Coming home

Painted pink and green, highlighted by a red front door, the sight was garish. But for the clash of colors that assaulted the eyes, the façade remained unchanged.

Once our proud abode, my father’s dream house had gone to seed, ravaged by time and languishing in neglect. Tall grass and other unwelcome vegetation are threatening to overwhelm the structure.

The front yard, where my mother once tended a vibrant garden of Santal and African daisies, is now a muddy patch serving as a parking lot for the new owner’s dilapidated delivery trucks. The old concrete fence had given way to a rusty chain-link barrier.

This gaudy and depressing scene had turned my father’s dream into a nightmare. He must be turning in his grave now.

In September 2023, after more than 30 years of absence, I embarked on a sentimental journey to Ozamiz City, my hometown. My old friend, Sammy Lao, as dapper as he had been in our youth, picked me up in Dapitan City, where I competed in a triathlon.

Time warped in the three-hour drive as Sammy and I traversed familiar roads of our youth, exchanging tales of bygone days and juvenile adventures. My heart raced as we drove closer and closer to town until we suddenly pulled up in front of the old house. My heart sank at the sight.

I had half expected a time machine to bring me back to the bucolic place where I grew up. I was disappointed. The Ozamiz of my youth is now a strange city gentrified by strangers, taken over by big-city businesses, and overrun by urbanization and commercialization. The family compound in Barangay Lam-an, which used to sit on the edge of town, is now engulfed by the bustling downtown area.

The city may have grown, but the place that was once my world looks smaller now. The streets still carry familiar names, but they seem much shorter and narrower now. What used to be a long walk to school is now no more than a six-minute stroll.

Familiar fast-food chains like Jollibee, McDonald’s, and Mang Inasal are now ubiquitous sights. Gone are the likes of North Pole and Landoy’s Barbecue. The movie houses of my youth—Times, Rex and Waling Waling theaters—are no more. So, too, is my father’s favorite grocery store, the Misamis Soap and Candle Factory, where he used to buy his favorite imported stuff like canned asparagus soup (there was no fresh asparagus available locally then) and bacalao (the salty dried codfish of Portuguese cuisine). It was also the source of Chinese delicacies like dikiam (still my favorite now), champoy and kiamoy, as well as candies like White Rabbit and Choc-Nut. Oddly enough, despite the name, very few knew they also sold soap and candles. In his heavy Cebuano accent, my father used to call the store “Misamis Sup.”

But as a Frenchman once said, the more things change, the more things stay the same. My homecoming gave me a better appreciation of the paradox of change and continuity. Despite the city’s evolution, familiar landmarks stood proud, refusing to be washed away by the sea of change and the passage of time.

Boyhood memories

I visited the haunts of my youth. The Immaculate Conception Cathedral, where I once served as an altar boy, looks the same, its timeless façade and lattice brick walls evoking memories of joyous celebrations and poignant farewells. Designed by National Artist Leandro Locsin in the 1960s from the ruins of the 18th-century church that was destroyed by an earthquake, it was the site of many weddings (two of my sisters were wed there), baptisms, first communions (mine) and funeral services (my father’s). The cathedral brings back memories of happier times—Christmas. It’s where I first heard my favorite Christmas song, Bach’s cantata, “Gloria in Excelsis Deo,” sung by a choir accompanied by a magnificent pipe organ, one of only a few in the country and the only one in Mindanao.

Two blocks from our house on Rizal Avenue, the city’s main street, is my old playground, Osrox Park, where my big brother Rodolfo and cousin Nicanor used to play, bike, watch an occasional free movie, and chill out (back then, we used the word istambay). Later, in our carefree teenage years, the plaza would serve as our nocturnal halfway house where we would wash off our inebriated stupor before going home. We would freshen up on one of two fountains flanking an imposing Spanish-style gazebo called “quiosco” that served as a centerpiece of the town plaza, named after two past presidents—Osmeña and Roxas. At one time or another, the quiosco served as a stage for political rallies and social and official events in the city. It was also a party place, a lovers’ rendezvous, a flea market, a farmer’s market, etc. The last time I was home, the quiosco was roofed and served as the office of some law enforcement agency with a jail cell. Today, the stone colonial structure stood bare, as majestic as it once was. Though its purpose has shifted over the years, it has remained a steadfast symbol of the past.

In one corner next to the park, the Angbetic ancestral house, built in 1912, has also seen better days. I was told I was born there. Another landmark a couple of blocks away is the Rodriguez ancestral house, a colonial structure of coral stone bricks said to have hosted Jose Rizal during his exile in Dapitan. The house is shuttered, except for the ground floor, which now houses what I think is a hardware store.

READ: Floods drive thousands to shelters on Christmas

Whatever memories I have of the old public market were wiped out years ago when a fire razed a large portion of the downtown area. The market has since been rebuilt on its old site.

I still remember the newspaper route I inherited from my maternal grandfather (yes, I was born into the newspaper business, which sent my mother and her seven siblings—and my children—through college). As GCOO (grandchild of the owner), I delivered newspaper on my bike during the lunch breaks from school, a job from which I was fired by an aunt for delivering a subscriber’s copy to the wrong address every day for one month. Years before I became a journalist, I was fired from my first newspaper job.

