MEMORIES: The house where I was born

I grew up in the house where I was born− 149 Rizal Street, in Calamba Laguna. It was a 5-bedroom, two story building made of timber under corrugated G.I. roof. It was near the Calamba railroad station. According to my father, the whole of its ceiling fell when American forces dropped bombs at the train station, in the suspicion that it keeps an ammunition depot during World War II.

We have a big backyard. An Avocado tree stands at the center of it, a Santol tree on one side and a Kamias tree on the other. In one corner were a tall Coconut tree and an Asis tree, which leaves we use like sandpaper. I grew up climbing and playing on the branches of these trees except the coconut tree, which was too tall for me. In this backyard, near the Asis tree, we also have a chicken coop and a hogpen.

My father was a pharmacist thus the façade of the house facing the street was a drug store It has big shelves filled with jars labeled in Spanish, like Borax en Polvo, Goma Arabica, Oxido de Zinc, Carbonato de Sosa, Sulfato de Aluminio, etc.

During the war, it was the hangout of local guerillas. My father covertly keeps a shortwave radio, and thus guerillas secretly gathered there pretending to play mahjong while listening to war news broadcasted by the Voice of America. After the war, it was the children that gathered there during late afternoons. We were the only one in the neighborhood with an AM radio. Children sat on the concrete floor of the Botica listening to radio dramas like “Prinsipe Amante” and “Mga Kuwento ni Lola Basyang.”

My bedroom was on the second floor, right above the Botica where friends and neighbors also played mahjong. At night, when the sharp rattling noise of mahjong tiles being shuffled begins to die down, the clop-pity-clop sounds of horse’s hoofs on asphalt road announcing a passing Calesa, lulls me to dreamland.

Life revolving around our house is typical among Calamba neighborhoods at the time of my youth.