It's Beginning to end Back again
After 3 months of traveling on the Asian continent, I went back to the Philippines, spent a week in Manila and then flew north to see my parents. I didn't call before hand, I just showed up, which I used to do when I would visit them in LA. (sometimes noone would be home and I'd spend hours sitting in the backyard since I no longer had a house key.) I arrived in Laoag just before noon. From the Laoag airport I took a jeepney to the city center and then took a tricycle to another Jeepney that would take me to Solsona.
The last time I had taken a Jeepney, I was 12, just about to enter junior high school, the 6th grade, vacationing in the Philippines for a month with my mom. I remember accompanying my mother one afternoon to Laoag to find My uncle Ninong's second wife. My uncle Ninong was living in eagle rock and he could barely support his first wife let alone his second wife and her kids. On some street bustling with tricycles, some seedy looking building we knocked on a door that seemed so close to the street that an errant wheel would clip the door jamb. A woman in her forties came out and maybe I remember small children peeking out from behind her. I remember she looked sad and tired, telling us the eldest was sleeping on the streets. My mother gave her dollars. I remember afterwards her telling me, in response to some unspoken question "...if you only knew what it was like to be hungry, to not know where your next meal was coming from." She was 9 or 10 during the Japanese occupation. She never spoke much about those times. She had a hard life and would only tell me about when I did something especially awful and disrespectful as a kid. A different take on the usual parental posturing, "When I was your age we didn't even have a home, we had to flee the city because of all of the bombs..." I can't recall that my father had any harrowing war time stories. I just remember how he never forgot how to count in japanese.
When I arrived at the Laoag airport, the skies were overcast. It was coming on the rainy season. The rain began in earnest as soon as I got off the jeepney and walked the last 2 blocks to the house. My mom was alone eating lunch in front of the television. "Why are you back again," she asked.
The last time I had taken a Jeepney, I was 12, just about to enter junior high school, the 6th grade, vacationing in the Philippines for a month with my mom. I remember accompanying my mother one afternoon to Laoag to find My uncle Ninong's second wife. My uncle Ninong was living in eagle rock and he could barely support his first wife let alone his second wife and her kids. On some street bustling with tricycles, some seedy looking building we knocked on a door that seemed so close to the street that an errant wheel would clip the door jamb. A woman in her forties came out and maybe I remember small children peeking out from behind her. I remember she looked sad and tired, telling us the eldest was sleeping on the streets. My mother gave her dollars. I remember afterwards her telling me, in response to some unspoken question "...if you only knew what it was like to be hungry, to not know where your next meal was coming from." She was 9 or 10 during the Japanese occupation. She never spoke much about those times. She had a hard life and would only tell me about when I did something especially awful and disrespectful as a kid. A different take on the usual parental posturing, "When I was your age we didn't even have a home, we had to flee the city because of all of the bombs..." I can't recall that my father had any harrowing war time stories. I just remember how he never forgot how to count in japanese.
When I arrived at the Laoag airport, the skies were overcast. It was coming on the rainy season. The rain began in earnest as soon as I got off the jeepney and walked the last 2 blocks to the house. My mom was alone eating lunch in front of the television. "Why are you back again," she asked.
posted by JGLuzifer at 3:34 PM
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