By Leica R. Carpo, Publisher
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

AT THE AGE of three I was kidnapped in Disneyland — or so I presumed as I kicked and screamed like a banshee getting skinned alive at the tall American who was bravely attempting to help me find my mom. My young mom barely 21 at that time had somehow misplaced me in the sea of humanity within the theme park. The tall American had carried me atop his shoulder in order to better spot my missing mother and I had misunderstood this action as his attempt to permanently abscond with me. Being so far from the ground and trapped in his arms I remember panic setting in and my survival instinct going on overdrive. Although I distinctly recall him saying, “Don’t worry honey I will take you to your mommy.” I remember thinking that this was a mere ruse on his part to silence me. So I upped my voice a couple of octaves higher and proceeded to pummel him with all my might.

At this point, if he had any intention of kidnapping he must have changed his mind when he saw what a handful I had become in a matter of seconds. The theory he may have had of well-behaved Asian kids was thrown out the window as I threw a fit that was probably heard clear across Fantasyland. I can still see the looks of pity that the other parents and kids were giving him for putting up with the brat in “The Magic Kingdom” the one place where all kids are guaranteed to be in a good mood.

Soon after my mom came running in our direction probably from the commotion we were causing — okay I was causing. In retrospect, I like to think of this tall American as my first “knight in shining armor — minus the horse” and the effort he made to rescue me as just part of the trials that all future knights were gonna have to undergo to rescue me. Yes I was already a hopeless, some would say crazy romantic at age three.

Editor’s note: Photo is a childhood picture of one of the author’s friends.

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.

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.

By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THE BEATLES’ “I Should Have Known Better” was on the jukebox, so it must have been my tenth birthday when my father gave me a BB rifle.

It was a Daisy pump-action rifle, the kind that you still see in the shooting galleries of small-time traveling fairs, and it was the most beautiful thing I had ever possessed. The barrel was gunmetal blue. The plastic stock was grained to look like real wood. It had a magazine that screwed into the muzzle that you loaded the BBs into, and a slide that you pumped to cock the gun, like a real shotgun.

Today, of course, the political correctness police would have freaked at the thought of handing a ten-year-old such a potentially dangerous weapon (not to mention the tacit approval of packing a piece that it implied.) The Daisy wasn’t as powerful as a real air rifle, but it could easily take out an eye if you weren’t careful (and nearly did, but we’re getting ahead of the story.)

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