Pagudpud and Tales of Our Childhood

While on our Laoag trip we stopped on a bridge to have our picture taken at the border of Pagudpud and saw a bunch of kids who were diving onto the lake below. They were all boys, in shorts, and were taking turns diving, swimming upstream, then going up again to dive again. Some children are easy to photograph because all it would take is a smile and kind words and they would smile back. This boy waited for me to signal to L to catch him in mid-air. He was wonderful. His spirit felt as free as a bird. This dive made me happy.









Looking on was this young boy who positioned himself onto a rock, and although his friends were shouting at him, teasing, cajoling him to have fun, he stood like a rock and just looked on. The boys were laughing at him. To me though, he looked at peace.














The older boys were a little harder to convince to pose for a shoot. They were shy, but I talked them into it, and got a little reaction. I thought it was a wonderful subject, little boys with their innocence intact, children of God.












When I was a child growing up in a drug-free Sampaloc, where there are no rivers but the streets would be an extension of your house, I would play patintero, teks and bahay bahayan with the other kids. Our bahay bahayan would just be creating a makeshift house using kumot (blanket), chairs as posts, and we would pretend to eat inside this tent using our toy plastic plates and spoons. I have one officemate who told me he played bahay bahayan and lost his virginity there. He said he lay on top of the girl and did what mothers and fathers did. Ok, he turned out to be gay, and yes his childhood story is so out of the ordinary.


Today while driving under heavy rain, we recalled the story of this girl we love, an ex-officemate named E who lived in Corinthian Gardens (an exclusive village in Ortigas). She told us one time during lunch that she and her sister would play bahay-bahayan too. But their version, they call as "squatter- squatter". They would hide under their dad's executive desk at home, build makeshift walls in the form of blankets and ask their yaya to bring them instant noodles. Then they would pretend they were children who lived under the bridge. I forgot to ask what they talked about, but we thought her version of childhood play was funnier than the one who lost his virginity.