Bike tour on a clear day

On the second day of my homecoming, I toured the city on my bike, pedaling through neighborhoods I no longer recognized. From my downtown hotel, I pedaled to the port area and then to Malaubang on a coastal road I was seeing for the first time. I had a great view of the Panguil Bay and, since it was a clear day, of the mountains across the bay into Lanao del Norte. I knew I was in Malaubang because I was now at the foot of Bukagan Hill, which, in my youth, we used to scale for a great view of the city and the Lanao towns of Kulambugan and Tubod across the bay. Still existing, I was told, are the fortifications that held the high ground for the Japanese during the war and the rusty German-made church bells installed there in the 1960s because they were deemed too heavy for the cathedral belfry to hold.

Rounding Bukagan Hill, I turned right on the Ozamiz-Pagadian highway toward the city, making sure to make a stop in Calusaran, Barangay Bagakay, at Regina’s swimming pool, founded by Lola Inang, my grandfather’s cousin. It was where the Engracia cousins spent countless hours frolicking in the cold natural spring water that fed the pool. It was also where I learned to swim, a dog paddle that became the precursor of the breaststroke that served me well as a triathlete decades later. The place has expanded to a couple more pools.

Pedaling back to the city, I decided to visit the old “grandstand,” a stadium that hosted many national and regional sports events. There, I watched track stars like sprinter Mona Sulaiman, then Asia’s fastest woman, and hurdler Manolita Cinco, the first Filipina Olympian, burn the cinder tracks of the stadium.

While Larry Mumar, playing for Metro Manila, was battling the likes of Manny Paner and Yoyong Martirez of Cebu over a concrete open-air court in the old version of the Palarong Pambansa, I was selling peanuts from the family’s box in the grandstand.

The next day, I would read all about it in the Manila Times in the coverage of sportswriters like Ernie Gonzales, who would one day become my colleague in two great newspapers we worked for—the martial-law era Daily Express and the Philippine Daily Inquirer. And of Tony Siddayao, the reputed dean of sportswriters who would one day become one of my mentors.

The track oval, now a concrete surface and unfit for athletic competition, is still exactly 400 meters long, as my Garmin confirmed. The grandstands are gone, now replaced by a national high school. But the oval’s backstretch still holds cherished memories for me. On this stretch, in the back seat of my father’s old Vauxhall and under cover of darkness, I shared a kiss with my first girlfriend. Nobody forgets the first kiss, a moment both exhilarating and forbidden.

The girl’s father, my father’s compadre, was furious when he found out about us.

“Hoy Pareng Temyong, your boy is chasing my daughter, and she’s only 13,” he confronted my father. “So, what’s wrong with that?” Papa retorted. “My boy is 14.”

Some street names remain familiar. Added were the names of former political leaders whose legacies lingered only in the streets and institutions named after them: Bernad (my godfather), Ramiro, and Sanciangco (my cousin). There is even a Parojinog street, presumably after the family of the once popular mayor of Kuratong notoriety, whose family—and influence—was virtually wiped out in Duterte’s deadly war on drugs.

No street is named after Oaminal, the current political kingpin, not yet anyway. Still, the name is as ubiquitous and pervasive all over the city as the loud and lurid blue and orange color he painted on lampposts, gutters, fences, plant boxes, parks, schoolhouses, and other city structures.

Juxtaposition

Since its founding in 1948, Ozamiz has languished as a third-class city. Originally the town of Misamis, it was the capital of the province of the same name. Founded in the 18th century, it grew when the Spanish built a seaside garrison to guard against pirates from the nearby Lanao area.

The fortified garrison, now called Cotta, was later used by the Japanese during World War II to imprison anyone who resisted the occupation. After the war, the town of Misamis became a city. It was renamed Ozamiz City in honor of Sen. Jose Ozamiz, the former Misamis governor who was executed by the Japanese. Ironically, my father, who was Ozamiz’s chief of staff in the prewar Senate and served as judge advocate in the guerrilla movement in Ozamiz, consistently misspelled the city as “Ozamis.” So did the media and some national offices. (For years, Ozamis vs Ozamiz became as much a debate at the Inquirer newsroom as was Legaspi vs Legazpi.)

Exasperated by the pervasive misspelling of the name, the city council passed a resolution in 2005 to set the record straight once and for all. However, some national offices did not get the memo. To this day, even the Commission on Elections still uses the incorrect spelling “Ozamis.”

Ozamiz or Ozamis, my hometown is my hometown. As I pedaled through its streets, visiting the few friends and relatives who remained, I marveled at the juxtaposition of the old and new. The city had grown and changed, yet traces of its old self lingered for me to savor and mourn. It was a bitter reminder of the passage of time and the inevitable changes it brings.

Bittersweet as my homecoming may have been, it was, in the end, a pleasant journey of rediscovery, a reminder that while the world around us may have changed, the memories we hold dear remain, timeless and unchanging. INQ

The author is a former news editor of the Inquirer.