Lessons my father taught me

This is the second year I’m celebrating Father’s Day without my father. I do not cry myself to sleep every night anymore but not a week will pass without me still shedding tears. His death in January last year will always leave a void in my heart. Many times, I consciously fill this stinging emptiness with the many lessons he taught me. 

My father was an ordinary man  a farmer all his life. His burnt skin was his badge of honor. The cracks under his feet were the insignia of his dignity to raise a family. His rough hands were his arsenals to provide food on the table for his loved ones. 

He was not known to complain about the hardship he underwent just so he could see his family through. Just like a superhero, he never let us down. But unlike a superhero, he had no powers. He only had the wisdom to do the right things in his simple ways. He could barely read and write, having only finished Grade 2, but he surely had a PhD degree in the School of Hard Knocks.   

My father and I never had a photograph together when I was growing up. We never had a camera to begin with. Nobody had one in the community where I grew up. There was a resident photographer for hire in the nearby village but economic circumstances deterred us from getting his services. In my heart, however, I freeze photographs of us together  so beautiful and warm are these memories that to this day I still remember how, I was perhaps four years old then, he asked me to jump from a raised table down to his arms. He would raise my chubby body up, then throw me in mid-air. He never missed to catch me. He never did my whole life. 

But not everything was fine and dandy between us. We ventured into some sort of a silent war when, in the prime of my teenaged years, I did not hide from him my being gay. He was up in arms. But our love for each other brought us back together. The walls between us soon collapsed. He accepted me for who I was and embraced me for how I wanted to live my life. Thanks to tough love. We became inseparable since then. He took up many battles for me. His welfare became my source of inspiration to better myself, to better my craft. I promised myself to give him a better life. Somehow, with the grace from The Guy Up There, I did. I worked hard  a trait he showed me by example  to spoil him. More than that, I spoiled him with love.

He never asked for anything from me. But I always anticipated his needs. I never waited for him to ask me for something. He gave me everything he had when I was small. My eagerness to indulge him of his needs was so small a token as compared to the many joys he brought me when he would go home from the rice field with his hands full of sweet aratilis and the pockets of his smudged gabardine trousers bursting with ripe duhat, which we would shake in a plastic container with salt. Early on, I already knew what it meant to appreciate simple happiness. 

My father taught me to be innovative. I never had a toy when I was a kid. Except for a top my father fashioned from a dried ipil-ipil branch. I still see the top twirling in my mind, spinning endlessly in the circle inside my heart. 

In those days when it was easier for others to buy a ready-made parol (lantern), my father taught me how to make a sturdy one out of bamboo sticks. We just had to spend a little for papel de hapon to dress up the wooden lantern. Some houses in the neighborhood were teeming with Christmas lights. Our home was decorated with a lone parol hanged proudly in the makeshift awning of our old house. 

The itak (bolo knife) my father used to make the parols of my childhood is still intact and oiled to keep it away from the rust. Yes, my father taught everyone in our house to be masinop. In the store room of our humble home can be found my father’s axe, screwdrivers, gusi (a medium sized earthen jar for salt) and other trinkets, which had been in his possession since he was a teenager. The araro (plough) he used for farming is now a decorative piece in our garden. 

Poverty taught my father not to be diferencioso (difficult). Life was difficult enough, he didn’t want to complicate it. “Kung maliit na bagay lamang naman ang pagsisimulan ng gulo, palampasin mo na (Let small things pass if they will just cause you trouble later on),” he reminded me many times. 

Despite the hardship our family experienced in the past, my father’s first cardinal rule in the house was “Huwag na huwag kayong magnanakaw (Never ever steal).” That act, he said, betrays trust. He taught me that it is important that people trust me in whatever I do. 

In the subject of forgiveness, I learned a lot from my father. I have a forgiving heart because my father did not believe in keeping grudges. To this day, I get sick if I keep grudges against others for more than 24 hours. My father taught me to have an understanding heart; that I need to be kind even if others are not.
I will always, always thank my father for teaching me to have a grateful heart. Because of this, I now get to lovingly fill the void of not being able to celebrate life with him every day, every night.

By Bum D. Tenorio Jr

(The Philippine Star) June 19, 2011