My Published Articles for ViewsHound: My Sudden Reality Check as a Senior Citizen in the Philippines

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

My Sudden Reality Check as a Senior Citizen in the Philippines

The following is a repost of the article in FB by Adolfo Aquino*-a Face Book friend and a fellow Filipino-American also residing in California. He went home to the Philippines on July 15 to help in the burial ceremonies of his eldest sister. He described his personal experiences during this trip a sudden reality check as a Senior Citizen in the Philippines. Here is his interesting story for your reading pleasure.

" Before I delve into the crux of my story, let me tell you first about the events that led me to a reality check of myself. I came home to bury my eldest sister in the Philippines on July 15, 2016. The experience was so stressing and at the same time very nostalgic of my childhood in Barangay Malinis of Lemery, Batangas where I grew up under the strict but doting guidance of my sister whom I fondly called Ate Ciana.

We were 18 years apart in age and she was already a teacher when I began my recognition of things and events surrounding my infancy. It was she who brought me first to the city of Manila when I was about 5 years old. It was the time when the provincial bus would fetch you from your homes before the crack of dawn and wait for you until you finish your shower and get your travel things ready. My thought of going to the big city was more exciting than my first travel to the US or to any of my travels in Europe. What could be more fascinating to a child’s eye than to see the neon lights of the Jai Alai across the old Luneta Park? It was then and so many more enthralling sites other than the hundred camachile trees and corn fields that abound our Barangay Malinis. As I was looking at the lifeless face of my Ate Ciana, I was overwhelmed by emotions and memories of my childhood days when she was always part of my daily life as my protector, my counselor, my second mother.

Once again, I felt the infantile sensation within me, having been pampered as the baby of the family and now confronted by the frozen and helpless body of my guardian. As I turned around from the white casket after a few minutes of prayer and recollections, I was met by a few couple of children who grabbed my right hand to say, “Mano po, Lolo Addie”. “Mano po, Lolo Addie”, yes it was me because that’s my name and that’s what my family and friends always call me, but hearing the word “lolo” jolted me like a lightning bolt. One second ago, I was crying inside me like a child who lost my sister like I lost my mother, and the thought that I was old, a grandpa, a senior citizen was not so uplifting. The un-invigorating thought of being called a “lolo” came to pass and the consoling notion that they were just little children was understandable and made it easier for me to ignore.

The day after the burial of Ate Ciana, I went to the BPI bank of Lemery to withdraw some cash. It was a busy day in the bank and I found myself at the end of one of the three queues when the security guard approached me and directed me to an empty line where a teller was waiting. Trying to be respectfully gracious to the people on the queue, I asked the guard why. He said, “Sir, you are a senior citizen and we have a special line reserved for you”. I was so flabbergasted but elated at the same time. There were three long lines of people, some of whom seems to be older than me, and yet the guard picked me up and addressed me as a senior citizen. Again, it was not a very stimulating idea but I felt relieved from the thought of standing in the queue for the next ten minutes or more.

On Saturday morning, my elder sister, Ate Emma and I went to Manila and took an air-conditioned bus to save our dole-out money for some of our friends and kin who need and expect financial help from us. The bus conductor issued us our tickets with discounted fares for two senior citizens worth around P40.00 pesos. Now, I am getting to like my status as a senior citizen.

After a day’s shopping for some cheap electronic gadgets (of course we know they’re made in China, where else) and some gift items around Carriedo and Echague streets (Ang bakya naman!), we took a UV Express (mas class naman kesa jeep) to the provincial bus terminal of DLTB Co. plying Manila-Lemery-Batangas. A 30-meter queue for the Lemery bound bus confronted us at the terminal but as soon as we got off from the UV Express on Taft Ave., two bus conductors/staff helped and directed us to go to the very front of the line saying, “Sir, Mam, Seniors po kayo, dito po kayo sa pinaka-una ng linya”. This time, I knew I was a “Senior citizen” but for God’s sake, how did I became the oldest out of the hundred people on the line? I thought I belong to the baby-boomer age? Whatever happened after 1947 in the Philippines? Was it another baby-boomer more explosive than the atomic bomb of WW-II.

