Port of Batangas. Calapan City bound. So, I'm travelling with my siblings via Fastcat roll - n - roll - roll - off boat first thing in the morning. The Pastor and The Nurse No. 3. For there are two more nurses in the family. The Nurse No. 1- who happens to be The Physician as well, will meet us in Calapan City, Oriental Mindoro, and The Nurse No. 2- on a far away country of the Middle East would be absent today. The Manager, whose work is currently based in the Manila, we also expect to be out of sight.
The Pastor, The Physician slash The Nurse No.1, The Nurse No.3, and I-The Homeschool Mom, would meet with our eldest brother, The Town Councilor in Puerto Galera. So, five out of seven siblings, the Arago children would meet a la homecoming to our beloved hometown of Muelle Bay? The pier we all grew up in. The sleepy pier which only stretches about 50 meters long, a walkway of about seven meters wide. Until the year 1978 when our parents decided to send us to school in the city of Batangas, a fourteen nautical-mile distance. Year after year, every long Christmas holidays, every summer, off of school, our Muelle Bay beckoned. Its pristine waters quiet as a lake. The yachts that moored on one side of the bay boasting postcard perfect. The sounds of pump boats ferrying familiar faces of relatives and friends and tourists to and fro the different island barangays separating this town.
Why. It's one small town, and yet we are so separated and scattered and we are counted ( for how many I wouldn't know ) as part of our unique archipelago of 7,120 islands to be exact. It's a cove. Among the plethora of coves lining the coastal town of Puerto Galera, this cove, our cove, our pier, our playground, I used to call this my home. And we were the first settlers of this reclaimed strip of land which would be a commercial center for our rugged but booming townsfolk. And the presence of foreign tourists? Circa 1973. Just a few.
Call it barbaric, err, unsophisticated civilization, our family was the second to have been able to afford a black and white TV set! Tatay was a mechanic. A high school graduate. A town councilor that ranked number one in the 1960's local elections, esteemed by the voting Mangyans of that time. Inay barely finished 6th grade in elementary. But she was a career woman. She owned that little souvenir shop which augmented Tatay's earnings. We lived a simple life. But our dreams were the opposite. School break and Tatay would hire his Arago boys to work with him on his many-a-projects. Together, they built boats, they built homes, got their hands and feet soiled with rust and mud, they built their dreams as to someday make it big and make poverty a history to the family. Inay for her part trained us, Arago girls, to manage her quaint souvenir shop. And that would be for another entry my dears.
