Kababata

HFA Glee Club '88. Photo by Dennis Dungo.


Kababata
adj.
childhood friend


IT'S CURIOUS how finding my old classmates here in the US and others in Cyberspace has made me feel less like I'm "floating in space". Wait, maybe this sounds better: I feel more anchored to something that I want to be anchored to.

For a few years, I felt unmoored in Manila. My parents had left for the US, I no longer frequented out family house in Angeles (what was the point?), and holidays were spent frantically trying to think of something to do with Riza O., my fellow "floater". We were orphans: she a literal orphan and I a figurative one. And we created our own siblinghood where there was none. We made our own Christmas traditions.

When I left for grad school in the US, I felt sorry to be leaving Riza. Although I was now closer to my real family, I wasn't sure if we would pick up where we left off eight years ago. Christmas in Las Vegas had been swallowed up by Chiqui's night shift and, of course, it wasn't quite the same without the crazy, baroque and sensory delights of a Manila Christmas.

But who would have thought that the mere cyberpresence of Joanne in Ottawa, Cecille in Pennsylvania, Susan in LA, Shirlyn in Arizona and many other classmates all over the US and still more back in the Philippines would make everything better?

I had congratulated Peter A. in Angeles City on the birth of his first child and had signed my e-mail "ang iyong kababata, Nats". He wrote back saying that that closing phrase gave him a very good feeling. It did taht for me too.

In the strictest sense, kababata is a word used to describe a childhood playmate. But my classmates are more than that. We all may not have been neighbors, but we all grew up together and learned together and received our formation from the same teachers and were watched over by the same nuns. We may not realize it but we are a family of some sort and share memories made more vivid with each retelling.