The Formative Years

I almost drowned when I was seven. My friends in that old neighborhood in Santa Ana, Manila all knew how to swim. Most swam doggie-style, but at least they stayed afloat. I didn't.

I remember diving into the pool after everyone else did and in an instant, all I could see were violent bubbles. I was gasping for air as I kept sinking on the steep incline of the pool's bottom surface. The more I tried to find air, the deeper I sank. I remember thinking that I would not get a chance to finally meet the child actress, Tessie Agana, who was my obsession in those days. I did not think of my parents, brothers and sisters. I thought of Tessie Agana and how I would not have a chance to ever meet her.

My life did not flash before my mind's eye, there was only surrender and a realization that my young life was about to be snuffed. Just then, there was a push against my back. Another push. Then another, and I could see the sky once more.

I had been saved by my friend Neto, who was probably two years older and very athletic even at that young age.

When I finally drown in the waters of my old age - which I am betting is still quite a ways from now - I don't expect to see my whole life unfolding before me either, contrary to what has been written about in books and movie scripts. I expect only an eerie silence, a cosmic resignation, a sublime acceptance.

Whatever parade and review of my life's icons, the nostalgic whispers of the real-life characters in my youth, the imagined giants who informed my moral and character building, those are happening now. Not at the point of death, but in moments such as now, when I wake up and spend a morning reflecting on my life.

My first class party (sophomore in high school) was an Elvis-filled night. One of my classmates, Jorge Bunag, shook his hips, stabbed his knees in a downward spiral, as his body gyrated to the tune of Blue Suede Shoes. It wasn't really my first party. That was a party at the home of my older brother's classmate, Gilbert Evaristo. I don't remember the music that was being played, though I'm willing to bet it was Frank Sinatra. Sinatra was all we listened and danced to in those days.

I remember dancing with a girl who may have been twelve - I was thirteen - and telling a joke which I considered particularly funny. I laughed so hard at my own joke that a bubble formed from my right nostril. I was so embarrassed I quickly turned around and left the girl in the middle of the dance floor. I glanced back at her to see that she was frozen in place, not knowing that she had just suffered the first trauma of her young life.

******************************************************

I remember having a book of pictures of Brigitte Bardot. I don't know how I got to own that book. I might have gotten it from my father's collection of books and paperbacks. My dad was an avid reader of pulp fiction and an admirer of the female form.

Brigitte Bardot, or B.B., was to an average 14-year-old boy like me the ultimate pinup girl. She had a bronzed body, long legs, a bosom made for the gods, narrow hips, and full, sensual lips. The old woman who did our family's laundry often caught me glancing at B.B.'s pictures while doing what normal 14-year-olds normally do. I did not care that she saw me. I remember thinking she was old anyway, what did she know?

******************************************************

The Beatles introduced me to the subtle intricacies of young adulthood. I was graduating from the unrequited love of Frank Sinatra ("If you are but a dream, I hope I'd never waken...") to the coy and complicated emotions of Beatle-land ("If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true?" and "Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover").

I remember having a girl friend where I worked who spoke to me in Beatle-talk. Whenever she wanted to tell me anything, she quoted a line from one of the Beatles' songs.

******************************************************

JFK was a huge influence on my political ideology. I am a Democrat now because Kennedy was a Democrat. I am a liberal-progressive despite the fact that where I grew up - La Salle - manufactured, and still does, religious conservatives. By the hundreds, by the thousands.

JFK also sent me subliminal signals that people who were borderline heroic were also sometimes immoral in their daily lives. I thought in those days that JFK was one of the exceptions, that he was one of the few heroic figures who were also immoral. Now I know that a person's personal morality has no connection with his heroism or lack thereof.

Marilyn's "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" before the world's TV cameras encapsulated the ill-fated romance between the world's greatest living man of the era and the world's most famous, most desirable woman.

*******************************************************

Marlon Brando was the first of the "method" actors who came out of a small acting school in New York. Founded and operated by the father of Geraldine Chaplin, Charlie Chaplin's wife and later widow - who appeared as the wife of Omar Shariff's Dr. Zhivago - the acting school produced James Dean, Paul Newman and many other actors and actresses who became giants on the movie screen.

Brando was only one of the many actors who graduated from the famous "method" acting school with a mission to transform acting into an art form. To be sure, there were great actors who had preceded Brando. Those actors, however, were not products of any school. They were great because they were great natural talents. Recall Lawrence Olivier, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Henry Fonda.

*******************************************************

I'm willing to bet that the generations that came after my generation have their own set of memories that make them feel that theirs have been lives worth living. But I just don't see how their wonder years could have the same sense of discovery that people of my generation enjoyed in our formative years.

Society allowed us to grow and become our individual selves. We roamed the streets and came home in time for dinner, our parents all the while knowing that wherever we were, we were safely discovering our ever-expanding world. Today, kids are forbidden from venturing out into the streets because so many kids disappear only to be found later in ditches, lifeless and covered with mud.

There are so many crazies, perverts and all kinds and degrees of social deviants that kids are locked up in houses out of necessity. Thank God for video and computer games kids can stay home and not end up wrecking the furniture.

When they are in their sixties, seventies, eighties and beyond, are the kids going to have memories of their adventures and misadventures, or are they going to have memories of their degree of expertise in Warcraft III? Will they remember how good they had become in Halo 3?

The generations born since the turn of the 20th century probably worried about the generations coming after them. The world was shrinking and becoming more dangerous. I imagine, however, that the older generations living at the end of the 19th century envied the younger generations because the kids in those days were beginning to discover the wonders of indoor plumbing. The world was also starting to eschew war as their countries' primary foreign policy strategy.

The 20th century brought us sanity and sanitary living. The 20th century enshrined the value of human life, human rights and civil rights.

The 21st century is threatening to dismantle all that we accomplished in the past 100 years, as the world moves towards the clash of civilizations (Islam versus the rest of the world), the imprisonment of our young (fear of perverts, rapists, serial murderers and such who prey on children and women), the rise of the counter-culture (tattoos, body jewelry, drugs, four-letter words) and the institutionalization of long-term unemployment.

What will the memories of today's digital generation look like?