MELANCHOLY MEMORIES OF OBANDO

*JOSELITO DELOS REYES is an award-winning poet in Filipino, and a member of the Linangan sa Imahen, Retorika, at Anyo (LIRA). A teacher by profession, he is currently taking a master’s degree in Philippine Studies at the De La Salle University-Manila. Raised in Obando, he now lives in Lucban, Quezon.

Not that I don’t have a hometown, but I used to long for what my college buddies and colleagues have—a hometown brimming with pastoral air, a two-month preparation for a journey during extended holidays, the challenge of landing a discounted airfare ticket, and bringing in goodies after vacation. Not with Obando, my minimum-fare hometown because of her proximity to the bustling metro. Jeepney-fare as of this writing: P 15 from Monumento, the heart of Caloocan City.

From where I used to stay in Valenzuela City, Obando—measuring the shortest distance between two points—is just a two-kilometer horizon among parcels of bangus, sugpo, and tilapia ponds. Even on a hazy day, the San Pascual Baylon bell tower and American-era tangke de agua can be seen from our backyard. Kwitis display can be watched and heard during fiestas signaling the start of the morning fertility rites procession, and my family’s fifteen-minute tricycle return to the hometown.

While I only briefly studied in Obando, I am still proud of being one of the voracious talaba munchers of my hometown, a habitué of a local greasy burger joint called “McDomeng”, a hole in the wall somewhere in Barangay Catanghalan. The owner was named—you guessed it right—Mang Domeng, who, aside from being the owner of the former burger monopoly in Obando, had a minor role as the character “Domeng” in Iskul Bukol, the sitcom of the new wave and Betamax generation. (Last I heard from an Obando e-group on Facebook, the burger joint is still lording over the town’s burger industry, but now on a classier establishment.)

At the onset of the Spandau Ballet and Bagets epoch, Sundays were Obando days. After attending mass, my family would visit aunts, uncles and cousins. We share the same fried tilapia, paksiw na ayungin, a shrimp variety called “hipong puti” in sampaloc broth and—far from the aphrodisiac notion of my elementary and still tender mind—talaba swimming in garlic-vinegar. During these short but frequent visits, I became the local text (not the SMS but the popular betting game using an inch by two-inch cards, one side printed with drawings of stills from local action movies of Dante Varona and Anthony Alonzo) and rubber band mogul cum plunderer of my playmates.

I have so many hometown memories. It was there where I first puffed a Marlboro, gulped my first bitter brown bottle on a family reunion, and first blurred my vision courtesy of the pricey thirty-peso long-necks and cheaper bilogs and lapads in between tabo-servings of tahong and silvery fish creatively called buwan-buwan and bidbid fresh from Barangay Binuangan, a motorized bangka-ride away from the bayan. It was in Obando where I first experienced the primal palpitation from a first year high school crush named Cherry San Diego of Barangay Lawa (Where is she now? I don’t know, some foreign lakes maybe. Facebook has its limits). It was also on my minimum-fare hometown that I learned the mystic rhythm and chant of Pasyon, voice amplified by gargantuan servings of biko, kutsinta, palitaw, and scalding cupfuls of chicken sopas, sweetened mongo and salabat. It was on Rebecca, the lone bedbug-infested movie house in town now turned into a Christian fellowship quarters, I marvelled the first three big screen movies of my life, all re-runs I believe: the first “Superman” starring Christopher Reeve, Dino de Laurentiis’ “Kingkong”, and “The Untouchable Family” starring Chichay and Redford White, a parody of Brian De Palma’s 1987 hit “The Untouchable”.

Before I read Doña Pia’s ordeal under Padre Damaso in Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere (in-passing during high school and college, and in full when I became a college instructor), I have always known that Obando is famous for her fertility rite processions. My cousins and I would always slither our way in the crowd to catch glimpse of pairs wanting to have a baby amidst the symphony of the blaring Musikong Bumbong and Magsikap Band. Always, a middle-aged and sun-baked couple gracefully led the dancing procession. I was told by my nanay, though I never had the chance to confirm, that the said former childless couple came from Cebu, and had become a permanent devotee of the procession performing their panata, even after the three patron saints—Sta. Clara, San Pascual Baylon, and Nuestra Señora de Salambao—granted them three kids. I was told, though again unconfirmed, that they named their children Clara, Pascual, and Virginia.

Once there was neighborhood news that Vilma Santos, who was then still childless with second husband Ralph Recto, would finally grace the dance floor that is Obando to have a child. Faster than shouting “Darna!” or “Ding, ang bato!”, news spread to town. It seemed that all fair-minded people who owned TV sets in Obando trooped the church grounds to see Vilma and Ralph in the flesh to dance the “Santa Clara pinong-pino...”. I have never seen the Darna of my youth in person. The following morning, the third and last day of fiesta, another wildfire of a gossip emerged; allegedly because of a looming crowd management crisis of the hermano mayor and the local police, Vilma and Ralph would just attend the morning pre-procession mass and would no longer swing on the parade. They were no-shows. That also happened to Sharon and Kiko years after. I no longer fell for the news.

Fiesta processions traversing the major artery (J.P. Rizal Street) and minor streets of Obando (Claridades and Plaridel) usually lasted three hours, in time for sumptuous lunch of seafood at the local market called punduhan. Food is good here with atsarang dampalit, a variety of grass growing on the river and fishpond banks of Obando. Fiesta afternoons were spent haggling with calamay, sinigwelas, and kasuy street vendors, if not looking for bargain goodies at the church patio turned pre-Made-in-China tianggehan. A nightly perya awaits the locals. Because of countless Ferris wheel rides, I learned to muster the courage to ride mammoth roller coasters and erased acrophobia on my vocabulary. I have seen the carnival’s Amazona who gorged on live chickens (not real, though she can kill the hapless white leghorns with a dinosaur-strength bite on the neck) and Babaeng Oktopus (again, not real; the girl has upper and lower limb deformities). It was in the same peryahan where I temporarily got hooked to beto-beto, a dice game on saucers tapped on ply boards.

My studies in Manila prompted me to lessen my Obando adventures. The visits eventually became occasional and we soon found ourselves in Obando during weddings and wakes. Nanay was no longer around to let me into Obando’s briny atmosphere. It is not an irrevocable dispersal but dispersal nonetheless. I still momentarily pause to take sight of Obando in television especially during this time of mushrooming festivals. I can still remember the very meaning of a fiesta in its splendor.#


The Musikong Bumbong image (with an imprint of Image Philippines) came from the Obando, Bulacan FB account. Daghang salamat sa walang pakundangan kong paggamit sa retrato ninyo.