Little bro no more

Traditional caption-writing goes from left to right. That's Eric, the brother I'm referring to in the title, with another sister, Pinky, and our Lola Purang. Taken at the old family home in Lower Brookside, Baguio City, summer of '68. Eric still likes wearing shorts, especially on weekends when he does his version of visita iglesia or mall hopping all over Ortigas Center. Brisk walking, badminton, basketball--all these activities crammed into his daylight hours. That's why he has never dealt with  unwanted body fat, unlike his other siblings. He also has the shortest first name among us. Poor Pinky who had to learn to write "Genevieve" when she was that high. I write this with the knowledge that Eric, Kerfwenk or Kwenk, turned 48 yesterday, has graying hair but still hasn't lost his childlike outlook. After I sent my SMS greeting from another part of Baguio where I've temporarily escaped from the Manila heat wave, he reminded me to bring down a loaf of raisin bread. That's why I love my little bro so. He doesn't ask much. B-) 

First of a Series of Brookside Babies

When word went around my immediate family circle that I had just put up a blog, the question from all was: “Why Brookside baby?” Friends and colleagues who don’t know my Baguio background commented that the blog’s name sounded like I was abandoned beside a body of water, like Moses in a basket among the river weeds.

My siblings and first cousins on my father’s side knew better. Our childhood summers and later, as we became college students, our semestral breaks were largely spent at 18 M. Roxas street, Lower Brookside, Baguio City. Our widowed grandmother, Telesfora Cariño Lolarga, built her retirement home in what was once a 1,000-square meter avocado grove.

The three-storey house was of modest dimensions. As the years went by and whenever she had enough savings, a room would be expanded or a roof and a fence added.

And yes, there was a brook behind the backyard. There was no budget for landscaping—my lola knew by instinct where this tree, that bush and those clusters of flowers should grow.

I am hoping that as I add more entries to this blog, I can recover more stories about those Brookside years. Meanwhile, among the first to get excited by the possibilities of this site in tying the scattered branches of our family together is my sister Evelyn Lolarga Trinidad, Embeng to us. We have a family code for “cute”; it’s “cute-at.” Embeng rang me several times, instructing me to open my G-mail and check if her cute-at photos were all in.

So for our buena mano Brookside babe, here she is, a few inches away from falling into Burnham Lake. She must have been five or six years old. Note the background. Yes, the boats then had real sails!