MY FATHER, CAPTAIN BLOOD

A week ago, my nephew Leo Jonathan tagged me a heartwarming picture of an ageing couple with this caption: “Let’s love our parents. We are so busy growing up we often forget they are also growing old.” Well, I am past the ‘growing up’ and speeding up without a brake to ‘growing old.’ But of course, we their parents in their growing up years also have our own parents, their grandparents who are now gone.

His FB post sent memories tumbling back to me. My father stayed with me most of my life, from my growing up years in Ilocos to the time I got married and had children in Manila. In his last years after a stroke, he stayed with my only sister (Leo’s mother) so he could also be near the house of our oldest brother who was a doctor. My other brother was abroad at that time.

Death, they say, is an endless proposition. We never know when it’s time. On the last two weeks before my father died, I failed to see him. I wasn’t able to visit him because I was too busy.Who knew he would pass away on those days I wasn’t there?They rushed him to the hospital and we his children kept vigil at his death bed. But he was no longer conscious to talk me. That was the biggest regret of my life.
This is for my father. It’s a hard piece to write for a loved one long gone, so I’m trying my best to make it as light as I could manage, the way father would have wanted…


In our home town in Lapog, they knew you as Captain Blood. That was how they called you everywhere we went when I was a kid.
I was spellbound by that name, if you ask me, father. In my young imagination, it conjured images of heroes like…for example Captain Barbell? Can you imagine someone with that name in a small town in Ilocos and everybody asking me “Where’s your father Captain Blood?” Your Christian name really was Jose or Tata Jose or Mang Joe but naturally, I liked that Captain name better! And I felt no desire to know how on earth you got it.

You were simply father to me – a “Captain” with the surname “Blood,” period.

Just a few months ago, five decades later, I took interest to do a bit of research in the Internet (easy!). This I found:

‘Captain Blood’ was a fictional character in a novel written by Rafael Sabatini about a swashbuckling pirate who fascinated the people’s imagination in the pre-war era with his adventures. He was portrayed in the blockbuster movie of the same title for its first run in 1935 by no less than Hollywood’s immortal heartthrob, Errol Flynn with the famous Olivia de Havilland as his screen partner.

Ah, interesting. “Captain Blood” – my father after Errol Flynn! That really got me. Beautiful! That ‘hero’ hunch was right ---but how on earth…?

You died at age 82 but let’s talk about the young days. You were well-built and quite tall at around 5’10” for a typical Ilocano. You never stopped boasting about it and now I concede: okay, you cut a dashing figure in your black tuxedo for that pre-war wedding photograph with Mother. Now, brown (kayumanggi) is the trademark complexion of Ilocanos but your trademark was different, not the regular brown skin but several shades deeper, almost black -

Oh, that explains, Mother said then, why they call your father Captain Blood. You know, your father being dark-skinned. Huh…? In that Hollywood movie, Irish Dr. Peter Blood escaped from captivity as a slave then turned into Captain Blood, the dashing buccaneer by a twist of fate. Certainly he was white. And blood, the great leveler in our color coded human race is, of course, red.

Mother had a point, all right. But for half a century until that Internet discovery, C-a-p-t-a-in B-l-o-o-d was a mystery to me. Small towns have a penchant for inventing strange aliases. It was some sort of a culture. You get tagged till your dying day with a second name. Well, I tell you, whoever invented Captain Blood for you should be commended. Just imagine the prestige of an Ilocano version for the Hollywood icon!

Hold it then, Captain Blood my father, today I pay tribute to you. Were you the book hero when I wasn’t yet born? Or yours was a truly colorful life in the footsteps of that legend?

Anyway, this piece should have been written long ago when Father’s Day was still unheard of, when you were still alive to hear it from your daughter.

It took years and a grandson to nudge me to write it, to take courage to speak my heart out, wear it silly in my sleeve and spill my thoughts in public. But you see, we have a way of taking for granted people nearest us including our fathers even if they called them fearless Captain Bloods in their glory days.

We get preoccupied growing up, raising our own young families, chasing careers, fretting over our own hectic lives…
Years pass by, our kids grow up and we think our fathers will always be nearby. We think our fathers are invincible figures shuffling around the house, familiar shadows always there.

