Memories of the Philippines

The Golden Fields of Summer

The sweet, earthy smell of steaming white rice wrapped in a banana leaf, our version of eco-friendly Tupperware, is my personal time machine. It teleports me back over five decades to a tiny lakeside nipa hut, a place filled with wonderful memories and one highly specific, deeply unpleasant incident. Ultimately, that summer taught me a valuable lesson: just because everyone else is doing something, it doesn’t mean you should blindly dive in.

Picture this: endless, bright green rice fields baking under a sun so brutal it turns the horizon into a shimmering mirage. Millions of rice stalks are bending low, heavy with the grains meant to feed the village. It looks peaceful, right? A rural paradise.

But summers in the province were long, lazy, and strictly DIY. No summer camps, no sports leagues, and absolutely no air conditioning. When the daytime sun turned the earth into an oven, my cousins, friends, and I would retreat to our family’s tiny patch of land by the lake. We’d string up a hammock under a small nipa hut and sway just enough to trick ourselves into thinking there was a breeze.

When our stomachs started to grumble, we’d unwrap whatever leftovers my mom had packed and eat with our hands. And our beverage program? Completely free-range. There was a little brook nearby fed by cold underground springs. Whenever we got thirsty, we’d just kneel on the bank and drink straight from the crystal-clear running stream. Total, unblinking, naive trust.

Until the day our adventurous streak—and my cousins’ terrible ideas—got the best of us.

They convinced me to explore upstream, claiming they heard a rumor about a secret, shady spot near a dense bamboo grove where fat river crabs liked to hang out. Visions of an afternoon crab feast dancing in our heads, we scrambled up the bank. We hadn’t gone a hundred yards before we froze.

There, right in the dead center of our pristine, crystal-clear, artisanal drinking water, was a massive, steaming, dark green mound. A water buffalo—a kalabaw—had decided that our favorite stream was the perfect place for a bathroom break.

I literally gagged right there on the grass, choking for air while my cousins absolutely lost it laughing. I made a solemn, lifelong vow right then and there: never, ever drink from nature again.

But even with the occasional traumatic plumbing surprise, the water was our entire world. On our best days, we’d “borrow” a small wooden boat and row out onto the open lake. Sunscreen wasn’t a word in our vocabulary, and shirts were strictly optional. In fact, going into the water with clothes on was a rookie mistake. The thick, muddy silt would get trapped in the fabric, and once the sun baked it dry against your skin, you’d spend the next three days scratching yourself like a dog with fleas.

Sometimes I’d play apprentice to my uncle, a lifelong fisherman whose skin was so dark and deeply wrinkled from decades under the sun that he looked like a walking oak tree—lines he wore with absolute pride. He taught me how to read the water and cast a net, and I’d march home proudly carrying a basket of weird, twitching fish. Mom would fry up the best ones for dinner, and the rest she’d heavily season and slap onto bamboo mats to dry in the sun.

We were mischievous, reckless, and borderline feral, but the village kept us from completely destroying ourselves. There were no fences or locked doors. Neighbors always had one eye on the kids running through the fields, letting us stay beautifully wild while making sure we didn’t accidentally drown, get trampled, or get gouged by an irate kalabaw. Which was a fair risk, considering we liked to poke them incessantly with long sticks. You know, just for the fun of it.

Living in the States now, I watch my own kids grow up in a completely different universe. Their childhood is a highly structured routine of organized activities, strict safety protocols, and digital screens. Sometimes I look at them and wonder if they can even fathom the kind of reckless freedom we had. A time when a boy, a borrowed boat, a piece of salty dried fish on a bed of white rice, and a vast sea of rice fields were all you needed to rule the world.

Or at least, until a vengeful kalabaw decided it was time for payback and ruined our beloved water supply.

How Odysseus Sparked My Passion for Literature

The summers of my childhood in tropical Asia were brutally hot and humid. I could still remember the day I grabbed a couple of ripe guavas from the kitchen to snack on. They were perfectly soft and fragrant, their yellow-green skins gleaming with an almost neon sheen against the bright summer sun filtering through the window. It was too hot to play outside under the blazing sun, and inside my grandmother’s house, boredom felt like its own kind of prison. I was ten years old, a boy with an insatiable hunger for stories but absolutely nothing left to devour. I had already read and reread every single magazine, book, and komiks I could lay my hands on until the pages were soft and frayed.

This is probably how bored I look when I was a young boy as imagined by AI. 🤣😁😂
(Image generated by Nano Banana 2 engine.)

