They can move their homes and families out of the pit or straight into it. They can move this nation to heaven or to hell, with madness or with brightness, with mad brightness or with bright madness. They move their life and limbs in unison with the sway of the cruel and crude currents of time or swim against them. They do so, or not entirely so, oftentimes when thrown in the wretchedness of survival and in the plight of the instinct for life while hounded by the prospect of tribulations. Some simply fade into oblivion; some are swallowed by the chasms of the earth, or are shoved into it by the tired hands of their sons holding the shovel.
And they came to be known as fathers.
I grew up with my father’s presence, not like the unfortunate kids of my generation who had none upon seeing the first light of this world. Or not quite like the unfortunate kids of my generation who were left to grow up without the guidance of a father other than a fatherly figure, a role oftentimes assumed by the mother or the eldest son in the family, whether or not it is a broken family torn in literal and figurative ways. And so I was raised without having to tread those rugged paths that led to nowhere, or to somewhere where future is bleak, if not distorted in barely imaginable ways. But I can say for certain that, even with a father by my side who was constantly straightening the life of a kid who has has been on the verge of losing sight of the road, life was never an easy voyage. It’s enough to say that even a stalwart Achilles can’t weather the push of violent winds.
I'm neither stalwart nor Achilles. I'm a son to a father.
Which makes me think about the other children who are now the same as my age of roughly two decades, those who were born after the dying days of the martial law era, and who were deprived of the hands of a father, genetic or otherwise. I can’t say anything on their behalf, although these times I was, or am, able to bear witness to some things that truly are worth mentioning, or worth saying by virtue of their substance and form. By substance, I mean the value of the lives they are living right now. And by form, I mean the apparent, or obvious, ways in which they now dwell on this little corner of the world.
I had a rather unwelcoming experience about two or three years ago. I can’t exactly remember the day as I have earnestly tried to burry it in the recesses of my collective memory. All I can recall is that one bitter yet poignant moment that almost broke a friendship that bloomed since childhood. But now that I can partly recall that day, I remember how my friend, who was also my neighbor, defended himself from the stories that were making their rounds in the small village where we lived. I shared with him my sympathy for having been branded as the boy notorious for bullying people around as the consequence of being abandoned by his father when he was still five.
I knew his father quite well, and I knew my friend more than I knew anybody else in the neighborhood. For a moment I said there’s no grain of truth in what the old folks were saying about him. Yet it must have torn him in his soul or sanity when I braved to ask him if it ever dawned upon him that it was perhaps out of the fact that his father was quite a nasty brute when drunk, intoxicated by liquor and by orgasmic stories shared over bottles of beer. I for one had seen his father did so on many occasions, especially on lazy afternoons when there is no reason to celebrate other than having to live a less busy and troubled life in the province. The thought must have pricked his pride, and I could feel the abrupt tingle in his veins.
That was the million dollar, or peso, question which almost slashed the thicket of that friendship of ours. To this day I’m still thinking if for what he lacked in substance, he made up for his form. Or if for what he lacked in form, he made up for his substance. I could tell, though, that he has already found the courage, like a long lost limb, to come forth before the people with his flash of pride, owing to how far he has now been able to prove the value of his life. The last I’ve heard, he now works for a company that pays him handsomely, and certainly things have changed much as he himself has changed. He now had the substance and the form, I thought. He now had the value, in both monetary and personal terms. Which, I’m quite certain, have given him the adequate reasons to rejoice and live a blissful existence. I don’t know if it was because of his newly found substance, one that tells the story of how he was able to rise through the ashes and reclaim his form. Or it might have been the other way around, finding form so as to restore whatever substance he had all along. Suffice it to say that he is now a transformed man, and this he did even without a father to bestow upon him all or some of the good things in this world.
Unlike him, I don’t reap a handsome pay in five digits within fifteen short days. I get four in fifteen long and agonizing mornings and afternoons and evenings. We were born in the same generation and yet we are miles apart both in distance and status. He without a father but was able to surge past vindications and vendettas which haunted him. That was his father’s only legacy out of his father’s drunken desires in life, quite apart from the genes that could easily be noticed on his widening forehead at such a young age. And unlike him, I had a father who knew nothing about abandoning his three sons and his loving wife, to which I greatly look upon him despite having been deprived in material wealth, and to which I greatly admire him for being relentless in seeking ways to provide for our struggling family.
