Green thumbs and pianos

“Some of us even then had the gift of a green thumb and theirs were pechay leaves large, deep white and green and oozing with nutrition.

It came as a shock to me the first time I realized that city kids rise as early as 5 a.m. to attend public school in Metro Manila. One has to be desperate to rise that early just to get an education. At that hour, the sun is still well behind the Sta. Margarita mountains in this Leyte town called Hilongos where school age kids remain sound asleep in the arms of their mothers.

None of the kids my age at the time were up at the ungodly hour of five in the morning. No one bothered to rise that early and be about the house because that exposed one to household chores, such as doing last night’s dishes that so needed someone’s attention at the banggera or fill the tibod with water from the poso so that the mistress of the house could have her cup of water before she left for the market or worse, cook a pot of rice so that everyone had a proper breakfast when one finally stood at attention at the flag ceremony when the “Lupang Hinirang” is sung and the pledge of allegiance is recited.

The school I attended as a boy uses a discarded metal tubing to summon kids to school. Its ring could be heard from a long distance. I could hear it quite well when it’s rung to announce recess.

Right now, I could hear it ringing to usher in that one-hour period when we boys were taught agriculture while the girls were taught home economics. Yes, public school kids my age were taught practical things when we were growing up, when we would weave bamboo-and-palm frond baskets with our eyes closed and plant rice seedlings using the Margate method. Years later I would hear of stories how the Americans planted silly notions into our collective heads by teaching us songs with lines that go “Planting rice is never fun!” and how this ostensibly or subliminally made Filipinos hate working the rice paddy all their lives. I laugh at the notion, of course, because the planting of rice seedlings, whether as participant or onlooker, generates happy memories for me.

The period before recess was one such memory. While the girls in class were off to the Home Economics Building and do the cooking and sewing there, we would march off to the agriculture shed about a hundred meters or two from the main school building where Mr. Bandalan, bless his soul, was waiting with his knee-high boots and his 30-number “short quiz” that he springs on us from out of nowhere. Because we were such an unruly bunch of 10- or 11-years, he would announce the first question while we were some distance yet from the shed and we would fall all over the rice paddy as we run to catch him announce the second, third, fourth question and onward from there. The first question was always about the use of fertilizers and we would enumerate as good for killing the nematodes, the bacteria and the fungi that attack the rice stem like crazed demons.

Our agri teacher Mr. Bandalan was a kindly old soul, grumpy at times, but he knew his stuff. He would teach us how to properly plow the paddy before filling it with water. The hand tractor was coming into fore by then but most fields were tilled the traditional way still, by this beast of burden known as the carabao. He would teach us that proper spacing between the seedlings spell the difference between a good harvest from a bad one and that fertilizers, properly used, help optimize yield from land that had been fallow. I would remember him for his daughter, Antonia, a competent piano player and declaimer whose prose and music were exquisite at times, but oh so ghastly when the moon was full. I would not understand this asynchrony, this dissonance as a boy and only later would I begin to appreciate that some of us have a genetic makeup that requires full thought and understanding.

Antonia’s father, the agri teacher, would also teach us good old gardening that I as an adult would engage in at times at the micro level. Some of my overseas purchases were flower and vegetable seeds from places as diverse as Arizona and Kobe that have thrilled the mistress of my household no end, and the pastime began with Mr. Bandalan teaching a rambunctious bunch of Grade V boys how to grow radish, tomato, eggplant and especially pechay without them falling victims to the nematodes and fungi that abound in the soil. Some of us even then had the gift of a green thumb and theirs were pechay leaves large, deep white and green and oozing with nutrition. We learned to come to school early because of those garden patches and we stayed much later after school to guard the unripe vegetables from the mischievous and those malformed servants of the illicit market seeking to profit not from their own sweat but from ours. Some of those guys were caught, of course, but beyond the naming and shaming, nothing much happened thereafter except that the schoolgrounds were peopled by anxious gardener boys with flashlights patrolling the patches well into the night and on to the wee hours of the morning on Fridays till the greens were ready for harvest.

Not too long ago, my Bulacan neighbor gifted me with a clump of lemon grass that he asked me to grow in my unsecured front yard. That lovely little clump grew into a fairly large piece of green that goes well with the malunggay that we from the Visayas love to cook this concoction known as the lao-uy. Then word got around that I have this aromatic miracle on my fence-less front yard and people would just come up unannounced and pull out a bulb or two all days of the week until the poor thing wilted and died. Now we have built ourselves a garage and kept some part of the property cement-free for garden purposes. The plan includes a pair of large pots for lemon grass — one each for the green thumbed agri teacher and the exquisite piano player.