Tell Me a Story Daddy…

This is something my father gave me and perhaps of all the gifts he gave, this is what I shall treasure most. And now that I have been blessed with the chance to pass it on to my own two boys I am doubly grateful for it has enhanced our mag-aama’s experience of life and all its wonderful meanings.

It’s a little ritual that always transports me back to the time when me and my sister, Joy, were like, 4 and 2 years old. (I’m the eldest of five weird siblings). It’s a singsong ditty that goes: “Tell me a story, tell me a story…tell me a story, daddy! Daddy, tell me a story…tell me a story, daddy!” We sang it to invoke the eagerly awaited story session that put us to sleep during siesta time or sent us to dreamland at night. But let me paint the background…

We lived in Rosales, Pangasinan inside the Wesleyan Bible College where my father was then president. It was a beautiful place to grow up in. Freshly mown grass, big acacia trees, a big oval playground where the students played baseball or soccer or volleyball, and where we flew kites on hot, lazy afternoons during siesta time, whenever we saw the opportunity to sneak out and play. We always wondered why the grown-ups would wish to waste such beautiful play hours on sleep. How they preferred the hot and itchy straw mat to climbing trees and hunting of dragonflies was a mystery to me then. The big wide world was just out there, waiting to be explored!

Now, there was this big tabernacle in the center of it all that I liked so much because of the echoes that reverberated whenever we felt the urge to test our vocal cords. I remember always winning hands down when it came to see who could scream the loudest. But I also feared the place a little because of the resident “tik-kas” or gecko lizards which I imagined to be big, mean and hungry dragons who loved swallowing kids for dinner. Well they did sound big to me.

There was also the Boys’ Dorm, the Dining Hall, the Girl’s Dorm, the Mission Home (where my friends Joy, Danny & Lois Turner lived) and our two story house.

Oh yeah, there was the small library building too and several nipa huts near the rice field. There were lots of flowers, fruit trees and all sorts of interesting creatures that made my four-year-old world so fascinating and mysterious and not to mention full of adventure both actual and imagined.

I remember coming home from such adventures (such as hunting birds with a slingshot, err, pretending, i mean because I never want to hurt the birds, climbing all the guava trees and getting the biggest, sweetest and juiciest ones for my Mama, catching dragon flies, picking up ripe tamarind, shooting down star apples and running away from the cow) with my little cowboy pants stuck thick with “puriket” (amorseco). I always felt all hot and itchy and pleasant at the same time as I told Mama what I saw… Like this big bad giant I fought and that other one with the three heads.

There was this little river over the chicken wire fence which we were forbidden to go to. Kumaw’s were running wild then. Old men with sacks who went around capturing kids for sacrifices at all the new bridges and highways being made. They say that blood had to be poured with the concrete so the spirits would be appeased and not take any more lives. The thought was enough to send kids screaming in their sleep but the river gurgled invitingly, seducing me to wade in its clear waters and to pick pretty stones and edible snails.

There were little fishes that jumped teasingly. And frogs too. I went down there to watch the old ladies hack away at their laundry with their smooth palo-palo’s to a beautiful rhythm that was like the song of the ripe fields ready for harvest. I envied the washing women’s children who frolicked naked in the water, swimming like the fat, contented carabaos (water buffalo) who occasionally came to drink and drop their pies on the river bank. I remember always finding mushrooms that grew in these mounds the very next day. I wondered why…

Anyway, during off-days for my father (who as part of the faculty taught during weekdays and preached during Sundays, he being a pastor too), my mother would fry some camote slices with brown sugar and put them in the brown supot that came with the morning’s pan-de-sal. We would then bring these as baon for our exciting hike to the hanging bridge.

To go there, we’d have to wade through the river’s shallow water and pass the bamboo grove and then the row of damortis (camachile) trees. On the way, my sister and I would swing on daddy’s arms like little brown monkeys, thrilled to the bone. Once reaching the hanging bridge, we’d both be scared stiff about crossing it so Daddy would have to carry us across. We then bring out the camote-fries and have a swell picnic.

It would be late afternoon then and we’d watch the cumulus clouds spin into all kinds of shapes as the sky turned orange and vermilion and a million other colors afterwards. We’d take the walk home and it would be just in time for dinner. We’d tell Mama all about it as we helped her set the table. I’d go out to wash by the hand-pump beside our avocado tree, making it whine and cough as I watched our chickens roost on the branches of the guava tree beside the pig pen. Our red pig would be grunting herself to sleep too.

Earlier, Mama would call the hens with a gentle “Krrrrruuuuk!” and a handful of grain. As they came, we would pick up the little chicks and put them in little baskets with soft rags and hang them inside the house to protect them from the banyas (monitor lizards) that abound.