That was our story, and I bet on it ours is perhaps just the same as others.
In case you haven’t noticed, the story is more of the son than the father. I chose to speak more of the son than the father simply because, like what others before us have always believed, what the tree is so shall its fruit be. But I say it’s more of the other way—what the fruit is, so its tree has been, or once has been, if not for an entire lifetime. While I have nothing against conventional wisdom that fathers make their sons, quite apart from its sensitively sexual context, sometimes wisdom is convened or confined, whichever you prefer, to believe that sons make their fathers, not in some orgasmic sense but in terms of sons giving insight about their fathers. For it is in cases like that of my childhood friend from whence I understood and from which he reinforced my belief that sons—especially when they get past their teen years—have certain ways of manifesting who their fathers are, or what their fathers are.
I could only begin to imagine how my friend would fare during weekends, especially on evenings spent under neon signs and the passing of booze on glasses of ice. The last time I’ve heard, too, he is nursing a growing pain in his liver. I suspect it has a lot to do with his penchant for that golden nectarine served on dark bottles with a horse for an emblem. And I’m reminded of who his father was.
As for me, I am still struggling with life, of earning a decent pay, like my father did before me, and his father, and his father’s father, and so on. There’s a hidden or an implicit strand of pattern there, one which pins us back to a conventional wisdom and wisdom. I’m quite certain that, some distant time in the future, I’ll soon be fathering a son who would very much reflect who I am. I’ll be seeing my world in his eyes, and he’ll be seeing his in mine, too. And it’s a good and reassuring thing to know, at least for consolation, that I had a father, and my father had a father, and his father’s father had a father who are more than willing to move homes and families out of the pit and not straight into it. It isn’t sheer luck, though I agree there’s genetics working its cogs somewhere there. But more to that, it is the upbringing that gravitates the miracle of life even more, to the point of weighing more than fathers and sons combined.
Ours is just a story, or two, about fathers and sons among the many others out there waiting to be discovered and to be told like an epic story for the generations that will soon take our place in one of the shortest trips in this world.
And they came to be known as fathers.
I grew up with my father’s presence, not like the unfortunate kids of my generation who had none upon seeing the first light of this world. Or not quite like the unfortunate kids of my generation who were left to grow up without the guidance of a father other than a fatherly figure, a role oftentimes assumed by the mother or the eldest son in the family, whether or not it is a broken family torn in literal and figurative ways. And so I was raised without having to tread those rugged paths that led to nowhere, or to somewhere where future is bleak, if not distorted in barely imaginable ways. But I can say for certain that, even with a father by my side who was constantly straightening the life of a kid who has has been on the verge of losing sight of the road, life was never an easy voyage. It’s enough to say that even a stalwart Achilles can’t weather the push of violent winds.
I'm neither stalwart nor Achilles. I'm a son to a father.
Which makes me think about the other children who are now the same as my age of roughly two decades, those who were born after the dying days of the martial law era, and who were deprived of the hands of a father, genetic or otherwise. I can’t say anything on their behalf, although these times I was, or am, able to bear witness to some things that truly are worth mentioning, or worth saying by virtue of their substance and form. By substance, I mean the value of the lives they are living right now. And by form, I mean the apparent, or obvious, ways in which they now dwell on this little corner of the world.
I had a rather unwelcoming experience about two or three years ago. I can’t exactly remember the day as I have earnestly tried to burry it in the recesses of my collective memory. All I can recall is that one bitter yet poignant moment that almost broke a friendship that bloomed since childhood. But now that I can partly recall that day, I remember how my friend, who was also my neighbor, defended himself from the stories that were making their rounds in the small village where we lived. I shared with him my sympathy for having been branded as the boy notorious for bullying people around as the consequence of being abandoned by his father when he was still five.
