PLEASE COME HOME
This is one of my feature article entries which got a perfect score. And it’s my centenary blog post. Hope you’ll like it. ^_^
And I apologize if I can’t visit your blogs that often… I’m just so busy dealing with Nicolas Copernicus and Doraemon in Kingdom Come.
Entry #10 - Personality Sketch
by Neil Brian Bernardo
Discipline and self-reliance. That’s what my Dad always reminds to us whenever we stumble on the “ginisang kalabasa with talong and other poisonous condiments” he served on the table–when we still have that “table”, I mean. I was still a kid back then, a kid whose brain worked like a cretin and never cared about the wonders of escayola and water mixed together. Which means I didn’t listen to the morning sermons of my Dad and focused only on the orange juice beside me. Later I knew, when my Dad was still of the same age as mine, he didn’t formally go to schooling and sold pan de sal on the streets. Then I stared at the poisonous vegetables on my plate again and wondered endlessly until the day this article came to be.
My dad is a sculptor–an occupation where none of the residents in Paete, Laguna would question. He sketches, he paints, he carves, and he furnishes. he had been earning a lot since he started laboring in his uncle’s firm in Laguna. But he was never contented. He wanted to go to school and be educated by the wonders of science and linguistics. So he worked out for it. For years, he had been selling bread on his bicycle like a newspaper boy to suffice his school expenses until he reached highschool. He worked all for himself, by himself.
He never had a perfect family. He never had perfect parents.
His father was a drunkard. His mother never took education as a priority. Neither his brothers nor sisters as well. But my Dad tried to become one and helped himself and his family in their everyday expenditures–whether important or superficially ‘recreational’. And he finished college with the help of his aunt in Las Piñas.
And now, I am seated uncomfortable against the table with the poisonous vegetables on my pink plate. I never experienced being scolded by my Dad with his hands or his Salvadore belt. But his intimidating authority speaks by itself. How would I be disciplined and become self-reliant with a squash and an eggplant even in at that time I already knew that squash has high vitamin A while the eggplant had no other nutritive values except fiber and carbohydrates?
Before, I never eat vegetables unless a belt or a broomstick is seated right next to me. But Dad insists. We should learn to live life on our own with the squash and the eggplant.
He learned the fundamentals of sculpting by just watching his co workers doing their giant sculptures in their warehouse. Whenever he is alone, he would experiment on anything. He secretly used his grandfather’s tools whenever he practices sculpting. And he would never stop until he gets it correctly even if he is working already in Guangdong, China.
Whenever he is at home, he would sing and sing even if all our glasswares have cracked up. Then I would get another microphone and devastate our whole community just for the sake of thinking what he should design and carve. And then if he’s done, he would not want anyone to get past through the lines in the house which he called “Area of Responsibility: Do Not Disturb. Point of No Return.”
Whenever he is back at home, he would always want to heighten the volumes of our audio system and watch movies he bought in Hongkong. Not because he wanted to show-off to our neighbors that he finally arrived from the greenest pastures, but just to do what he always did when he is alone or with other people in his apartment in China.
Whenever he is back at home, he would talk to us about the cruelties of working outside the Philippine Archipelago, like there are so many burglars and snatchers in China and how all my Dad’s most expensive perks had been stolen by the Chinese. He would talk about himself, about pornography, about mommy in their first years in life, everything. Everything that would scope all the 13 years he missed without us his family beside him. he would just talk like any father would talk about.
Whenever he is back at home, he would teach us what he learned in his work–digital imaging, 3D modeling and animation, designing, among others just for a couple of minutes and then leaves us to study it only by ourselves.
Whenever he is back at home, he would always make everything seemed perfect. The looks of the house, our talent, our speaking, our attitude towards others, and the like. He is not that strictly a perfectionist, but he preferred to have us give our best on everything so as not to disappoint other people.
Whenever he is back at home, the house is of his full authority. He is the head of the family, the husband of my mother, and the father of my kuya, my brother Henry and Teri, and me.
He would tie our shoes before we go to school. He would clean our appliances and windows and reorder our upholstery a whole lot differently. He would give us his things and call it “our own”. He would ask questions and answer it himself. He would laugh at all the cheesiest shows on television and yawn at all we though the funniest. He would design a floor plan of our small bungalow house and then keep it to himself. He would play Chinese songs, sing along with it, and then I would always end up memorizing the song earlier than he. Yet for retribution, he would cook his all-time favorite ‘ginisang kalabasa with talong and other poisonous condiments’ and commands us to fill our stomachs with this special treat of his with the broomstick and belt on our side. He would spend a lot and care less on the following days.
He would always do that whenever he is back at home. As of now, I’m contented and satisfied with the online chat and emails.
I rarely see him in his bad cold weather outfit everytime he comes home. Because he rarely does come home. His Giordano polo shirt bought in some luxurious department store in Hongkong complements well with blue, sometimes brown, jacket filled with nonempty pockets of varying sizes. Unlike those OFWs from the Middle East who come out of the wide open with gold jewelry horrendously contrasting with their obvious monstrosity, he never wore any except his replaceable wristwatch.
But will all the luggage and the unlabeled Balikbayan boxes next to him, we who anticipate his arrival on the NAIA or stunned for his surprise return of the comeback, think of only one thing:
No, not the “pasalubong”.
Dad is finally back.
Happy 20th Church anniversary to you, Mom and Dad! Love ya and all!
