Every year, during his birthday and death anniversary, I would always write about him. Those things that I still vividly remember in my mind. I couldn’t count the anecdotes and stories we have shared in the past. When I stopped working at the bank, Dad and Mom stayed with me. Almost every afternoon and sometimes when I am trimming the grass, he would sit on the ledge of our garage and regale me with those stories of long ago.
I remember, I first learned to read novels and books through him. He would borrow books from their library at the UST High school and allow me to read when I was no longer busy with school assignments. I graduated from those Mills and Boons stories back in high school and learned more reading genre when I started working as a student librarian while studying at the same time.
When we were in grade school, my brothers and I stayed in the province with my grandmother most of the time when mom won’t be around to take care of us. When my two brothers and I started high school, they transferred my youngest brother here in Manila to continue with her grade schooling. I remember those days when dad would come home every December break from school and he would bring along various groceries and old clothes (of students) from their school. Mom would distribute the latter to our neighbors and sometimes would even make alterations on the good ones for us to wear. I remember those days when Dad would make us sit and remove white hairs from his head. We would count them afterwards and Dad would give us some cents for candies…haha! I remember those days when he would harvest our Formosa pineapples and cashews from the trees we planted together when I was a kid. He loved fruits. He planted several coconut saplings when he retired from work, they are all bearing fruits now.
This is one of my favorite pictures of him which I have posted too several years ago. He was in his early eighties when this photo was taken.
I want to share these lovely quotes with you on fatherhood.
“I suddenly remember being very little and being embraced by my father. I would try to put my arms around my father’s waist, hug him back. I could never reach the whole way around the equator of his body; he was that much larger than life. Then one day, I could do it. I held him, instead of him holding me, and all I wanted at that moment was to have it back the other way.”
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“My father didn’t tell me how to live;
he lived, and let me watch him do it”
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“A father’s tears and fears are unseen, his love is unexpressed, but his care and protection remains as a pillar of strength throughout our lives.”
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Dreams And Escapes 
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