I knew his father quite well, and I knew my friend more than I knew anybody else in the neighborhood. For a moment I said there’s no grain of truth in what the old folks were saying about him. Yet it must have torn him in his soul or sanity when I braved to ask him if it ever dawned upon him that it was perhaps out of the fact that his father was quite a nasty brute when drunk, intoxicated by liquor and by orgasmic stories shared over bottles of beer. I for one had seen his father did so on many occasions, especially on lazy afternoons when there is no reason to celebrate other than having to live a less busy and troubled life in the province. The thought must have pricked his pride, and I could feel the abrupt tingle in his veins.
That was the million dollar, or peso, question which almost slashed the thicket of that friendship of ours. To this day I’m still thinking if for what he lacked in substance, he made up for his form. Or if for what he lacked in form, he made up for his substance. I could tell, though, that he has already found the courage, like a long lost limb, to come forth before the people with his flash of pride, owing to how far he has now been able to prove the value of his life. The last I’ve heard, he now works for a company that pays him handsomely, and certainly things have changed much as he himself has changed. He now had the substance and the form, I thought. He now had the value, in both monetary and personal terms. Which, I’m quite certain, have given him the adequate reasons to rejoice and live a blissful existence. I don’t know if it was because of his newly found substance, one that tells the story of how he was able to rise through the ashes and reclaim his form. Or it might have been the other way around, finding form so as to restore whatever substance he had all along. Suffice it to say that he is now a transformed man, and this he did even without a father to bestow upon him all or some of the good things in this world.
Unlike him, I don’t reap a handsome pay in five digits within fifteen short days. I get four in fifteen long and agonizing mornings and afternoons and evenings. We were born in the same generation and yet we are miles apart both in distance and status. He without a father but was able to surge past vindications and vendettas which haunted him. That was his father’s only legacy out of his father’s drunken desires in life, quite apart from the genes that could easily be noticed on his widening forehead at such a young age. And unlike him, I had a father who knew nothing about abandoning his three sons and his loving wife, to which I greatly look upon him despite having been deprived in material wealth, and to which I greatly admire him for being relentless in seeking ways to provide for our struggling family.
That was our story, and I bet on it ours is perhaps just the same as others.
In case you haven’t noticed, the story is more of the son than the father. I chose to speak more of the son than the father simply because, like what others before us have always believed, what the tree is so shall its fruit be. But I say it’s more of the other way—what the fruit is, so its tree has been, or once has been, if not for an entire lifetime. While I have nothing against conventional wisdom that fathers make their sons, quite apart from its sensitively sexual context, sometimes wisdom is convened or confined, whichever you prefer, to believe that sons make their fathers, not in some orgasmic sense but in terms of sons giving insight about their fathers. For it is in cases like that of my childhood friend from whence I understood and from which he reinforced my belief that sons—especially when they get past their teen years—have certain ways of manifesting who their fathers are, or what their fathers are.
I could only begin to imagine how my friend would fare during weekends, especially on evenings spent under neon signs and the passing of booze on glasses of ice. The last time I’ve heard, too, he is nursing a growing pain in his liver. I suspect it has a lot to do with his penchant for that golden nectarine served on dark bottles with a horse for an emblem. And I’m reminded of who his father was.
As for me, I am still struggling with life, of earning a decent pay, like my father did before me, and his father, and his father’s father, and so on. There’s a hidden or an implicit strand of pattern there, one which pins us back to a conventional wisdom and wisdom. I’m quite certain that, some distant time in the future, I’ll soon be fathering a son who would very much reflect who I am. I’ll be seeing my world in his eyes, and he’ll be seeing his in mine, too. And it’s a good and reassuring thing to know, at least for consolation, that I had a father, and my father had a father, and his father’s father had a father who are more than willing to move homes and families out of the pit and not straight into it. It isn’t sheer luck, though I agree there’s genetics working its cogs somewhere there. But more to that, it is the upbringing that gravitates the miracle of life even more, to the point of weighing more than fathers and sons combined.
Ours is just a story, or two, about fathers and sons among the many others out there waiting to be discovered and to be told like an epic story for the generations that will soon take our place in one of the shortest trips in this world.
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