i know i did. and fortunately so. i find that memories of a happy childhood serve more purpose than just to bring a smile to your face when you remember them. they help define who you become as a grownup. a couple of friends and i were talking about our childhood memories over roti and sodas this weekend, and i couldn't help but notice that most of my childhood friends are still very good friends up to now . somehow, apart from the many conversations (silly ones, i might add), the bond forged over being caked in dirt and sweat together has endured the test of time.
i grew up in the village that we live in up to now. it looks very different though. unlike our time when the streets would be filled with little children playing on the streets in the afternoon till early evening, the roads now are much more quiet. children spend their afternoons watching tv and playing video games, walking around the mall, more than anything i guess. thinking about that made me sad for them, for missing out on the secret adventures that our village had for young minds, just waiting to be discovered. i wish they had the same childhood that we did.
i grew up living on the same street as many of my cousins. i come from a big family (on my mother's side at least), and having 11 aunts and uncles, most of them in the same village, meant having a lot of cousins over for summer.
now, even the weather is different. it's been raining every day since i arrived from australia. but i digress.
my favorite days consisted of mornings at swimming class then art class with my cousins, afternoons spent on the streets, playing patintero and chinese garter. i remember days spent at jacqui's house. i would be there early and we would play win, lose, or draw or that flag memory game thing. i liked it there because we could have coke any time we wanted hahaha. early afternoons, we would be given the kababayan bread with our coke, and when it stopped being too hot, we would play chinese garters with the girls on our street, and after, patintero or kickball (our version of softball but kicking around a soccerball) with the other kids on the street.
other days, we would bike around the village or playing hide and seek. we even had picnics and jogging sessions and camping days. i remember one night when there was a massive blackout and my mom and some friends of mine laid out a mat in front of our house and we just sat talking under the stars.
other afternoons would be spent being "bantay" in my tita's store, which was one of the more popular sari-sari stores inside the village then. it was good for people watching and seeing crushes (hahaha on the brain, even at 8), getting free food and soda, and whiling away hours when we really had nothing to do.
when we wanted to make money, we would make "pastillas" (from a mixture of powdered milk and condensed milk, rolled into balls and then coated with sugar) and force our parents to buy our creations. no one thought to wash their hands of course, so we ate even what our parents bought.
i even loved the summers i spent in the province. days when i would go to my tita's office and get paid P5 per day to write poems about the people in the office. we would eat pancit at asiong's on f.tanedo or have cheese pineapple sandwiches that the nurse made. we would take baths with the hose outside the house and hide from my lola because i was the most sickly malnourished child ever. we would "shop" at my grandma's store (where i would buy everything from patis to katol) and bring them home in a plastic bag. but the summer i spent at my cousin's house in tarlac was one of the most memorable. it was where i met the first guy who really liked me (age 9).
we would nap in the afternoons (a conspiracy between all grownups at that time) and walk to the panaderia to buy pandesal and the palengke type sweet corn snacks. at night he would go to my cousin's house to sit with me in the lanai. good times. hahaha.
i wonder what kids spend their time on these days. i can only hope that their childhoods are half as fun as ours were.
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