Childhood memories that stick

By Herbert Vego

AT 76, I often forget names, places and events. “Senior moments,” I comfort myself, knowing that all other senior citizens tend to forget.

But just like them, I light up at the thought that certain memories from childhood are hard to forget. I am recalling some of them here, hoping that this “young once” could impart a lesson to today’s young ones.

My earliest childhood memory takes me back to age three in 1953 in San Pedro, a barangay in San Jose, Antique. It was when my infant brother Walter was crying due to a pox-like skin disease. Since the nearest doctor was five kilometers away, we could only reach him by borrowing private transportation.

There was only one man in San Pedro who owned a car, a certain Palermo. It was available for hire during emergencies. In fact, Palermo himself would drive us to the doctor for Walter’s treatment.

But dermatology in 1953 had barely gone beyond the “primitive” stage. The prescribed ointment failed to save my brother, who died at the age of six months.

The trips to the doctor in a borrowed car must have motivated my father to buy his own secondhand jeepney. It cost him PHP 3,000, a princely sum at that time.

My parents took me to a photographer for my first studio picture. I cried upon being left alone on a chair in front of a big camera. And so, my dad handed me his fountain pen.

Of course, I did not know then that it was symbolic of what I would eventually do for a living — write, write, write.

One day, my Lola Maria gave me a silver 10-centavo coin. She said I could trade it for bread or candy. So, I ran to the corner store and pointed at a jar full of round candies called dulce de limon. The smiling storekeeper wrapped 20 of them and handed me a larger five-centavo coin as change.

It taught me a lesson about the value of money.

The largest coin at the time had the smallest value. One centavo, as big as today’s 20-peso coin, could buy a piece of wrapped candy.

I was five years old when I sat in a first-grade classroom as a “visitor.” Nursery and kindergarten schools were unheard of then.

In 1956, at age six, I was in the same classroom, my mom having enrolled me in first grade. The only first-grade textbook at that time was “Pepe and Pilar.”

We did not have to buy books in public schools. The government lent us all our textbooks, which were returnable at the end of the school year to be used by the next batch.

Inflation was a slow process, as prices remained constant for a decade or more. From the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s, gasoline cost 30 centavos per liter. I should remember because I worked as our jeepney conductor during summer vacations.

I remember that a bus ride from San Jose to Iloilo City cost only a peso.

The minimum wage of government employees at that time was PHP 120 per month, and that was good enough.

We practiced “business” in our first year of high school in 1962. Each day, a group of us freshmen at Antique High School would be assigned by our economics teacher, Miss Diana Grasparil, to man the school’s retail store. One day, she read to us a letter from a soft drink company announcing a price increase — from 10 centavos to 15 centavos per bottle.

It was my first lesson in inflation.

As a septuagenarian looking back, I realize that first-time childhood experiences survive the ravages of time.