happy birthday, Dad
What was my first memory of you?
It wasn't technically a memory of mine, but a story you told us kids, and over the years growing up echoed by Lolo Max and Lola Goring.
The setting was Baguio City, where I was born in March of 1960. I was around 2 years old the time you took me one early morning to buy pan de sal for our breakfast; you decided to drive us from our home — the quonset hut parsonage on Bukawkan Road — to the bakery on Session Road downtown which, like most roads in that mountain city, was on an incline. The car was the small black Prinz that the Baguio City UCCP church allocated for your use as its Assistant Pastor.
As the story goes, you parked in front of the bakery and went in to buy the bread but, around a minute or so later there was a commotion in the store as someone had looked out to see the car — with me at the steering wheel, start rolling down Session Road!
Evidently, I had climbed into the driver's seat, started playing with the steering wheel and somehow disengaging the brakes. "Ada ti ubing! Ada ti ubing!!" [there's a child] someone was yelling, and of course you'd already bolted out of the bakery when you saw the car start moving downhill. You ran quickly out to the driver's side, yanked open the door, grabbed the steering wheel to turn the wheels to the curb, while also engaging the hand- or foot-brakes (the story is unclear about this last part).
I was surely no wiser about this whole incident which fortunately had a happy ending thanks to your quick action on that morning. But of course it could have ended much worse, or even tragically, as a car careening out of control down steep Session Road with a toddler in it was sure to spell disaster.
Over the years and the retelling of this family tale, you never said you were mad or upset at me for this, and I can dimly remember at some point you saying you should've taken me inside the bakery with you, instead of leaving me by myself in the car.
Thanks, Dad... wherever you are. In hindsight, that was perhaps the first instance where you did something for me that made all the difference, from that point on in my life.
[ Still one of my favorite pics of mom and dad... ]
