find against us.
In time, her patience wore thin. I was quietly transferred, without the slightest hint of remorse or maybe a good riddance, to Grade One, Section 4: an afternoon class housed in a building at the far edge of the school grounds.
The change was jarring. Section 4 occupied a remote, weather-worn building at the far edge of the school grounds, as though it had been set apart from the main campus, noticeably neglected, almost forgotten. The children there seemed different from what I noticed in Section One. Many came from poor families, their uniforms were a bit tattered and their shoes worn out and some wore slippers. Our new teacher, Mrs. Abapo, had a gentle cross-eyed gaze.
She lived in a humble wooden shanty with bamboo walls and stairs and nipa-leaf roof, in a narrow passageway, along I. Tabura Street. I often helped her carry her things home after class, and that is how I came to know where she lived.
Adjusting to this new world was not easy. My already overactive imagination turned against me at night: I dreamed of one of my new classmates, his face ravaged by boils, reaching up from beneath our porch, chasing after me and pulling me down from the chair where I had taken refuge.
In real life, that same classmate suffered from severe rashes, and many of the children were mostly unkempt in appearance. I stood among them in my clean, pressed uniform, wondering if I truly belonged here. Wondering if I ever had belonged anywhere at all.
But something unexpected happened, something I could not have predicted and would not have believed if anyone had told me beforehand. I found joy and satisfaction.
The simplicity of that remote classroom, the gentleness of Mrs. Abapo, the unguarded laughter of children who had never learned to be pretentious, it all soothed me.
For the first time in my young life, I felt seen without being judged. My robust and clean appearance led some classmates to assume I came from a wealthy family, and perhaps that entitlement, however undeserved, made it easier for friendships to blossom.
I still remember their names, as one often remembers those who sat closest to you, neighbors in the small geography of a classroom: Michael Medel, Hermis Delicano, Ricardo Nacional, and Diomedes Castañares, to name just a few I can still readily recall.
Years later, in 1991, I was walking from a narrow alley toward J. Tabura Street when someone called out my name. It was Diomedes, quite older now, weathered, a shovel in hand as he worked beneath the afternoon sun. We greeted each other and spoke for a few fleeting moments, trying to gather the fragments of those long-ago days. Two children, briefly reunited, recalling the earliest memories of our small, shared world.
In that new class, something in me began to settle and grow. My academic performance improved dramatically.
I read aloud with growing confidence, raised my hand during recitations, wrote neatly, and held my own in English, Mathematics, and Visayan. Mrs. Abapo was patient in a way that Mrs. Andales never had been.
At last, I was learning. I had become like fertile ground, ready to receive, to hold, and to nurture, where even the most restless child could finally take root.
During recess, older students from the upper grades would pass by selling snacks from the canteen.
At times, Mrs. Abapo would buy more than she needed and quietly slip the extra to me, aware that my daily allowance from my mother, a mere fifteen centavos, could not stretch far.
I received each extra bite with a depth of gratitude a child feels long before he has the language to name it.
Then, I began visiting my classmates’ homes.
Hermis lived just beyond a barb-wired fence near our classroom; in their kitchen stood an alive iba tree, with hanging fruits attached to its main trunk beneath their roof, as though the house and the tree had simply agreed to coexist.
One afternoon, just after our classes ended, I made the long walk to Michael Medel’s home in Campar, Pardo. There, I discovered, with a quiet, almost reverent sense of wonder, that my parents had once lived in that very house as young family tenants, just beginning their married life together.
It seemed the world had been folding back on itself long before I was old enough to notice.
But to reach Michael’s house, I had to cross a busy highway. On my way home after the visit, I crossed the street alone when vehicles suddenly surged in from both directions. Halfway across, I froze, a small, distressed boy stranded at the center of the road, caught in between roaring stream of metal and noise.
An elderly couple on the roadside saw me and stiffened with alarm, seemingly more frightened than I was. They waited for the briefest break in the traffic, then hurried toward me, grasped my hand, and pulled me to safety, scolding me breathlessly as they did. They urged me to go straight home and not to wander off again.
