Sometimes we can go home again. You may not live there but you know you still do. You belong. You know you belong there.
Smelling the bygone smells. The pink cadena de amor flowers. The tall grass heavy with sparkling dew you could almost drink off it. The cock’s squawk in the mornings, so loud it could wake up the dead in the nearby memorial park and turn themselves into beautiful ghosts. A plus: you didn’t need an alarm clock to get up with the sun.
Lucena hasn’t stopped growing. Sometimes a city moves only as unhurriedly as its mall escalators. Thankfully, its relaxed atmosphere still makes it a relevant city.
But each time I return to my grandparents’ old neighborhood, some memoried places have either disappeared or seemed a lot less of themselves.
Wasn’t there a bookstore on that street corner? And where was that stone house a block away from where I used to live? A wrecking ball had erased all traces of it, as well as those of the coconut trees. Sawed down to make room for a fast food outlet. A grand old house of successive generations, layered with similar personalities and affluence. Gone.
Images such as those of bancas on the shore of Dalahican Beach and vibrant flowers remain.
The wooden house I grew up in is likewise gone, its ashes buried under the jumble of shops, ukay-ukay stores, sidewalks jammed with food carts in every street corner, parking scofflaws, and jeepneys racing by in speeds we could taste their exhausts.
The classic houses with bamboo stairs and rusting galvanized iron roofs have given way to modern supermalls and a sprinkling of cookie-cut three-layered buildings.
And where has the Dalahican Beach receded to? The sea, I remember it well, alternately invading and retreating, unmindful of the unthinking usurpation of the current culture. Seashells of different sizes and sheen. Little crabs crawling on the shore. Fish freshly hauled from the gracious sea, some of them wiggling for dear life, and fishing-net floats bobbing in the water. A piece of heaven to get a good tan until the sun simmered down and gets completely swallowed by the ocean.
Across time, these images in my mind continue to exist, have never faded, even if they are no longer there to see or touch. Such is the insistence of memories—the kind of prelapsarian bucolic field which wish to recapture because, you see, we insist on holding on to some of what we have cherished since we were as young as three.
But Lucena still has plenty of things to love, of course. And places to revisit. Some remnants have somehow managed to survive the tsunami of development that nearly inundated them.
The twin rivers (Iyam and Dumacaa) are not exactly so destroyed that we can expect their death soon. Recurring differences between nature’s handiwork and man’s trespass—for instance, abusive polluters discharging into the rivers wastes that do not biodegrade—frustrate sincere ecological efforts to heal the rivers. It’s going to take a while for it to happen but it will. The rivers slurping and murmuring again, creating tiny whirlpools and serpentinely moving fast through boulders and mangroves, along miles and miles of cool, sparkling roily beauty. And don’t forget the river shrimps.
Then there’s that reliable saging na binangi (saba banana grilled over charcoal) smelling of sweet heaven. Even yellow corn grilled the same way would pale in comparison. Or your common bananacue. Follow the warm perfume of baking bonete and energy-lifting kapeng barako. Food stalls around the public market serve the best chami in the world—noodles and large dollop of green vegetables and organic seasonings served piping hot at no extortionate price.
Fresh buko to liven up our fruit salad and add a delicious twist to pansit. And a glass of home-made lambanog—that lava-spewing, Cape Canaveral rocket-launching lambanog! A friendly advice—if someone offers a toast, it would probably be wise to drink the glass down; a little sip of it can start some vicious ribbing. And don’t say you’ve not been warned.
There are many filaments around this place which connect the people to their roots and ancestors, both factual (like digging for fossils) and spiritual. Religion, for example. The church bells of St. Ferdinand Cathedral, in full swing, summon the faithful to refill the soul every day without fail.
The public market has undergone a remarkable facelift—bigger, with tiled walkways, definitely well-scrubbed, and the extensive windows afford well-circulated air into each corner of the structure. An added bonus to market-goers is an escalator to get them going without the discomfort of schlepping heavy baskets of goods.
And Perez Park with its five sunken gardens primped up like masterpieces of nature to be playgrounds for kids and cool spots for pooped out parents to have some break. Old memories, images that stick like cotton candy, surviving only on sepia photographs are faithfully relived in all places at the park for selfies.
And don’t forget the Lucenahins. While the city itself may have undergone some cosmetic alterations, the people’s fellow feeling has not been diluted at all. Hear them talk in the lilting roll of a Southern Tagalog/Bicolano prosody, amusingly delightful to Big City ears.
My home has changed. But then again, even Shangri-La did. What has become of my city is merely an affirmation of all things fleeting. Still, there are vital remnants of old wealth and beauty which are elements of a progression that has begun since birds dispensed seeds to grow the forests to today’s acceptance of urban growth. But this is home. Every street corner retains adherent associations, each one of them joyful. The longer my feet remain in Lucena soil, the more difficult it is always for me to get on the bus and leave again.
Photos by Diana B. Noche