RETURNING to familiar streets and “eskinitas” after so many years, where one had spent a significant part of one’s childhood, always elicits a certain sense that can only be attributed to childlike excitement. However briefly as that might seem, the feeling still leaves one with an aberrant tingle akin to goosebumps.
This sensation, like suspended cigarette smoke in a room, hangs for a while, dissipates slowly into a transparent ghostly mist, and then is gone.
At the closest, it’s almost like enjoying the most wonderful dream, and suddenly, you wake up. But just right before that realization of your bubble bursting, the initial surprise of that experience of a return to the past tantalizes you, no matter how short it may have been.
What follows right after is the fun in discovering some things new to the place, a new apartment perhaps where the one in your youth used to be, or a widened alleyway that once led to you and your old friends’ secret lair. It’s almost like being a child once again, finding an old toy that’s been repaired and improved on by an older sibling.
After studying it closely and reliving in your mind its once-glorious playable days, you realize you’re already in the present, and at once, the magic is lost. To say again, the nostalgia of it is gone, hanging but briefly like ghostly mist.
I once wrote in a caption that the old buildings along San Pedro Street had souls of their own. I always imagined the spirits of old people in my childhood, regularly milling about its dimmed sidewalks, which, back in the day, were still free of stalls and hawkers.
Some among them, my father’s workmates, resplendent in their starched white pants, puff their brown cigars while probably just hanging around before dinnertime. Right above them, looking down from windows decorated by an assortment of shirts and underwear, wives and other residents loudly join in conversation while heckling a few passers-by.
A few years ago, while walking past the park fronting City Hall near twilight, I imagined old kalesas inching slowly through old San Pedro, briefly stopping by the Three Sisters soda fountain, before proceeding to unknown destinations in Bankerohan.
In their wake, the lingering smell of dung and sweat from their malnourished and ashen-white steeds hung in the air. In that daydream, I’m back with my grandfather, Lolo Ute, as he chats with one of the sisters inside the salon while I dive deep into their halo-halo specialty. That memory may be gone now, like ghostly mist, but it was great while it lasted.
For us old-timers, it’s not at all difficult to be lost in a whirl of fond remembering. Perhaps to aid you in reverie, Rizal Park and City Hall still stand. Then, if you’re feeling lucky, try catching those brief seconds at dusk, when the light is just right and the bell tower is ringing the Angelus.
The darkening shadows of Acacias will assist you in opening that magical portal of reliving our past, on this, our supposed independence day.
