My father Pio A. Verzola in his early 20s. Some cousins insist I look like him. Possibly. Lol.
He came from an industrious family of craftsmen, tailors and musicians that made and sold men’s suits, musical instruments and other crafted goods. His father died young and his mother went to live with another man, leaving him and his brother in the care of bachelor uncles and spinster aunts.
[Quick clarification, which I’m inserting here after a first cousin, Dr. Eufemio Verzola of Festus, MO pointed it out: My father’s mother, whom we all fondly called Lola Uban, returned to care for her sons and daughter after a short while. She was a loving mother or mother-in-law and doting Lola to all of us up to the end of her days.]
Gifted with native intelligence, fair mestizo looks, and a quaintly provincial sense of humor, my father struggled with limited funds through college at the prestigious University of the Philippines in Los Baños. He excelled in math and literature, but had to settle for a two-year forest ranger course. Continue reading “My father’s mustache, turntable, etc”
My 11 most reassuring sounds. Most of them came at night like fairies, replacing my childhood fears with utmost wonder.
As a young kid, I had the usual childhood fears—of the dark, of weird sounds at night, of dying, of the deep unknown, and so on. Recalling those years, I got rid of many of these fears by age 10. By the time I was 17 (and freed from Marcos jails), I was truly and literally fearless—except for an irrational phobia or two that took me many years to fully defeat.
Recalling these stuff leads me to reflect on how I was able to overcome many of my childhood fears and even a few hardcore fears of my later years. It was certainly a complex tangle of situations and encounters, worthy of a book to be edited by a psychiatrist no less. But since it’s now past midnight going into a nice Sunday and I’m enjoying Neil Young’s “Rust Never Sleeps” album on my lonesome own, I’ll be content to inspect just one persistent pattern: memories of sounds that carried the message, “Fear not, everything’s alright.”
Yes, that’s my secret weapon, my secret shield, my armor of sounds—acquired since childhood and nurtured into adulthood with the help of family, comrades and friends. For this good fortune, I guess one way to thank the cosmic spirits is to share my 11 most reassuring sounds. Here they are: Continue reading “My 11 most reassuring sounds”
I’m not sure if my one and only senatorial candidate, Teddy Casiño, has a bike or if he even knows how to ride one. I don’t know if his campaign machinery has any biking event listed. But, whatever the case, it’s a nice idea for bikers who support Teddy’s bid for the Senate to organize a mass bike ride on or around Earth Day or any other memorable date before the May 13 elections.
The idea actually came from my ex-girlfriend, who is immensely busy these days with her own hectic race to complete her university studies and get the degree she’d been aiming for since time immemorial. So she asked me to put her suggestion into blog form.
Like me, Ex-GF was at first doubtful of Teddy’s chances at winning a Senate seat although we had been supportive of his party-list’s program from Day 1. Truth to tell, we cringed at his first tentative steps to craft his messages for a wider audience, such as his rather tacky “Don’t touch my talong” slogan against GMOs.
But as he plodded along, or rather jogged and chatted and expounded his way into public consciousness, slowly gathering momentum, he started to shine, and XGF’s mental light bulbs started to emit brilliant flashes.
“Jogging is ok, but too slow if he wants to cover more ground,” she noted. “He should bike all around the city, and call on all bikers—including you,” emphatically pointing a finger at me, “to join him and help distribute his leaflets.”
“Hmm,” I said, contemplating her finger. “There’s an Earth Day bike ride on April 21,” I noted, checking a website calendar for the Firefly Brigade’s “critical mass rides” for this year. On the other hand—I corrected myself—it would probably be a bad idea to politicize an event that has already established itself as non-political.
So taking off from XGF’s idea, the next best thing is maybe for Teddy’s bikers to organize their own mass rides to raise environmental issues, bring their ecological philosophy and program to the masses in a creative way, and involve a wide range of activist and advocate groups—even plain biking enthusiasts and pedicab drivers. They can trace a well-chosen route that’s long enough to cover much ground, but not too long as to be exhausting and self-limiting in terms of participants. Continue reading “Biking for Teddy C.”
