“His eyeglasses were like layers of thick mirrors, which extracted a magical spell that seemed to guide his trained artist’s hand. My father was a man of the hour, he seized everyday with a restless romance with his drawing table, protractors and engineering pens.”

I am the daughter of an architect, my father was one of the youngest, most promising professionals during his time. He failed to complete his degree but I was told by his contemporaries that sans a diploma, he was a visionary in his era.

 

Every Sunday he would take us to Luneta and Manila Zoo, all four of us (my sister and I, and my two cousins Dan and Omeng). It was always family day on Sunday, a time for him to set aside work and tend to his two young kids and his wife’s extended family.

 

He  too, like most fathers, was guilty of passion for work. It consumed him– cigarette stick after another, his tensed lungs gave life to his architectural plans. His genius was one borrowed from hours of marriage with nicotine and caffeine that sifted inside his pale and thin frame. His eyeglasses were like layers of thick mirrors, which extracted a magical spell that seemed to guide his trained artist’s hand. My father was a man of the hour, he seized everyday with a restless romance with his drawing table, protractors and engineering pens.

 

I could still remember sitting on his lap, his guitar played tunes in his era -the good old days. And I sang with him for hours. It was a moment that will forever be etched in my mind. My five year old consciousness betrayed me, unsuspecting about what he meant. Through the meanings of the words I thought that like all the days before it, it will be like this forever. I was going to be with my father forever, just like this.

 

“Remember this song, this is our song when you grow up”. Brief and yet, in my mind I did not know  how this would forever change my life. “Good morning yesterday, you wake up and time had slipped away, and suddenly its hard to find, the memories you’ve left behind, remember, do you remember the times of your life…”

 

In between singing Rico J’s and Florante’s and Sampaguita’s songs, he and I would stop only to eat merienda from Mom’s cooking. Life is so much simpler in the eyes of a child.

 

In that fateful week in October, in the middle of an argument with him to watch my favorite robot cartoons Voltes V, I agreed to let him watch the Toyota – Crispa Championship game that he and Mom always watched at the Araneta Colosseum  (they have connections with the Silverios who then was the first dealers of Toyota in the country). Daddy  promised to buy me that Voltes V 2 feet action figure Robot I saw on TV in exchange for letting him watch the game in our colored TV (the only colored TV in the neighborhood that time which he had a friend ship from Japan, a SONY).  He watched it (the game) from home after he had been nursing fever from quite sometime. His frail body grew thinner and he begged Mom not to take him to the doctor. It was just a bad fever, he said.

 

That night same night he was brought to the hospital because the fever overcame him and his usually jolly spirit. It was H-Fever and it took away my father from us. I was five and my sister, still a baby.

 

The next day, Dad went home, serene in that box. He and I now separated by that thick glass (thicker than his spectacles). He was asleep. He did not look like his usual self and seemed different and still. Everyone was crying. The lights were brought up our house, then suddenly my young mind knew that there was something wrong. Why wasn’t he moving, where’s my Voltes V robot that he promised last night? My still innocent selfish mind confused at the scenes that followed.

 

He is gone, I heard them say. Gone? For how long? Is he waking up soon? Nobody answered me and avoided my questions. But I knew there was really something wrong. I remembered earlier on that week when I lost my dog and they said he was dead. Spot was never coming back. And so was Daddy. He is also (was) dead,  like Spot. Never coming back.

 

Never.

 

I ran out of the house, I ran and ran and ran until at some point I got so tired crying. The neighbor found me sitting and still crying on the alley at the back of our house and took me home. Then everything after that was a blur. The white dress I wore the day we buried him and that black strip of plastic pinned on my dress, the hundreds of people who came in and out our house to say how good my father was, and stories of how he came to bring our neigbor’s wife to the hospital using his car (he was the first to own one too in our neighborhood) when the latter gave birth. Thanks to this young man, whose cold body laid to rest. I miss him up until now.

 

He died young at 28, and took with him our love and respect. For all he is and was, a father who dreamed for his family, a man who was born before his time.

 

– for my father, who’s watching us from heaven. You are always remembered…

Lifted from my site www.myhappythoughts.info