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LAST
weekend our generation was home. It was 35 years after
our high-school graduation, and we were back in our
city. We were 16 or 17 then when we left; we were golden
boys and girls that weekend, truly deserving of memories
and armed with the best regrets and the best wishes.
We were
often taken for Martial Law Babies, but we were not. We
formed our conscience and our dreams long before that
rule of greed overcame the land. When we left high
school that summer, our young minds were overflowing
with ambitions and plans. We were about to chart our
future. A regime would make sure it would chart the
horizon for us.
High
school was a paradise. The old Jesuit school in the
province made sure that it was that. 1969 was our
freshman year. It was a good year, the volatility of the
period escaping our youth. That year, Yasser Arafat
started to lead the Palestine Liberation Organization
and Golda Meir became the Prime Minister of Israel. John
Lennon would marry Yoko Ono that year as well and by the
time we left school, the Beatles had disbanded.
Woodstock
amazed us and brought us to the hippie movement even if
the most we could do in the small city was to party in
living rooms transformed into dark caverns. We felt like
gleeful sinners every time we danced to “Soul
Sacrifice,” the lengthy solo drumming giving us our
first view of passion in the most naïve and lovely way.
Janis Joplin was too much for us. We settled for James
Taylor and Carole King. The city had two major records
store. Dyna’s Dynamic Ten was our guide to a world of
music that served as footnote to our growing up. We did
not call those tiny surges of feelings and sadness as
angst. We were too young then to be existential. Our
older friends running around the city with red flags
were more into angst. Ours was just growing-up
discomfort.
There
was no Internet then and no one among us had even seen a
computer. Telegrams announced urgent matters. Then
letters were common and they were indices of privacy: no
one, not your mother and not even the bishop had the
right to open your letter. But telegrams were meant to
be read by the first person who received it. Telegrams
were messengers of happiness (you won the Juicy Fruit
contest!) and sorrow (like sickness and death).
Our city
was like a town. Everyone knew everybody. Peace was
already an item then. We chanted “Give Peace a Chance”
but we never imagined that a few years later, we would
not be even allowed to make those chants anymore.
We were
in second year when the ’60s came to a close and the
’70s roared in angrily. And yet, we were not really the
Angry Generation. Even as we watched photos of the My
Lai Massacre, we could not understand fully the uproar.
The Americans then were still the leading characters in
the protracted Vietnam War. We feared and loathed the
Vietcong. Up the blue skies of our city, jets drew white
streaks of smoke: they were either leaving the bases in
the country or coming in from another bombing of
Vietnam. Janis Joplin would die that year. It would be
many, many years when we would rediscover her blues and
genius.
Jim
Morrison would die during our third year in high school.
Bangladesh, which went through extreme drought and
hunger the year before, would declare itself separate.
We knew this both out of concern and also because George
Harrison would stage a concert for Bangladesh. We knew
those words: My friend came to me/With sadness in his
eyes/He told me that he wanted help/Before his country
died….We would be disturbed by the photo of a child, the
stomach bloated and the eyes dilated, a huge empty plate
in front of him.
1972 was
our last year in high school.
Manila
remained a distant place. There were very few television
sets in the city. We instead listened to radio and heard
those words and phrases: “Tuta,” “Ibagsak ang
Imperyalismo”. Peasants and students would stay outside
the famous four pillars of our school, calling us to
join them. We were too young to listen.
Inside
our classrooms the debates were beginning to assume an
edge. We started to examine our bourgeoise upbringing
even as we laughed at the Free Press cover with Guy and
Pip as bakya. By the time we graduated, the first
hand-held calculator had been released to the market and
Nixon had visited China. A film called The Godfather was
released during the year but this would not be our
concern. During that year, a man described as deranged
attacked Michaelangelo’s Pieta with a hammer. The act
disturbed us even if we were also disturbed by our
feelings about an act happening to an object in a
culture that was not ours, and will never be ours. But
then again, Robert “Bobby” Kennedy and Martin Luther
King would die during our generation. It was also in
classrooms that we recited King’s “I Had a Dream” even
if that dream was too far off from where we were then.
We never
fought any war for there were no wars then. We were not
activists and we were not quarterstormers. We were at
the mouth of martial rule. Months after our graduation,
the old
Colgante
Bridge would collapse, killing hundreds. People
interpreted it as ominous. By the middle of that month,
we would wake up to a morning of no broadcast. Martial
law had been declared.
Last
weekend, we the 1972 graduates of the Jesuit school and
our counterparts from the Colegio de Santa Isabel (now a
University) met after 35 years.
That
night, in between the music and laughter, I looked
around and saw mighty survivors. I tried to look for the
quietest of our classmates. He was nowhere. He died for
a cause that we talked about and ranted in the safe
confines of our classroom. Some of our classmates had
disappeared altogether. Some had gone on to cities
bigger than our imagination.
But it
was good to see those who made it. Enrico was the
inimitable ringmaster shouting over the din that
everyone should dance because we have the place only
till midnight. The girls from the convent school were
luckier. The years were very good to most of them. Our
teachers, Mr. Paraiso and Mrs. Paraiso, Mr. Arqueza and
Mrs. Arqueza. They all made it to the homecoming.
Like any
homecoming, music remained the persistent tour guide to
the past. That night, I saw a generation that knew how
to dance “The Hustle.” We sure knew how to raise those
hands and shake them when the Fifth Dimension declared
it the Age of Aquarius, even if we did not know what
that particular age was all about.
That
night, we were back to the only home we had, alive to
share the memories that we kept through these years. We
were like that essay we read many years back, about the
river meandering and hiding under the ground when the
heat was too much and surfacing when the ferns and the
plants came upon to cool the land. On our faces were
inscribed narratives waiting to be told. |
