At twelve, I was a World War II veteran and D-Day survivor in Normandy. Vicariously of course, only vicariously.
Blame it, first, on the weekly episodes of Combat!, which at six I began to watch with my brothers and cousins at Auntie Maura’s house along nearby South-9 (now Scout Fuentebella) Street, which had television. Blame it, second, on our family driver and most cheerful lifetime friend Manong Natoy, who brought us kids to watch the film The Longest Day, a cinematic retelling of the June 1944 Allied landings in Nazi-occupied France, when I was seven. Both the TV show and the movie made a huge impression on me.
The frenzy of a Normandy beach in 1944, by the famous war photographer Robert Capa.
Manny Loste, with wife Maureen and some friends going vegetarian at La Azotea in Baguio last December 2012.
To the last, his intellectual and political heart was as strong as a bull’s. But alas, his physical heart began to falter in recent years. Relatives, friends and comrades hoped and helped to stretch his shortened time. At 66, there was so much more to do; it was too soon to go.
Still, without warning last April 30, Manny Loste went ahead just the same, leaving the rest of us to comprehend his sudden loss and contemplate his unmeasured legacy. Suddenly, we all realized we lost a social science teacher, a veteran activist and political leader of the Left, a dedicated family man, and a friend to most everyone he closely worked with. Continue reading “Manny Loste and the secret of survival”
Author’s note: I wrote this column piece in 2002, under the same title. It was published in the Nov. 29 issue ( vol. 14 no. 8 ) of the Baguio-based Northern Dispatch Weekly. My son, mentioned as a third-grade school boy in the essay, is now a second-year college student. I often wonder but forget to ask him whether college history textbooks still contain the story of Indonesian-A and Indonesian-B, or have they been expunged. Anyway, my take on the story still stands, and I hope my dear readers will learn something new once they finish reading this piece, which I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting nearly 10 years later.
Did our ancient ancestors really arrive in the Philippines in waves? Image of Cagayan warrior drawn circa 16th century as part of the Boxer Codex doesn't seem to provide a good answer to this puzzling question of Philippine prehistory.
My younger son is in Grade 3, and sometimes I’m called upon to help him do his homework or review for his periodic exams.
A month ago, as I was checking his homework, we fell into a heated argument.
He claimed that the people of the Cordillera were descended from the first wave of Malays that came over here, while the rest of Luzon lowland peoples (e.g. Kapampangan, Tagalog) and the Visayans were descended from a second wave of Malays. He proceeded to lecture to me that the Malays were preceded by Indonesians, who also came in two waves–Type A and Type B.
I tried to explain to him, in terms an eight-year-old mind could grasp, that the wave migration theory of how our country was populated — most elaborately developed by Dr. H. Otley Beyer — has been debunked by most scholars of Philippine prehistory for quite some time now. But no, my son insisted, I was utterly wrong, and how dare I question his teacher and his textbook!
