Tales of Growing Up

Let me tell you stories of my days growing up, my child, because perhaps, you never will have a chance to hear them…

My mother custom-tailored pants for a living and her mother before her.  While I was growing up almost everyone went to the dressmaker or the tailor to have  dresses and pants made. When I  sewed you your Blue Baby’s pillow cases, it was, to me,  an emotional voyage; a spiritual communion with my roots.  It brought me back to the days when my mother spent endless hours sewing pants, making quilted blankets from leftover materials from the ones she made and revising hand-me-down clothes into wearable outfits for me and my siblings.  The Singer manual sewing machine was a part of our lives.

 

The wheel on my mother’s sewing machine was unlike the one in the picture. It  did not have a cover.   I liked to sit on the foot rest and hold on to the wheel  pretending that I was driving  a car.

When your grandmother Lola Signa, would make patterns for  the pants she would use a long wooden yardstick like the one in the picture below.

I would never have you drink coffee for breakfast, my child. Amazingly, though, Sant-Best  coffee was part of our breakfast then.  We mixed the instant coffee in hot water and poured it into one of these…

Only rich people could afford telephones then.  It was a novelty; a prized possession.  I would tremble  with excitement the rare occasion that I was able to go into my neighbor’s house and fiddle with it.  They had party lines then.  You could pick up the phone and be listening to some stranger,  sometimes,another neighbor with a telephone  talking. You apologize when that happens, put down the phone and wait for them to finish.

When we sleep at night we have one of these by the bed so we didn’t have to go to the bathroom in the dark to relieve ourselves.

Some have them in porcelain like this but ours was plastic.  In the morning we would empty and wash the pee bucket (arinola) and by the next evening bring the arinola in as part of our sleeping routine.

Our beds were made from hard wooden slats and we slept on hand woven mats that we buy from roving vendors.

We ironed our clothes with this iron.

We placed glowing charcoals inside this iron and when the coals are spent, we pour the contents out and replace with fresh, hot coals. My mother would ask me to get dried, brown banana leaves (ramay) from our backyard to set the iron on and prevent it from sticking to the clothes.

When our shoes get too worn in the soles, or part of it comes loose, we have the roving shoe repair man.  We don’t throw away what can still be recycled.

When the shoe repair man comes around, we would take all the shoes in the house to be resoled and I would watch with fascination as he takes out the tools of his trade—his blade, his glue, square rubber pieces of the heavy-duty types that he would carve our soles from, his needles and threads.  He’d take the worn sole out from the shoe  then glue the  new one he had carved  on, wait for it to dry, then stitch it using his  agoha. The thread is a special one. He would combine a couple or more of the large threads by waxing them and  rolling them together in between his palms. By the time he was finished with our shoes, it was better than brand new. You could throw your shoe at someone, drag it on concrete, slide with it, do whatever you  want and it will last.  It was an operation elaborate enough to capture a kid’s attention for a length of time.

The shoe repair man or “Manug-Sapatos” is just one of the many unforgettable characters of that long-gone era.

I have many more stories for you, my son, of my childhood  under the cover of the many trees in our old, old  house at Tandang Sora St.  Suffice it for now.  The rest will be for another day.