In our small barangay (village), books were a luxury. Our public school didn’t have a library, let alone extra volumes to lend out. This was an era before the internet, before screens ruled our lives. Power lines had not yet reached our little barrio far from the town center, so when night fell, darkness was absolute.

Entertainment was a communal, intimate ritual. Every weekday evening from six to nine, we would huddle around the living room table. It was lit only by a single kerosene lamp, which cast a flickering orange glow across our expectant faces. In that warm, dancing light, we would listen intently to the crackling AM radio, transported by the serialized fantasy soap operas that played out in the dark. We knew there was a television station out there somewhere, but without electricity or money, a TV set was out of the question. My imagination had to build its own worlds.

On that dog day of summer, desperation drove me to explore my uncle’s room. My uncle, whom I call Papa Max, kept a modest cabinet that I usually ignored. It was packed mostly with dusty college textbooks, faded paperbacks, and a stack of old magazines. I began to browse the shelves, expecting nothing, until my fingers brushed against a worn paperback.

I pulled the thinnest, most unintimidating book I could find, settled onto the floor, and took a bite out of the guava. The fruit split open to reveal a vivid pink flesh, and its sweet, tropical aroma immediately bloomed and lingered in the warm air.

With the taste of guava on my tongue, I opened the book. It was about Greek mythology.

At first, the names flew off the page like strange incantations: Zeus, Athena, Minerva. They entertained me, but then the narrative shifted, and the trap snapped shut. I stumbled into the grand, sweeping epic of the Trojan War. I read of Odysseus, a keen and clever warrior with unmatched bravery, embarking on a treacherous sea voyage to wage war against Troy. More than the battles, it was his grueling journey home… the sheer peril, the heartbreaking loss, and the unyielding suffering he endured… that captured my soul.

The world around me faded. The humid air of the house vanished, replaced by the salty spray of the Aegean Sea and the roar of ancient battle cries.

*1984 photogravure of “Ulysses Defying the Cyclops” by Louis-Frederic Schutzenberger.*
*(Public domain media. Source: Wikimedia Commons)*

As I read, the ancient myths collided with my own bloodline. My grandmother, whose eyes were clouding over and nearly blind from advancing cataracts, used to sit with me and trace the past. In her gentle voice, she would tell me tales of my late grandfather. Long before I was born, he had briefly been a crew member of a commercial ship that sailed all over the archipelago.

Sitting on that dusty floor, the book resting on my lap, my mind blurred the lines between legend and reality. I didn’t just see Odysseus anymore; I saw my grandfather. I imagined him standing on a wooden deck, bracing against crashing waves and battling the stormy, unpredictable seas of our own country, mirroring the perilous journey of the Greek heroes. The distant past and my own family history became the same.

I devoured the entire book in three days. But when I finished, I didn’t put it away. I turned right back to the beginning, reading section after section, over and over again. My mind was craving to relive those moments. I felt the thrill of their victories and the agonies they endured trying to go home. That battered paperback didn’t just pass the time; it rewrote my DNA. It was the exact moment my lifelong passion for literature was born.

Decades later, I look at the world today, completely saturated with instant streaming, blockbuster movies, and endless digital entertainment options at a child’s fingertips. Sometimes, I watch the screens glow and wonder: in a world where everything is visualized for them, would a ten-year-old child still find the magic to pick up a book, sit by a flickering light, bite into a piece of fruit, and spend hours building a universe of their own?

From Rice Fields to Hospital Halls: A Journey of Memory and Meaning

I grew up in a small rural community in the Philippines, surrounded by rice fields, simple homes, and people who knew one another. Some of my earliest memories are of bright green rice paddies stretching into the distance, the sound of people talking and laughing, and the ordinary sights and smells of village life.

An Amorsolo reproduction being sold in an e-commerce site. — A decorative reproduction of Fernando Amorsolo’s Planting Rice, inspired by one of the Filipino National Artist’s best-known depictions of rural life. Amorsolo was renowned for his distinctive treatment of tropical light, often using backlighting to give figures and landscapes a warm, luminous quality. His various Planting Rice paintings portray farmers working together in the rice fields and reflect his enduring interest in everyday life in the Philippine countryside.

When I look back now, those memories sometimes seem almost like a painting by the late Fernando Amorsolo, the first ever designated Filipino National Artist. The warm sunlight, the green fields, the people working and going about their daily lives. It was beautiful, but life was not as idyllic as it may appear in those memories. There were also poverty, political turmoil, corruption, and the feeling that ordinary people had little control over their future. Even as a child in the ’70s, I sensed that there had to be something beyond the world I knew.

