My mother's memories

my mother is 87 years old. She has begun scratching the top of her head , almost non-stop, and has surreptitiously started plucking her hair off the site where her fontanel was. During the times i have caught her, she has blatantly denied doing so, believing that i am too myopic to notice what she's been up to. Seeing that very conspicuous bald patch now, i realize, at her age, she must feel entitled already to a little dash of craziness.

She was eighteen years old when the Japanese came to occupy Manila, and she recounts the days of running to bomb shelters when dogfights thundered over their heads. She remembers a young Japanese officer, one who stopped a foot soldier from robbing her of her ring. She had pretended that the ring was too tight to come off her finger and so the soldier had taken out his knife and her hair had stood at their ends at the realization that the man was going to end up with more than just a ring. When the Japanese officer suddenly appeared from nowhere and slapped that foot soldier to submission, my mother was grateful, and bowed low to that officer , though she didn't stay to chat or even say thanks, she ran all the way home, frightened that the foot solider would exact his vengeance. This incident she remembers with vivid clarity, together with the fact that my ninong's wife died during that war, and that my own father was conscripted by the japanese to fetch them water so they could all bathe.

My mother is old. she was mother to a student activist that she feared would die during the martial law years , but would live and migrate to canada, abandoning the cause she walked the streets for when first world opportunity presented itself. and just years ago, my mother recovered from a hypoglycemic attack, to live another 10 years, and to bury both her husband and her fifty year old son. She has shrunk in size, and her hands and face have become wizened. Though she was always small , she was never puny. I remember her feistiness, and her opinionatedness. Perhaps these two qualities were what precisely helped her reach her age today, as she defied diabetes, hypertension, even a heart problem she's nursed for decades.

My mom is Methuselah, I thought, just a few days ago during the Christmas holidays, when i was giving her a bath, after cajoling , coaxing and finally blackmailing her into stepping inside the bathroom.

I was high pitched in the bathroom. when she turned to me and asked why i was angry, i really didn't have an answer.

She's started walking nights. Fully awake, she was at the foot of my marital bed, at three o clock in the morning, and my husband and i were stunned into wakefulness, hearing her voice calling out my name. Rosario, Rosario, where is your Aunty Puring? I sat up in bed, and i snapped at her that Aunty Puring is long dead. No, my mother shook her head, she is in Bataan, and then she hobbled away and left, mumbling that Puring should have come to visit a long time ago.

I couldn't sleep after that. My son arrived at his school really early that day.

My mother didn't even notice it was Christmas. She has no fondness anymore for this Christmas or the Christmas before that when my sister came home from Canada.

But she remembers the family's first ever Christmas ... the very first Christmas she stopped buying a real pine tree and opted for a silvery-tinsel wrapped kind...the Christmas my father opened our house to the whole neighborhood.