"Anay"
In every life, each of us all have the chance at love. It’s intrinsic for living creatures, to keep the species going, so to speak. For us humans, we were all born out of love. Supposedly, at least. And so, as symbiosis goes, we are all born to love in return. In my life not fully lived, I had a love very early in life. It was deep and special and mutual and to this day, something I treasure and remember with profound fondness. I had loving, hardworking, and highly intelligent parents. They were both working lawyers who never thought for a minute of shifting their service in government and who chose to stay in a low-paying job throughout their lives but which eventually taught us the value and priority of honesty and integrity over the accumulation of material wealth.
Growing up as the youngest in a family of five children, my
mother Imelda apparently needed help in maintaining house and in raising all of
us. Needless to say, she hired maids and nannies some even before I was born.
One of these was a nanny from the province of my father Alex, in Albay Bicol.
Her name was Simeona Belen, or simply Anay (a play on the word “Nanay” which is Filipino for mother) to us. Immediately after I was born in 1964, my mother
had to go to Washington DC to be with Alex who had work to do for the World
Bank being sent by the government as its Philippine representative. For about a
year, I was left to the care of our Yaya (nanny) Anay and I grew up knowing her
to be my first mother. Imelda was revered at home but was in fact no. 2, at
least to me.
So it goes without saying that my first cognition of love
was in fact Anay, our Yaya. Looking at these precious pictures some of you
might not find particularly special, I feel real nostalgia and a little
sadness. I couldn’t put it any other way. I really loved her. She was the
beautiful, loving face etched in my young brain and the only soul I kept
looking for when she was eventually fired from the household from a family
quarrel/fight, one of many I could hardly care for and which happened so quickly,
like a bullet hitting your heart in a crossfire without you knowing what hit
you. Believe me, a family of professionals is a family of unrelenting
arguments. Unrelenting!
Several years passed and I found myself caught in the
trappings of school, good or bad that may have been, and not entirely
forgetting my longing for her. Things gradually went south and so did I when I
eventually embarked on a solo journey to the South of Luzon, to Bicol in fact
to look for Anay when I was in 3rd year College and desperately searching for
guidance that school couldn’t provide me anymore because I felt I literally owed her my life up to that point. But that’s another story
altogether and something I would not be able to provide a memorable snapshot
of. Right now, all I want in life is a
mental image of what little happiness there once was and embed it to what is now. No more. No less.
At the School Fair
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