Eventually, that desire for something different led me, or IMO my wife led me, to the United States.

Coming to America was exciting, but it was also a huge adjustment. Everything seemed bigger and faster. I was learning a new culture, finding my way around a new country, and trying to build a future at the same time.

When I was younger, I imagined doing many things with my life. I wanted to be an artist, a writer, maybe even a world traveler. But life has a way of changing your plans.

I became a husband and a father. With a family to support, being the breadwinner became my priority. Nursing became my profession, and eventually I found myself working at a nationally ranked teaching hospital in Los Angeles.

Nursing was never boring.

Some days were exhausting. Some were heartbreaking. Others were incredibly rewarding. There were alarms going off, phones ringing, doctors and nurses moving quickly through the halls, and patients and families dealing with some of the most difficult moments of their lives.

Somewhere in all of that, I learned that nursing was about much more than medications, procedures, and medical knowledge. It was about people. It was about listening, staying calm when someone else was frightened, and sometimes simply being there. It was also working alongside wonderful colleagues and feeling that I was a part of a work family.

I had moments when I felt proud of what I was able to do. I remember helping save patients’ lives, and for a brief moment, I felt like some kind of superhero. Of course, nursing quickly brought me back to reality. The grueling 12-hour shift. Multiple tasks at once. Trying to keep my sanity while caring for patients and dealing with their families.

And then there was being a parent.

One of my favorite reminders that life doesn’t always follow the script came when my son decided to test the laws of gravity while hanging in the playground parallel bars. The result was a broken arm and a trip to the emergency room.

There is something strangely surreal about walking through a hospital as both a nurse and a worried parent. Suddenly, all the clinical knowledge in the world doesn’t stop you from being a dad who is worried about his child.

Those experiences — both big and small — shaped me in ways I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

Now, after many years in nursing, I have finally hung up my stethoscope and packed away my uniform. Retirement has given me something I didn’t have much of during my working years: time to slow down and think.

And, perhaps more importantly, time to return to some of the things I had put aside.

Writing. Photography. Art. Travel. Storytelling.

The creative side of me that was there when I was a young boy in the Philippines never really disappeared. It was simply buried beneath the responsibilities of work, family, and everyday life.

Now I’m ready to dig it back up.

I want to write about the places I’ve been, the people I’ve met, the experiences that changed me, and the memories that have stayed with me all these years. Some stories will come from my childhood in the Philippines. Others will come from my years as a nurse, a husband, and a father.

I sometimes find myself thinking about the reasons I left the Philippines in the first place. As a young man, I wanted to escape the political chaos¹, the greed, the graft and corruption of the trapos² that seemed to limit the possibilities for ordinary people. I came to America believing I was leaving those problems behind and entering a society built on greater opportunity, fairness, and the rule of law. Yet, decades later, I sometimes look around and wonder how far we have really come. The political and social climate in America today can feel increasingly divided and unsettled, with money and influence concentrated in the hands of a very small segment of society. In some ways, the problems I thought I was leaving behind have taken on a different form here. That realization has made me reflect more deeply on my journey, not with regret, but with a greater appreciation for the complicated realities of both the country I left and the country I chose to call home.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I simply want to observe, remember, question, and share what I have learned along the way.

In many ways, this feels like coming full circle.

I started life surrounded by rice fields. I spent much of my adult life walking hospital corridors. Now, in retirement, I’m finding my way back to the creative dreams I had as a young man.

Maybe that’s what growing older really means — not leaving your past behind, but finally having the time to understand it.

So this is a new chapter for me.

I’ll be sharing memories from the Philippines, stories from my nursing years, moments from family life, and whatever else catches my attention along the way. Some stories may make you laugh. Others may make you think. A few might even bring back memories of your own.

After all, life rarely turns out exactly the way we imagine it.

Mine certainly didn’t. And I’m grateful for that, and there are still stories to tell.

PS: Full disclosure: I needed AI to help me jump start this rusty writer’s mind. In my younger years it would have been an easy job spin a yarn and craft narratives, but like an athlete needing to up his game, I enlisted ChatGPT and Grammarly to coach me and refine this piece. I am sorry, I promise I will be back and it is going to be me, not some electricity-hungry and water-hogging voracious robot housed in a sprawling complex somewhere in rural America.

Marcos’ martial law: Golden age for corruption, abuses | Inquirer News ↩︎
Trapo (noun) is Filipino word for old useless clothes that has been repurposed as wash rags or as a mop to clean floors. Used as a slang for traditional politicians, it denotes that they are the lowest form of life in a society. ↩︎