A Day in the Life...

I was born at around two o' clock in the morning of the seventy-second year of the twentieth century, as I have been told by my mother. If hospital records would concur, then this must be the fact. My mother once told me that she had a reasonable difficulty in her labor that it took her towards the beginning of dawn before I first breathe the air of this mortal world. That day, all Moslems went to the community mosque because it was also the day in the Hijrah Calendar to be the commemoration of the birth of Prophet Mohammad (P.B.U.H.), the feast of the Maullud-din-nabi. I had a very special affiliation with this coincidence because when there is nothing more to say, I always mentioned to my friends that indeed I was born on the day Prophet Muhammad (P.B.U.H.) was born. To be born in the day a known prophet was born may be a sign of some bigger things for me ahead I thought, something grand that I had a sentiment of grandeur because of the coincidences of my birth. There was some so...

When I entered high school my grandfather took me back and paid for the expensive fees of my catholic schooling. He had become weaker and weaker that perhaps, he needed someone to tend over him when weakness consumed him altogether. He had bouts with asthma that often, we both slept in the hospital for days. The hospital became my second home during those years while I struggled with my studies. In his healthier days, he would give me Arabic lessons and great myths of old. Being a Moslem preacher that he was, he was always writing some Arabic scribbles into his minute notebooks and I would ask about them. "It is the mysteries of the world." He would always say. I wanted to ask if for who does he writes it for when almost nobody could understand Arabic but I did not. I would observe him scribbling all afternoon like a well-versed scholar on composing his post-graduate opus. He had an apprentice whom he always consults every now and then, a young preacher named Abiri...

Panampangan Beach, Sapa-Sapa Municipality It was a huge disappointment to find out that although dried fish processing was rampant in our island hometown, there was just too much buyers of the goods that I could not possibly penetrate the cartel in so short a time. Traders from as far up north in Pagadian City, about five hundred miles from Zamboanga, would come and negotiate with the local fishermen and cornered the market there. I was advised that seizing a sufficient amount of the goods would entail some patience and a lengthened stay in the islands. This was an untenable idea for me. The urban man in me would be so hard pressed to slide into the virtual desolation of rural life, to be "the man called Friday" and away from the honking noise and pollution of the city. While the serenity of the islands provided me a great breather, it was imaginable for me then to succumb into general silence of a rural environment. There would be just too much silence that it would bord...