Old School

I come from an old family. As in very old. My grandparents were old enough to be my great-grandparents; my aunts, to be my great-aunts; and my mother, to be my youngest sister's grandmother. Their values and belief systems were even older than their years. And they imposed their old-fashioned ways on us children who were born so much later than their time.

Let me just give you a few examples of their rules...

1. No loud voices. Anytime. Anywhere in the house.
   
2. No sitting with feet, legs apart.
3. No elbows on the dining table.
4. No talking while eating. (It didn't matter whether your mouth was full or not.)
5. No running.
   
6. No slouching.
7. No butting in when adults were engaged in conversation.
8. Oh yes, no cokes.
   

And a lot of other no-nos...

We were little girls with the big responsibility of behaving like ladies, like yesterday's Maria Claras. It seemed to me they wanted us to act like nuns in a convent! Come to think of it, my folks were far more strict than the Sisters who ran the Catholic school where Pie and I were students.

Recycling: 70s Style

Long before the advent of global warming and environmentalism, recycling had always been fashionable in my family. No, it had nothing to do with saving the world we lived in, but everything to do with saving moolah at every opportunity.

My elder sister Pie was an angel in one of those Santacruzans in the town where I was born. She wore my mother's old dress that was reworked into a little girl's gown. Lovely.

The next year, Pie and I were Ave Marias in the same Santacruzan. Our gowns were rehashed from used frocks straight from my grandmother's ancient baul. I wasn't very sure if these were my Lola's, my aunts' or my mother's. But one thing was sure though, these were freaking old, probably as old as time itself. The sewing was taken care of by my two old maid aunts—yes, the same aunts from Children of the War—who were very good with the sewing machine. Our gowns were not bad at all, really. But to wear them when all other kids were decked in new ones at a time when vintage was still uncool! Okay, so we were different. (Together with us in top photo are our cousins Ron, now based in Canada, and Ate Margie, also known as Little.)

The following Santacruzan, I was again an Ave Maria. This time my mother bought applique flowers and beads and I was only too glad to finally see her buying new stuff for my new gown. But lo and behold! the new materials were for last year's outfit. My ever resourceful aunts were merely replacing the blue trimmings with red ones. That's the picture on the left. Take note, I was headless here but the pic still managed to find its way in the family album. Sayang daw e. The two photos on the right were taken when I was among the angels in another Church celebration a few months later. There were no major rehashings or reworkings for this occasion. My mother simply made me "re-wear" my old recycled gown.

Pie was a hila, like some sort of sagala, in one of those religious feasts in August and my mother asked an artist friend to create a gown for Pie and handpaint it. It actually turned out very nicely. Besides it was new—not previously owned, not previously worn—as in brand new. (That's the picture at the bottom.) Come December, Pie was chosen as class muse. What my mother did was to have the same friend take out the poncho and sew in a pair of the mandatory butterfly sleeves. (Top photo.) My mother was becoming creative.

Nah, not really creative. She used the same idea twice, right? Just look at the two pics of six-year old me above and see a re-application of the sew-in-butterfly-sleeves-to-old-gown technique. It's what ad people call two executions of the same concept. Maybe that's why I ended up in advertising...

Twin Issues

My middle name should have been “Issue”.

You see, I had always been full of issues even as a kid. Issues about my apple cut hair. About vegetables and vitamins. About anything, everything. But my biggest issue was this idea of making me look like the other half of twins, the other half being my sister Pie. It was awful. Anyone who saw us bought it. We were of almost the same height, the same build, the same hairstyle (or lack of it!) and our facial features were more or less the same. We had every appearance of being twins which we were absolutely not. And I hated it.


It was my mother’s doing, of course. She garbed us in matching outfits, sometimes even at home and most times when we were out. At Church, people would always have something to say about our supposed twin-ness. It was a good thing I was but a young wide-eyed girl who had no inkling her middle finger had certain uses or I would have flashed my small one left and right.


My mother was, naturally, innocent. She did not mean to offend my childish sensibilities — I can see that now. Maybe she thought it was cute, completely harmless. But for me it was just plain horrible. In the first place, Pie and I were as different as night and day. She was all girly whereas I was more of a tomboy. Meaning, we were not made for the same type of clothes. Second, most of those dresses looked pretty on Pie and almost always not on me which was just great for a five-year old’s self-esteem! Third and most importantly, I wasn’t cut out for assimilation. Clothe us as one. Strip us of our individuality. Of course, this was not how I put it back then.


So, at some point, I couldn’t take anymore of this look-alike-dress-alike crap and thereupon put my little foot down. The last time my sister and I were made to wear identical frocks was at a cousin’s wedding when I was 7, after which I refused to have another haircut similar to Pie's. And so it was.

Wonder twins… de-activate!

Children of the War

My maternal grandfather was born in the late 1800's and his first three children were born in the first quarter of the 20th century. By the Second World War, the three had grown into adolescents who already knew enough and understood enough not to be untouched by the war that hit them hard.

No one emerges from a war without being broken in any way. And where my uncle and two aunts were concerned, this brokenness came in the form of this fear of losing everything and ending up with nothing. Perhaps this was the reason why they always had this overwhelming need to hold on to all things possible as if there was value in every little thing and it was a mortal sin to throw anything away.

My sisters and I grew up in our motherhouse. And a large part of the first ten years of my life was spent with my two aunts — who were old maids by the way — who also lived with my grandparents.

My aunts' stinginess went from silly to downright outrageous. They kept scraps of paper that belonged in the waste can more than anywhere else. And there was, of course, nothing anyone can use them with except as paper money when we children played bank. Disposable cups and cutlery were not disposed of but washed then stored in a cabinet full of precious plastic junk collection. One time one aunt gave me a mild scolding when she caught me putting away the Chippy bag I just finished. I was baffled and later mortified to find a frozen fish in the fridge wrapped in my Chippy foil!

They were also very skillful with the sewing machine which was a bad thing for me and my sisters. Come summer they would take piles of their old clothes from an ancient glass aparador in my grandfather's bedroom and start sewing away. And there would be new cases for our pillows which was fine with us. But then there would also be new pajamas, shorts and skirts for us from those worn pieces of cloth which was deplorable for any young person, naturally.

We were in a state of having and not having, of being with and without. For some time, I had this notion that we were kind of rich. We had kasamas (tenants who worked my grandparents' land) who came in and out of the house on a regular basis. I was pretty sure none of my friends' families had their share of kasamas. But hey I was the only one in class who wore clothes made from old ones at home, who brought baon, pandesal with varying filling and lemonada, to school as to be always short of allowance. So at one point, it eventually dawned on me that I was not the rich kid I thought I was. Destitute was more like it.

But if we were so hard up, why was there so much food on the table? The mandatory soupy vegetable, 2 kinds of meat (poultry, pork or beef), seafood and fruit were always there. We ate three big meals a day and three small meals in between. We were always eating it seemed. I remember my aunts would get all fired up about us girls leaving morsels on our plates and I always thought they were a bit over the edge. It was only when I was a little grown-up that I realized that it was never about the money. It was about the war. Even the abundance of food on the table was about the war.

I started writing this thinking that this was going to be hilarious. But it did not turn out to be. Because no matter how funny my aunts' efforts at frugality were, I did not have it in me to laugh at these two dear women who had to suffer a devastating war at a very vulnerable age.