I have never forgotten their faces. Those two strangers who, for one ordinary afternoon, became my guardian angels. Wherever they are now, I carry a quiet debt of gratitude they may never know.
On many afternoons, Mrs. Abapo would ask us to rest our heads on our desks for a brief nap, a mid-afternoon siesta that was customary for young children in those days, while she listened to radio dramas on her small transistor radio.
I rarely slept. Instead, I lay perfectly still with my eyes closed and my ears keenly attuned, absorbing every word and nuance of the unfolding radio drama.
The drama was called Mga Mata ni Angelita, translated in English as The Eyes of Angelita. And it captured my imagination completely.
The story was part drama, part fantasy, part spiritual fable.
Angelita was a blind girl, an orphan, found unconscious after someone had led her to the edge of a cliff and left her to fall.
Discovered by nuns and brought to a monastery, she grew into a child of profound devotion, kneeling before the Virgin Mary with a faith that seemed to see more clearly than any pair of eyes ever could.
Yet she had no eyes of her own. They had been taken from her. And still, she became a vessel of miracles, a figure of innocence so luminous it pierced the darkness around her.
Lying there in that humble classroom, pretending to sleep, I felt it sink into my consciousness early on in life that span many years of my interest in radio dramas.
While the drama played on, Mrs. Abapo quietly cooked bananas in an old tin can at the back of the room, balancing it over a small fire of gathered firewood.
When the bananas were done, she called us from our nap and shared them among us, still warm, soft, and delectable.
I do not know if she ever realized that I had been awake, listening to the radio drama the entire time. I like to think she did not.
I believed that sharing those bananas was her own quiet way of thanking us, for taking our nap, or probably, feeding us in gratitude, for those few moments of uninterrupted listening, allowing her to follow each episode of the radio drama she so deeply enjoyed.
Grade One was not entirely gentle. One afternoon, during a routine cleaning period, I walked up to a boy much taller than I was, a stranger whose face I barely recognized. In the open, uncomplicated way I had always approached the world, I asked if he wanted to be my friend.
He responded with a fist to my face.
The impact was sudden and sharp. I tried to retaliate, but he towered over me; my swings cut only empty air. Tears came quickly, hot, involuntary, and humiliating.
Then, driven by instinct rather than thought, I grabbed a stone from the ground and threw it at him. He turned and ran.
My teacher and classmates rushed to my side, their voices softened with concern.
Something in their perception of me shifted in that moment. They saw strength where there had been none.
Afterward, they would sometimes ask me to let them punch my stomach, as though testing whether I could endure it without flinching.
But I was never tough. I was simply a child who had learned, too early, how to swallow pain without understanding what it meant.
After the final bell, we swept the classroom, raked the yard, and gathered the dried leaves that had fallen from the trees.
Inside an old wooden cabinet, someone discovered a honeycomb.
On many afternoons thereafter, we would disturb it whenever an unsuspecting classmate came too close to the hive.
At first, we tapped it lightly, but soon the provocation escalated, until the bees erupted in a furious swarm that sent us screaming in both fear and exhilaration.
It was, in hindsight, a cruel game, many of us were left with swollen, stinging welts. And yet, in the peculiar logic of childhood, it also felt like play: reckless, shared, and unexamined.
We waited for the flag-lowering ceremony before we were dismissed, and in those lingering golden hours between class's end and sunset, we gathered beneath the wide branches of the caimito tree or star apple, and watched the ripe fruit dangle just out of reach.
We threw stones at them until they fell, bruised and splitting open, their sweetness spilling out into our waiting hands.
Those were among the most delicious things I have ever eaten, not because of what they were, but because of everything that surrounded them: the laughter, the free moments of late afternoon, the feeling of being small and free and completely, purely alive.
At the flag-lowering ceremony, we raised our voices in a song that I can still hear, even now, echoing faintly across the years, "Mabuhay ang Pilipino" or Long live the Filipino. We sang it with the unselfconscious pride that only children possess, not yet old enough to question the words, only old enough to mean them.
Mabuhay ang Pilipino
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