Yes, we forget our fathers also get old - until that day when we catch them huffing into the house, chasing their breaths. They have just taken a few meters’ walk around the village and now they are about to collapse with the small exertion. Their hands get wrinkled, their knees wobble, their eyes get weak but somehow we fail to notice.

One afternoon about 10 years ago, you went home earlier than usual. You were limping. “I stumbled on the sidewalk,” you said simply. That night, you had difficulty pulling down your socks but you tried to close your door so I wouldn’t see. We were told later, you had suffered a stroke.

Things were never the same from that day on. You stayed in bed. Our neighbors in the city never stopped telling me – you were in your 70s— that they often see you clambering up speeding public buses like an Olympic tri-athlete. But now you stagger like a toddler on his first steps…

Nights after that incident, as you lay on your bed, you said “My old town buddies are coming for me...”

I tried to imagine you, father, in your younger years in an era that now threatens to disappear before me. I imagined you happy, too, chatting and laughing as you were then, so full of life:

I was back in the 1960s as a little girl in Lapog of my memory: you were sitting on those lazy afternoons on a wooden bench at the shaded porch of Nana Geling’s store beside the town plaza’s giant acacia tree, flicking the ashes of a Hope cigarette, having a round of whiskey, laughing and trading stories with your old town buddies.

I see you turning for home at the toll of Angelus in the corner of our old McKinley Street in brisk youthful steps, a big hefty man in his trademark tucked-in long sleeved polo with bold geometric or flower prints, slightly rolled up. You were hurrying to be home at nightfall because in those days, electricity was yet unknown in our small town.

In my mind’s eye, I watched the red sunset of Lapog appear in a huge fireball across the rice field in the west at the end of the narrow road where you took your corner turn past the house of the Purugganans, linger a few seconds then disappear in the gathering night.

Of course, your hair was always pressed glossy with Tancho pomade. And ah, you always wore shoes, didn’t you? You had rows under your bed, Florsheim leather from your brothers and friends sent home from California in the U.S. It was a family joke that you never catch Captain Blood without his shoes on even in his sleep. And any unfortunate fly that touches down on that super shiny shoe would certainly skid off!

In those days, the town held dances in December that became a much-awaited tradition we dubbed Christmas Festival, when the Lapoguenos leave behind their burdens of a year and enjoy the 7-day festivities.

There was much pageantry of ‘banderitas’ in streets, grand parades around town, noisy basketball tournaments in the old tennis court, folk dances. On New Year’s Eve, we crown our festival queen at the town plaza and adults get to dance to that ultimate sweet nostalgia, Daniel O’ Donnell & Mary Duff’s “Harbor Lights”/goodbye to tender nights beside the silvery sea…/ Or strut their tangos and sambas to the heart-thumping music of a hired orchestra. We the young set (!?) then who couldn’t be bothered by oldies’ stuff stayed out of the ballroom scene, chatting in groups at the Rizal Monument, making innocent flirtations around the fenced town square. You were the toast of the dancing crowd. You sure danced a mean tango, father!—to the endless ribbings among your friends later on.

And you enjoyed singing. I could see you now with us kids huddled in the living room of our old house on an early evening, feet thumping trying to get the right notes, then belting out an impassioned rendition of Jerry Lewis’ “Jambalaya and a crawfish pie….”After you’d finish the first lines of the song, you’d pause and say, “All right, kids, after me!” And we’d blurt into a raucous chorus, “Son-of- a - gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou!!” Shame on the Von Trapps, we sure had a good time!

I don’t remember if you had a guitar, but I still remember “Jambalaya” half a century later.

Those magic moments were exceptions to the rule because back then, you were mostly away someplace on unusual concerns, experimenting on tobacco crops (Burley & Virginia), gold-hunting, etc.

In one faded photograph I unearthed, you said to mother (scribbled at the back, undated, in English): “This is a remembrance in one of the remotest mountain barrios in Davao, Mindanao. See the one standing beside me? He is the chief of the Bagobos. He likes betel nut. They are very friendly and they entertained me well!” The picture showed you in your typical get-up of printed polo and flared Gabardine pants (still in gleaming black shoes!), posing with the locales in their traditional garb with a headdress, grinning ear-to-ear. You were out for a year exploring mind-boggling possibilities. In the mountains, see?

By all accounts, you loved adventures. Those were vague in my memory now. But I heard stories of you as Captain Blood a top trader of Virginia tobacco in its golden era and the legend of the town’s first Buick which they said was… yours?