Anyway, dinner would consist of soft, steamed rice, “pir-res” (ginisang bagoong with sqeezed calamansi) camote tops and fried okra as well as “dinengdeng” (fresh vegetables stewed in bagoong, usually with seeds like “kardis” or blackbeans or patani). If there was squash, my daddy would squash it on our rice to make “labay-labay”. He would then sculpt it into shapes and stick string beans or the okra on top and call it cake. Of course, we’d consume the whole thing down because there was a contest for the cleanest plate.

When dinner was done, daddy would go outside to find some bunot or coconut husk to burn as katol, or insect repellant, while my sister and I took the “kamen” (straw mat) and “ules ken pungan” (sheets & pillow). We would then go outside to the cool, soft grass, spread the mat, arrange the pillows and wiggle into the sheets. Daddy would sigh tiredly and settle down on a pillow while I gave the signal. My sister and I would then launch into a shrill duet of “Tell me a storee, tell me a storeee, tell me a story dadeeeeh! Dadeeeh, tell me a story, tell me a story daddeeeeeeeeeh!” complete with tremolo effect. And just to make sure, the incantation worked, we’d follow up with “And then, daddy? And then…?”

Then the tradition begins anew. Father, telling the children all the well-loved stories his father in turn had taught him. Of course, he’d embellish it with his own version of events that even if we asked to hear it again and again and again, there was always some new element or two that cropped up. This of course hooked us more and convinced us he was the best dad in the whole wide world.

We’d then eagerly comb his hair or massage his back as he brought us to a wonderful fantasy world. Into the story, we would forget about the masahe as we settled down on his left and right using his biceps for pillows and stared at the starry sky above. Sometimes the moon was there and sometimes it wasn’t and it didn’t make the magic less fulfilling whatever.

I loved to listen to his voice as it reverberated in his chest. My sister even discovered that if you stuck your ear on his back, you’d hear the same effect. And we didn’t mind the occasional whine of mosquitoes as we snuggled closer to him. His voice, his warmth, the cold night air, the story and his big hands gently scratching our backs was simply heaven. We wanted to sleep there, outside, under the stars if possible. And we did, or sometimes pretended to, so he would carry us inside…upstairs, until we reached the safe canopy of the mosquito net.

Maybe, in a way, as it is with me now, storytelling was a time when Daddy re-lived the days or nights when as a child, he too listened to his father’s tales even as it too, was a time so special and distinctly set aside for bonding with his own children. Maybe, in the telling, he too was once more transported to that wonderful neverland where ordinary concerns were nonexistent and life was just one great carefree adventure after another.

The stories had songs in it whose magical melancholia never failed to make us cry. Like this version of The Prodigal Son wherein the father was at the window day and night, waiting…praying…hoping against hope for his son’s return. And he sang out his sorrow in a tune like that of “bring back my bunny to me” (which by the way, made us cry too for some inexplicable reason). The song lent that soul of Filipino sentimentality…That romance…That stardust that made a story even more real and remarkable.

It was a wonderful spice that my father used sparingly and effectively with his stories whether bible-based or drawn from Ilocano folklore or from the deepest recesses of his wild imagination. Together with masterful timing, humor and vocal acrobatics (he provided the sound effects and musical scoring very well)…it made every storytelling session with him even better than a movie laden with special-effects.

Some of the titles dearly loved are “Juan Pugot”, “Kingdom of The Cats”, “Adarna” “Pugpugtit & Taktakla”(With sub-titles: Rasa/ Buwaya/ Ugsa) and the many mutations of “The Monkey & the Turtle”( Turtle Vs The Whale;Turtle vs Rabbit; Turtle Vs Elephant; Turtle vs. Monkey’s Cousin,etc.) “David & Goliath”; “Juan Sadot” and the comedy/horror thriller he entitled, “BRRR!”

It’s quite a little disappointing that I who took after his storytelling talents and eventually became the more active writer (my sister writes but has pursued psychology as a career rather than journalism or literature for that matter) in the family, and who prides himself as the “talker” couldn’t pass on to my children, the stories I knew by heart as a child in the same verbal tradition.

I don’t know. I have written quite a number of stories already including several tagalog-novelettes and I am quite handy with the details. But when my children invoke the “Tell Me a Story” thing…I couldn’t come up with much. I can’t seem to remember the stories anymore and it’s like the father-children legacy gets broken there. For one thing, I didn’t know it took so much energy. I hardly am in the middle of the story when I vaguely hear my eldest say, “ Mommy, tignan mo si daddy, iba-iba’ng sinasabi” (daddy’s mubling again) to which their mom responds,” Hay naku, tulog na ‘yan! (he’s asleep!)”

