June 29, 2004
on books
From an old blog...My love for books began way before I learned to read. I remember that what set our house apart from the same bamboo and thatched roof houses in our barrio, is that it contained books. Actually, they are mostly pocketbooks about romance and adventures.
The books were the focal point of our house. When cleaning the house, I wiped and smelled and neatly aligned them back on the shelves along with boxes of chivas regal and napoleon (remnants of a brother from Saudi), atop a wall decked with my mother's large picture of God's sacred heart.
In my kid days, I was used to the mostly romance stories my mother told us. While most children might have listened to nursery rhymes, or the story of Alice in Wonderland, we had a nightly session of Barbara Cartland stories of romance and happy endings, instead. (Later, I learned that my mother had exercised her parental guidance authority in telling the ‘romantic parts’). The stories served as incentives for us to do our house chores – the more chores, the more stories we bargained for. Those times were hard times for our family, but my mother’s stories cushioned us through the day by making us look forward to the night. But sometimes, reality breaks through the world of make believe. There was a time when after another tiring day of work in the rice fields, my mother slept through the lord-and-lady story she was telling us. As we urged her to continue, she started mumbling about our debts and who we can we sell our rice at a higher price.
When my eldest sister was able to study in a state university in Manila through a scholarship, we always look forward to her return during Christmas or summer. We realized that my sister tells stories better and tells better stories. She kept us awake with Gone with the Wind for two nights, even my naughty brother closed in to listen.
Books goaded me to attend school at a much younger age so that I would already learn to read and write. But barrio education had always been in dearth of books. In my first four years, I attended school that had only two classrooms, two teachers, and no library. Textbooks were limited, so three others and I had to share one book. After grade one, I still look forward to the opening of classes even if it means going back to the same classroom and the same teacher.
Ironically, this was also the same years when I held books literally rescued by our neighbor from fire. These discarded books were to be completely eliminated by the school because the President then wanted everyone to read about his new society. The books had missing parts, but for months, they kept me returning to our neighbor’s house.
In my remaining years in elementary, I was able to read my first novel - a sweet dreams pocketbook in which only the author’s name (Yvonne Greene) stuck out in my memory. The barrio high school I attended to allotted a large lawn for CAT exercises, but there was no space for a library. In my last year, the school had purchased a set of encyclopedia but these priced possessions were kept inside the principal’s office.
College, of course, was an entirely different story. Coming from a small barrio school, the size of the school I went to (several four-storey buildings) was a complete spectacle then. (Of course, I later found that a state university has the size as big as our town’s poblacion). I no longer share my books with other, but own them and even write exercises on them. When I saw the school’s main library, I leaped. The musty smell of books old me that I'm home. I later worked in the library as a student assistant to sustain my studies and enjoyed every moment of it. I then started collecting my own books, neatly arranging them inside my own cubicle in the library.
After twelve years of erratic urban living, now in my fourteenth transfer of residence - from bedspacing to living with relatives to living with friends to renting studio-type rooms - my books are still with me, keeping up with me, growing with me. After a hard day of work, I bury myself to my books for that dose of fiction, adventure, essays, and poetry. Just like before, I need them keep me going, and look forward to the night. 1/20/2004
eyed at 7:32 PM