By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine
AS a child, the only event that could even come close to Christmas was your own personal Christmas — your birthday.
One of my earliest memories is brief and almost MTV-ish in that it’s just a jumble of cut-to-cut images but remains oh-so-potent in my head. I must have been four or five. I was madly entranced by the giant fighting robots on TV (this was before the Marcosian machine pulled the shogun warriors and their sibs from the air), watching a robot show every week night, changing channels just so I could get my daily dose of iron. Back then, my father worked in a building deep in Quiapo, and not the homogenized Quiapo of today.
In the late 1970s, it was unpredictable, twisting and full of discoveries. My father took me with him to work for my birthday and I remember being amazed by the people, the lights and dark. We had lunch in the Quiapo branch of the venerable Hong Ning Panciteria, all polished wooden floors and soy sauce. We would patronize the Cubao branch for the better part of a decade afterwards, but that was my first taste of Hong Ning. Then, we went off to the Underpass.
Wow. It was, first of all, underground, full of people and merchants of wonders. There, I saw, line after line, of robots. And not those cheap plastic robots with the wheels and the lights and the guns that burst forth from the chest. No, I remember line after line of die-cast Japanese robots, of all sizes. Back then, what everyone wanted was the full-sized Voltez V, the one that actually came as five machines with firing missiles and combined. My neighbor RJ had just the thing, and it was kept behind a glass cabinet. But being of more modest means, I realistically didn’t pine for one. That day, all I wanted was one robot. Just one, mine.
Today, I know those die-cast robots are POPY robots. But back then, they were miniaturized dreams. My dad got me one. I don’t remember exactly which one, but I do believe it was most probably a Mazinger Z, with the firing gauntlets, five inches of die-cast daydreams. I remember walking hand-in-hand with my father through the wonders of a Manila long gone, content. The robot, as with all artifacts of fondly remembered youth, has long been lost. My father’s office moved from Quiapo to Cubao. Quiapo, underpass included, irrevocably changed soon after. But those fragments of contentment I still hold close, reminders of a time when our questions were answered, and one could go home and not brood at all, just excited to get on with whatever came next.