Oh, I try. And occasionally I come up with a few originals like the robot story my two sons love. But the stories my father told me which his father had told him and grandpa’s father too I suppose…And which I want to tell my children too…well. Like the bible stories for example, which I used to know by heart.

In exasperation, I bring my 2 boys over to my Dad’s. And when I get the chance, listen in as the lolo tells his apos of the adventures of Don Juan and his flying horse named Buntuangin. And once more, I can see my original heroes. The ones before my comic collection. The ones who gave me my own sense of adventure, the ones who launched me on many a childhood daydream….the ones I pretended to be as a kid who ran around straddling a stick-horse yelling “Siak ni Juan Pugot!” (I am Juan Pugot).

It’s so easy when my Dad tells it. I can remember what will happen next. But on my own, with my two little kids…

What is it? The times? The pressures? The prevalence of the electronic media? The death of the magical printed word even? If I remember it right, Filipino communication was oral in tradition. It required careful exercise of all the senses. The beautiful part of it was that then, people listened with their eyes and with every pore of their skin and their minds and their hearts as well as with their souls. People actually “sensed” each other and it was an art. A delicate one that now seems forgotten and extinct.

Then, like history itself, the written code took over the spoken and mankind was transported into a new world. It was supposed to be our most important discovery. “Literature” was born. The problem is: the whole picture diminished. Not everything could be captured in print and what was left out became forgotten…Other accounts, other versions of the truth…other characters which the historian determined as insignificant at that time.

Then sound took center stage again with the invention of the telegraph…then the radio and the telephone. This was enhanced by the coming of the Television which combined both sound and sight. Slowly, the written word seemed to grow paler and paler to the new medium’s power. And the oral, direct, person to person mode of communication suffered yet another blow.

But developments in technology boosted both the world of publishing and broadcasting that for a time, the battle was at a draw. Indeed, novels stand tall and equal (at times greater even) to movies shown in either theater or television. And vice-versa. In effect, were the skirmishes that pitted poems against paintings versus natural photographs vs. digitally enhanced photos …And still, the light of the oral tradition of life seemed to grow dimmer and dimmer.

At this point, several questions come to my mind. Did developments in mass-communication perhaps threaten the state and quality of inter-personal communication? Is it the same reason that intra-personal affairs have come to be so convoluted as well?

If, indeed, for balance, body and soul had to be one…and both spoke in a different language, or a different medium for that matter, then what will become of the entire personhood?

Storytelling was then an integral part of the family tradition. It was in itself an excellent medium of communication that was interactive. It drew the participation of every member of the family. It dictated a special time in which parents passed on a legacy of companionship…of love …and bonding, that kept that most basic unit of society, intact.

It helped in the development of an individual’s sense of identity . It developed proper values and it enhanced confidence in each other. Stories lit up other stories that lit up particular instances of ones life.

“ You loved that story when you were eight years old and you’d ask your daddy to repeat it every night.” Is a sentence that immediately transports you to where you were then, what you were and who were the people that mattered. A window opens to show you details that clear up certain why’s of the present and it is this connection to your “history” that grounds you to something…a foundation.

“ This was daddy’s favorite story as a child.” Gives the child a vital sense of continuity. Accounts of his daddy and his daddy’s daddy help root him to a solid sense of who he is.

And story telling is a wonderful way of updating one’s self on the latest developments of your child’s life. His reactions would show the level of his thinking, his natural inclinations, signatures of his personality. Like, is he easily moved to tears? Does he have a certain gift of empathy? What are the things that seem scary to him/her and what are the things that give him/her assurance? And why is a naughty dancing eggplant so funny to this child?

Creatively used, it helps the child express feelings and thoughts otherwise difficult for him/her to reveal. Storytelling, as you can see, is a legacy in itself. It is a reference point by which a person could connect to his childhood. It is an experience that allows one to be enriched…by magic.

It has been more than 15 years since I wrote this. I ended it then with “Tonight, when my children sing the magic song…I’ll take them out (hope it doesn’t rain) and use our imaginations to see beyond the smog and find the moon, smiling on the characters…A prince, a princess…ahhh, a dragon! Oh yes, with matching sounds and music please…”

First, it was Gelo and JC (B1 and B2) and then later Gio and Pia…

Now I will have to append it with reference to my own grandchildren…I am imagining a scene with Bhela and Xiana by my side, on a straw mat, looking up at a clear night sky…They will be cuddling in my arms, staring at my white and gray beard (and wondering at my nose hairs) and hopefully not playing with their smartphones but listening to me.