And you told us your own stories of the dreaded private armies (‘saka-saka’) that terrorized Ilocos in the dark decades of the 60s and 70s. You claimed you knew them personally so they wouldn’t touch us your family. That really comforted me, father, if only you knew. In my tender age then I’ve seen how people in those days trembled behind locked doors and windows, talking in whispers about your ‘friends.’ They shut tight their houses and herd their men inside at the first fall of darkness. A gunshot at night, a victim falls dead on the roadside every single week or, was it every single day?

And then… there’s your first person account of Lapog’s war hero during the Japanese occupation, Constante Varilla Castro— Mang Tante to us your listening audience, somebody close to the family, you said and a relative of Mother, a Varilla.

That favorite war story of yours never lost its glory in the retelling. It was a story that I sensed later has had a profound effect on you: It was 1944, the townspeople were herded at gunpoint and locked up inside the town church of San Juan Bautista (St John de Baptist) by Japanese soldiers. They wanted to know where a fellow Japanese soldier was buried (?). Rifles were cocked and aimed at the people trapped inside, ready to shoot down everyone, men, women and children. Silence hung in the air like a blade of death. The children started to weep. It was war time; killings were cheap. The entire community could be wiped out in a few seconds if nobody stands up and talk…

Oh but to dredge up all the stories would make a book!

But I will get real personal now and remember instead the time you wrote me a speech for my Grade 6 graduation that was laced with Latin,“Viva Triumpator!” (What’s that again? Etc. I mumbled through that piece for a heroic 10 minutes without knowing what it meant! You were smiling so wide, so full of pride (and, surprise! we got heavy applause) I had to promptly forgive you for that incredible stunt.

Seriously, why am I mentioning that speech again? --- Because, as a young girl, it was my fondest memory of you. You wrote that speech while you were hundreds of miles away somewhere and then brought home that piece of paper (in yellow pad, ‘kudigo’ style) for me in time for my graduation.

The beauty of it was that it was your first attempt at writing for a public audience and you never even reached college. You finished high school (with the American Thomasites of history as mentors). Of course, you garnered ‘top honors’ in the school of hard knocks.

And yet, your confidence was overwhelming. You believed it was a perfect piece and you believed as much I will make a perfect delivery. That episode bonded us with the valuable lesson of self-confidence and mutual trust. Thank you, Father.

Oh, I know that this speech earned you the most number of “pogi” points with St. Peter up there in the category of creative writing, err… “Fathering 101.” Anyway, it easily defeated your war stories by the number of times it was told and retold by you; it had the longest theater run. Your mind till your last days remained wondrously alert, remembering the work’s every single word. I treasured that memory. It kept us connected till the end.

On mornings, I wake up early to catch the sunrise and have coffee. The kitchen is quiet not breathing with the clink of milk mugs and the stampede of tiny feet rushing for school bags. Are you listening, Father? You stayed with me the longest time. The boys you saw born, carried and rushed to their pediatricians, tended to in their naughty growing up years are now adults. They wash up on their own, go to offices, drive their own cars. You would have been so proud of them. They now have their own lives to lead.

I reach over for a coffee cup and my back aches. I try to gather up my slippers under the breakfast table and I feel the tendons creak. I’m feeling my age, too. The years have also caught up with me.

I remember you once complain, then in your twilight years, that those pesky Japanese soldiers never left you in peace. I hid in mountain caves and abandoned cemeteries, you said, when alleged false guerillas started tracking down Mang Tante who finally in that hell of a church scene in 1944, stood up to save the townspeople. You were his foster father of sorts.

You escaped that one, of course. Mang Tante the hero, as I understand, was killed.

You were Captain Blood the adventurer and survivor of many tragedies. Your grandchildren knew you as the cool lolo who remembers exactly where he put his wallet and how much in it and who could recite Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’ without missing a single beat. And who, as you tell them “have experienced holding bags of peso bills and having almost nothing in his pocket.”

The bad times, the good times, the highs and lows you breezed through these lessons of life and survival with the kind of irreverence, bold spirit and keen street smarts as did Captain Blood of Errol Flynn’s fame. If you could receive text messages up there, here’s one from me and the boys for seeing us through all your living days.

Thank you, father, with all my heart.