PLACES i'VE BEEN TO

THERE were times and places still quite vivid in my memory even as I am still aware most of them happened before the world called me a toddler. Take that scene and feeling that I was in a place, I think it was somewhere in a decrepit kitchen area as I smelled something which as I grew I realized it was onion and potato being fried with egg. My parents – deceased Carlos Sr. and Rosario Dangca – told me in their so many stories during my formative years that they met in Manila and I was born in Tondo area. I concluded that that scene was where I first developed my early cognitive abilities. I had returned to that surroundings, which had made me comfortable always, in my thinking of dreaming for a better life during my childhood especially. It was still graphic in my mind as a child of about three, I guess, I was with about three people older than me including my mother we were lost around the pier area in Tondo – there was a strange feeling here that I belonged to the place – looking for some kin. It was where I spent even unwarily my first taste of life, I am certain.
Life then was so easy that going around what is called now Metro Manila only needed to hop in a calesa, and that incident when certain adults, including my mother, tagged me along looking for a relative in Malabon then celebrating a fiesta. Crossing that bridge which I believed spanned Tondo area and Malabon on that bright summer day, perhaps, still echoed the click-clacking of the horse's hoofs. What happened afterwards, I could no longer remember.
One time, when I sensed that my father and mother could not support my college studies (even as they wanted me to continue because of what I presumed was my impressive grades in high school) they brought me to certain Visayan relatives in – again – Tondo area to ask for financial support. I only recalled my supposed uncle gave us a snack of banana cue and glasses of water.
Those were the places I've been to during my formative age that I still remember. The others were in Cavite where I studied college, Kalinga-Apayao ( I don't know which part is Kalinga or Apayao now after the split) where I spent the adventurous parts of my early manhood, Manila where I wandered as I worked as a laborer (helping mix and feeding the mix to the mason – please bear with me if I graphically describe how to go about that job) before being promoted as mason after learning the simple task of putting the hollow blocks together, and putting the finishing touch of “palitada” or smoothening plain cement on the surface – and doing that in style.
(Later, I became a Mason – speculative mason, or member of the fraternity most often mistaken as A bunch of atheist men).