Three days later, my two elder sisters went to Xntro Mall in our Barangay Malinis to see a Filipino movie. I refused to go with them ……………..it was Tuesday, a “free movie day” for Senior Citizens!

For the veracity and authenticity of my story and social status, my Senior Citizen Control No. is 2016-0738, issued by the Republic of the Philippines, Office of the Senior Citizens Affairs (OSCA), Municipality of Lemery on July 28, 2016 signed by the Hon. Mayor, Eulalio M. Alilio ".

My Comment: Heart felt condolence from the David B Katague Clan. Not mention in your interesting story is that Senior Citizens also get discounts on groceries, medicines, and airline tickets. Senior citizens are granted several benefits and privileges under Republic Act No. 9994 and Republic Act No. 10645.

*Adolfo Aquino ( Addie or Adel)was born in Malinis, Lemery, Batangas, 69 years ago. He is the youngest of 9 siblings. He finished elementary at Our Lady of Caysasay, Taal, Batangas and high school at Our Lady of Fatima in Tanauan City, Batangas. He majored in Management and studied law until his 4th year in various universities in the Philippines. He worked at Filinvest group of companies as Manager of Credit Dept. & Bus. Development Dept. He later was engaged in retail business at Cartimar Pasay & Central Shopping at Shaw, Mandaluyong. He and his wife from Marinduque immigrated to US several decades ago. He retired from the California Highway Patrol in 2013. Welcome to the club, Lolo Addie!

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Guest Article from Susan Creamer Joy

In The Silence, by Susan Creamer Joy.

Today's guest article is from Susan Creamer Joy. Susan is one of my favorite authors in the ViewsHound community. Susan writes, draws, paints and cobbles together art from found objects making a variety of creations from jewelry to religious shrines. She frequently sports burns on her fingers from her soldering iron, paint on her palms and ink under her fingernails, but her hair is usually combed. When she is not losing time in the creative vortex of her studio, she is likely to be putting her knowledge of metaphysics and esoteric principles including Tarot, numerology, astrology and graphology to good use in consultations. Her children are grown, her husband still works and her four dogs believe she needs serious help. The title of her article is "A Matter Of Love And Death". Thank you Susan.

By the time they reached my bedroom door, I was already sitting up – my stomach ratcheted in the tense grip of an unnamed anxiety; my pillow, unburdened of my drowsy head.

To this day I cannot explain how I heard them coming up those stairs in their bare feet or how I knew that my father struggled to hold his composure as my mother unnaturally clutched at the folds of her dressing gown and followed him through the dark just a little too closely.

As the wooden groan of those old stairs tore into my bones that morning like a hacksaw, all I could see between the predawn shadows was the letter I’d written just hours earlier to my boyfriend, Chris, propped against the lamp on my desk across the room awaiting an envelope.

I had not slept well. It was late November and there had been so many changes since the middle of August when he left for the Air Force in Texas to begin basic training and I began my third new school in as many years.

The conspiracy between fate and the last surge of the Vietnam draft had broken apart the every-waking-minutes of our two-year union with unceremonious indifference. All that night my sleep had been infested by difficult dreams and by the illogical fear that truth and reality were merging into a darkness only a martyr could grasp; and at sixteen, martyrdom seemed reasonable only for the nuns among the poor in Bangladesh

I tried to remind myself that he would be home on leave for Thanksgiving in another few days. It was the only tether to calm I could find, but reviewing the facts offered little relief from my baseless fears.

Chris had been girding his pacifist sensibilities preparing to fight in an unpopular war that had not yet slaughtered its last innocent. I was hovering just over the line of inclusion at an exclusive girl’s school – missing him – and finding myself at odds with these young women and their attachment to propriety and with the prep-school veneer that blinded them to the fact that they were no better than anyone else.

