By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THE BEST thing about growing up poor was that you learned to make do. Playing house meant rolling up some leaves and slicing them thinly with a rusty blade to conjure up pancit. For fish, we served up dried twigs on soft drink crowns. With our pinky finger daintily sticking out, we’d hold up our Café Puro jar glasses filled with sarsaparilla and pretend we were quaffing wine. Having watched too many Sampaguita Picture movies, we knew how to hold match sticks just so between two fingers and thoughtfully blow out wispy smoke from pouting lips — Carol Varga plotting yet another seduction of the male lead.

As kids growing up in the mid-Sixties, our biggest dread was the afternoon nap forced on us right after lunch. But ever so wily, we learned to smuggle in a jerry can of soapy water, squish some gumamela leaves in it and voila! managed to turn the locked stuffy room into a magical kingdom of rainbow bubbles.

Evenings were no less inventive. A full moon turned potholed streets into a battleground where scrawny kids marked each other off as prey in local tag games — patintero, tumbang preso, takipsilim. “Taya, taya, taya!!” we chanted gleefully, when somebody else got tagged. Everybody eventually got to be “it”– the boy whose father rode the only car in the neighborhood, the dark-skinned daughter of the shoeless Mang Pedro who cleaned canals for a living, the sallow-faced Chinese girls whose amah had small feet and funny mincing steps, and whose perpetually open front door we made sure to avoid, even jumping off to the other side every time we passed it. Even then, the strange and different, was feared and demonized.

But except for that, we were blissfully unaware of class, race or even guilt. I remember how, at about 9 p.m., just before our mothers would give us grief for staying out too late on the streets, two willowy girls, D and K, would pass us by. Pretty, fair, with a trail of perfume announcing them and their long legs encased in stockings that for some reason, always had a straight black line at the back, the two women always managed to stop our games inadvertently. We would turn to face them, call out their names with expectant smiles and look up adoringly at their movie star looks. Sometimes, one or both of them would reward one of us with a fond tousling of the hair, with the lucky creature being crowned with envious looks all around. It would take years before I finally figured out why they left at that hour every night, and by then they had left the neighborhood. Soon after, just before I reached my teens, the other kids for whom the tag games had become a summer ritual, just melted away.

This was Tondo after all, home to transients and migrants who were starting out in the big city, the first stop enroute to bigger things. We had never kept in touch, but I still remember their names, these kids whom I shall forever associate with moonlit nights.

People say today’s children are so much luckier — with their iPods, cell phones, Wii and the amazing gizmos of this techno-age. Everything within reach. Why, they don’t even need to play on the streets where who-knows-what-kind-of-danger lurks. Well, it’s probably a generation thing, but I don’t envy them. Not one bit.