When my parents renovated the old family house in the early 1960s, they had two rows of huge storage closets painted in bright Mondrian colors, built right into an entire wall from floor to ceiling, right beside the stairs and near a backdoor leading to the garage. Both closet arrays were some 5 feet high, 7 feet wide and 3 feet deep. So you could imagine that a young boy could easily snuggle inside, keep quiet, and not be noticed for the rest of the day. Continue reading “My secret vice that I’ll fight to keep”
What if I were lost to everyone?
What if I were lost for an instant or two,
In the wink of an electron’s eye
Since we are wiggly bits of energy
That leap in and out of quantum lives
As physics tells us we all must be,
Would anyone notice? Would I even know? Continue reading “What if I were lost to everyone?”
Ilocano children’s rhymes before we all forget
Writing and researching a blog post about Filipino children’s native games has led me to jog my own memory about so much folklore that Lola Julita, my mother’s mother, had taught us as kids.
A lot of it was stories about legends and myths of the Northern regions, about Angngalo, Lam-ang and Ines Kannoyan, about the alsados from upstream, about plain folk doing extraordinary things, sometimes funny, sometimes noble.
Regretfully, I have forgotten most, having listened to them while half-asleep since my Lola was my frequent baby-sitter and bedtime storyteller when I was a toddler.
Some of the Abra lore she shared were not really stories but riddles, sayings, native doggerel, and nonsensical verses—probably mnemonics that helped our ancestors memorize stuff while having fun at work.
Continue reading “Ilocano children’s rhymes before we all forget”