Neither one of us was coping well with the worlds into which we were respectively summoned, and although we both knew that the best hope for any future together depended upon our individual successes apart, it was far from comforting most days.

But in spite of our discomfort, we each did our best; and, of course, there were the letters: Thin, plain-paper sheets with row after row after row of inky blue words penned with the intensity and awkward locutions of a love learned too soon. It had come down to just that little, but without them, I would have had nothing.

Chris was learning to fly. I was learning to drive, and both of us were aching to transport our souls to an earlier time through the hallowed intercourse of memories and dreams. Of course, as with all progress, there was the positive element: We were both clean and drug-free for the first time in years.

Now, without pretense, both healthy cognition and sincere motivation surfaced regularly in my psychology and prompted me to care about myself and to arbitrate against all temptation for a better standing in the world, in school and in my own eyes. I even did my homework.

No longer was I escaping today but, instead, living for my day of escape. Lying still in the dark of my room, I listened to the slow, padded footfall of my parents approaching and looked to the floor and to my history book half hidden beneath the nightstand where I’d tossed it the night before. Even in this early morning dark I could make out the swirls and stars in colored marker and the bubble-formed letters that spelled C H R I S in soft, juvenile curves on the torn book cover I’d fashioned out of a brown paper grocery bag.

I vaguely remembered throwing it there somewhat hastily. I had been doing my homework when a sense of urgency struck and I realized I had not written him as I promised I would and glancing at the clock, I noted it was nine-twenty-three. Why that mattered I had no way of knowing in that strange moment, but within hours, it would be one I would never forget; and although I was becoming drowsy and still needed to finish my work, I felt beyond reason that my letter to him could not wait.

So, I wrote. I would always write. I would always be there. He would always be there.“Suzi."It was my name spoken in the smooth and familiar voice of my mother, although weighted and slow, her head bowed to her chest almost as though she were speaking only to herself.

"Suzi.” She said it again, this time with sharp gravity, like a chisel against stone.

As if on cue, I leaned forward, flanked now by my parents who were sitting on either side of my bed.

I had been waiting for them. I don’t know how. I didn’t know why. The lights in my room remained off, but it seemed that the darkness clung more to them than to me, as though they were holding it there – away from me to give me enough light to see through the next moment. They were crying. My father was crying. My father. “Suzi. We have something very, very bad to tell you." Chris has been in a car accident." And he was killed."

If the world moved forward from that moment, I could not know it. f there were air around me worth breathing, I could not take it in. And if there were another sound beyond the leaden bellow of my own raw grief, I could not hear it.

"Who am I going to talk to? Who am I going to love?” I wailed. Who will love me? In that sodden moment violated by the intrusion of a predawn light that had no business rising, everything I ever believed about happiness, hoped for in life, trusted in or held as my own was annihilated.

After that – there was no after that. After that came months of hollow redundancies that would inform my way of being in the world for years to come. A serial commitment to waking up each morning, remembering he was gone and dedicating the remaining hours to forgetting. To that end I would try anything, drink anything, ingest anything, inject anything. It was a slow and arbitrary suicide by indifference.

Many years later, at 25 years-old and in the midst of a pharmaceutical free-fall leaning dangerously close to terminal, I discovered that I was expecting a child, and after a decade of forgetting, I remembered. I named him Griffin after the legendary winged lion, a symbol of the divine because what he inspired and the miracle that he was, were nothing less. I remembered and I loved again, and I went on to marry and to the gift of two beautiful daughters.

Today my son is struggling not to drown in the same well of drug abuse and apathy that almost swallowed me – his great, divine wings clipped by his own hand; and while it is up to him to restore his place in the sky, I will do my best to help provide an open runway.

In the meantime, I will continue soaring for both of us; bequeathed as I have been, with a determination to fly from a boy whose ragged fate precluded that dream.

Death took one young man from me once upon a dark time. If it has any intention of coming for this one, it will have to go through me. And trust me, it will be in for one hell of a fight.

Note: If you enjoy this article, please let me know.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

My Sudden Reality Check as a Senior Citizen in the Philippines

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