A Glance From The Past Poem by Efren Petalver Carranza

Where Have The Days Gone?
EPC-DECXIIMMXI

Back then, when you lived in a small barrio, there was no bitterness of being born poor. All neighborhoods, in their likeness, added no insult to my childhood when everybody called their brewed roasted rice - a coffee. Or, maybe, it was how father taught me to call it - a coffee!

Yes! Just before the first crow of rooster, my father would rise early to fuel a kiln to brew his roasted rice in a clay pot, pour it on a tin cup, and then off he goes to the field. And before the morning sun gets into the high noon, my eldest sister would bring his breakfast.

It's amazing to deem why father would build me a rice-straw hut at the center of a ricefield, for it was not my rice-straw-house to play, but as a shade to shoo the birds away from the newly harvested rice being sun-dried. Until these seeds become fully dried, we lived here much like our second home with kitchen apparatus and utensils. Father and I would sleep on a bamboo bench. And back then, life was pure, simple, and normal, and I didn't see any day of reason should future bring me somewhere else.
But hard labor, sometimes, caused my father to visit his quack-doctors for a massage with herbal coconut oils and all other things to relieve his pains. Quack-doctors believed to have miraculous power to cure the act of witches and devils as well. Yet, with lack of centavo on my father's hand, we practiced barter of rice, fish, poultry, and vegetables for such services.

And back then, all youngsters played on the streets without fear of being kidnapped, without parents being accused of child abandonment; punished yet not as a child abuse. We knew how to fear from our parents unlike some generations of today. They are fearless since law protects them. I am not saying that we lived in lawless land; we were just purely obedient children than these children of today.

For all things are twisted: The inversion of the whole goodness of the past into smart-mouth-newer generations is caused by technology and new laws. I suppose some laws [though I'm not expert of any kind] contribute the hardening of these children's hearts and lost their five-senses including their common senses of how obedience and respect play roles in their growth. Of course, it starts from home but everything that surrounds them have full contribution to who they become. And where we live, absolutely!

Blame it on my childhood but still! I don't take any insult when I call your rice tea - a coffee; when you're having BRUNCH at 10: 00 AM, and I say breakfast; and your physical therapist a quack doctor. All I know I was better than my father and my sons think they're smarter than me.

And this is how days go by! !