Last Friday, April 15, 2011 should have been one ordinary day. But it turned out it was not.
At 9:30 a.m., I was slightly bitten in my right leg by my neighbor’s pet dog, the mini dachshund breed . At first I thought it was only a scratch but the spot turned black and I felt some pain. We immediately washed and applied some first aid. I still felt the pain while driving and combined with paranoia for the possible effect of the dogbite’s rabies, I accidentally swide swiped a 52-year old lady on my way to work at the Baclaran area and was forced to rush her to the nearby San Juan de Dios Hospital. Fortunately, she only had minor bruises in the ankle area and no major injury. While chatting at the hospital, I apologized to her for the accident and she said that she is not mad since “mabait naman ako.” What perhaps helped to ease the tension was the fact that she has siblings who are seafarers and I told her I am a lawyer for seafarers and we are the legal counsel of the church based organization, Apostleship of the Sea. Plus I have two brother priests. The hospital emergency bill: Almost P3,000 pesos. After the accident, I went to Makati medical center to attend to the dog bite: the cost 5 injections of verorab at P1,600 per injectible , or P 8,000.00 plus a little less than a thousand for the antibiotics and antitetanus.
During our conversation at the San Juan De Dios Hospital, it was only then that I remembered that April 15 was not just an ordinary day.
April 15, 2002 was when we brought Mama for the first time to the hospital. My mother, fondly called Mama Linda, died l on May 17, 2002 due to pericarditis and lymphoma or cancer of the lymph nodes after almost a month of confinement at the Philippine Heart Center. On April 14, 2003, papa was rushed to Las Piñas City Medical Center after falling down from the stairs — a day short of the one full year from mama’s hospitalization. A year and six months after mama’s death, my father, Papa Ponching to many, died November 16, 2003 a Sunday, due to pneumonia after being bedridden for almost eight months brought about by complications arising from an operation on his brain (hydrocephalus). I have told relatives and friends that Papa could have been dead during the second week of April due to the gravity of the hydrocephalus if not for that incident when he fell from our stairs. Maybe Mama pushed him so that the hydrocephalus and tumor could be detected.
In my blog “KAMATIS” LOVE AFFAIR OF PONCHING AND LINDA GORECHO I wrote that if I will submit the love story of my parents to “Maalaala Mo Kaya,” I will use the title “Kamatis.” The wedding line, “Till death do us part” will be replaced by “But death will not set us apart.” All throughout their more than thirty years of marriage, we never saw them engage in physical fights. Although we were accustomed to Mama’s masungit and mataray lines, we knew that was just how they expressed their emotions: only through words and eye contact. Laging sinasabi ni Papa: Bago pa man magkasala si mama sa kanya (siguro sa pagiging mataray ni Mama) pinapatawad na nya si mama. If mama was angry, Papa would just step back. Di nya sasalubungin emotion ni mama.
When we were growing up, I remember times when Mama scolded us, “Buti nga kayo di nyo naranasan ang magtinda ng kamatis sa palengke.” Then she would cry. Perhaps, this was her way of saying that whatever the benefits we were enjoying then were due to their hard work..This is something that children have to realize: that parents will sacrifice a lot for the future of the kids. If mama would say the “kamatis” story, Papa, on the other hand, would tell us stories when he was still a security guard in a government agency before they got married in July 1968. Papa was a security guard by day and a student by night taking up library science. When he graduated, he proceeded to be a librarian in the same office until he retired in early 1990s.
People wonder why we have several stuff in our house which Papa did not want to dispose, especially the shoes. Papa justified this by saying that while he was growing up, he never had the luxury of owning new ones since both he and mama came from a family with very modest means. He tried to instill this in us such that long before ukay-ukay became famous, we were already wearing secondhand clothes and shoes, sleeping on beds, sitting on chairs and sofas that papa bought from the secondhand shops in Bangkal. Seldom did we wear brand-new clothes, except maybe during Christmases when our Titas bought us clothing on an installment basis - one Tita would buy us pants while another took care of the shirts. Never mind the shoes, andyan naman ang Bangkal. We became the walking models for ukay-ukay.
Perhaps the two incidents this morning, the dog bite and the car accident, were my parents’ “reminder” that April 15 is a date to be remembered. So, I attended the 7pm mass at greenbelt chapel and prayed for them.
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