Life Cakes

Earlier, I was at the 9th day mass of my uncle who passed away. His sons honored him afterwards by throwing a party for him, commemorating the day their dad, as our faith tells us, has gone to heaven. Coincidentally, I was sitting with my own dad at dinner. There, as we ate our "kakanin" for dessert, he told me how he used to make these rice cakes when he was young. This triggered bits and pieces of memories that he began to share, which slowly made me appreciate even more what a remarkable man he is.

My dad was around 15 years old during World War II. At the time, he had to stop schooling and was making rice cakes that his younger siblings would sell at the movie house nearby (where incidentally, my Dad also hung out with the projectionist like Toto in my favorite movie “Cinema Paradiso”). His family lived right next to an old school, which the Japanese turned into their garrison.

His war stories are quite diverse. Once he was almost mistakenly identified as a Filipino guerrilla soldier. Fortunately he was on the good side of a Japanese soldier who was running a rice plantation, so he was able to claim that he worked there and was spared from being arrested. He also told me how once the Japanese assigned him and some kids nearby to patrol the perimeter of their camp, holding nothing more than sharpened sticks. Another time, when his family had to flee their homes because bombs were being dropped on the camps, he walked miles and miles just to go back… so he can use the toilet he was ‘accustomed’ to.

When the war ended he went back to school. To make up for lost time they had to do continuous schooling with no summer breaks. While studying he juggled working on the weekends with the loftier pursuits of any teenage guy…courting girls. One girl lived close to my dad’s house, but was from the province. He told me that he would find time to still take her to visit her sister in Pampanga. What today is about a 2 hours’ drive from where we live was quite a long and dangerous trip back then - what with the insurgents hiding in the area during the ‘50s. And still he would make it back by night so his mother won’t know.

He married this girl and was expecting a child when he was only on his third year in college. But sadly, she died in childbirth, leaving my dad a widower and a single father to my eldest sister at the age of 23. While my grandparents helped take care of her, my dad finished school and went to work. He’s the eldest child and so what he earned had to go not just to raising my sister, but also to helping his younger siblings through school.

It would take him over half a decade to marry again, this time to a girl he met at the office - my mother. He loved her so much that even though they were properly engaged, they secretly exchanged vows at a civil wedding 4 months before their actual church wedding.

He worked more than one job to sustain the 5 more kids that he would raise with my mom. On the same land he patrolled at the perimeter of the Japanese camp, he built a house of wood then a house of stone. He earned enough for a car, then two. He earned enough to see each child finish college. And even after I, the youngest, have gone and made a living of my own, he still kept going to work Mondays through Saturdays - up to this very day.

I write this now as a story, but it was all told in bits and pieces – some over tonight’s rice cakes, others in a drive through traffic or while waiting for a waiter in a restaurant. You never know when memories are triggered. They come best when they are not forced.

But from all this I realize now that whenever my dad recounts stories from his past, it is always with a half smile. More than just nostalgia, it is from a sense of fulfillment. From the little I have gathered, it is already quite a life. And even now, as he approaches his 81st year, indeed he is living it well.