children
Children
By Conrado de QuirosPhilippine Daily InquirerFirst Posted 05:08:00 12/23/2010
IT WAS some weeks ago. It was early evening, the traffic light had turned red at an intersection on Congressional Avenue. I saw a couple of kids on the sidewalk. They hadn’t joined their companions who had gotten to the head of the line, which was the columns of cars idling in front of the traffic light, streaming around them like floodwater as soon as the light turned red. The two had stayed behind, and they were playing.
They couldn’t have been more than 5 and 3 years old, though you can always be wrong about these things. The soot and grime of a hard life can play tricks on age, masking it in a way that no make-up ever can. The older kid, a boy, was cradling the other one, a girl, in his arms, and he was tickling her with his chin, rubbing it on her face and body and sending her into spasms of giggling.
They were barefoot. All they had on were shirts that were too large and too long for them, blackened now by dirt and mud and smoke from the exhaust of cars. Their own skins were blackened by the hard knocks of life, which are probably not completely metaphorical, and blackened even more by the deepening dark. If their Fagins had been around to see them, they would have gotten a savage tongue-lashing or a few more hard knocks for goofing off when they should be hard at work earning their keep, or scraps at the table.
But there wasn’t one—or one in view. And the two kids, under the influence of something more powerful than rugby, had lapsed into what they were doing. That influence more powerful than a drug was childhood. For an instant, driven by the compelling force of what they were, they had forgotten what they were supposed to do, they had forgotten what the world bid them do, which was to work. They had remembered only they were children, and they had remembered only that children played.
And so for that one instant of time, for that one respite in time, they played, the older boy tickling the younger girl with his chin, their oversized shirts lying loose on their bodies, the hems of them splayed out on the ground, dragging dirt along as they moved. For that one instant of time, for that one dazzling, mesmerizing, magical crack in time, they were happy.
I was filled with mixed emotions when I saw this.
The first was a flash of anger and a fit of depression. It brought back memories of why I became an activist a long time ago and why I have remained so, in spirit at least if not in body, all these years. Why something as cruel as this can happen in this world, the abject deprivation of the kids emphasized by the fleet of cars gleaming in the lamplights—that was what drove me to go underground during martial law, the first couple of years full-time, the rest part-time while maintaining a government front (to which I was assigned), and remain so long afterward. You’ve got to rebel, physically and mentally, at this oppression.
To this day, I cannot look at a child that knocks on the window of my car without feeling a sense of dread. I don’t know, maybe some people have learned the trick of rendering them invisible, they are no longer bothered by the sight and sound of them, except when they become threatening or annoying. Or maybe they don’t even have to play mind tricks, they truly can no longer see them, comfort in the form of an air-conditioned car with lush sounds pouring out of the speakers making them blind and deaf to the fleeting shadows around them.
I still can. And I dread looking at them in the face because they cease to be a generic huddle, a tangle of arms and legs and appurtenances flitting by me, and turn into human beings. They become persons, they become individuals, they become flesh and blood. They become real. They become children. They become the brood that might have been my own, my daughter, my son, but for an accident of fate, or life, that plunged them into this maelstrom, that birthed them into this lot. Like these two tots playing on a curb one early evening in a busy street.
My second reaction was to wonder what in Christ’s name has turned Christmas into the plenitude-amid-want it has become. Or to the abundance and superfluity and gift-giving (or gift-wanting) it now is. The songs are pretty much gone now, replaced by the sounds of ads talking about the latest laptop, the latest car, the latest television you need to get for yourself for the holidays, you deserve it, you worked for it, you can pamper yourself with it without guilt, without even a down payment. I can’t get no satisfaction, “Wowowee” on a grand scale.
When the original Christmas had to do with a couple that was so penniless they were turned out by the inns on a cold wintry night the woman had to give birth to a child in a stable among the animals. How has an event that encourages contemplating the plight of the poor turned into raising a toast to the life of the rich? How has a season that is meant to make one rich in spirit even if poor in body turned into making one rich in gifts and impoverished in soul?
The sight of two kids who had nothing playing, and in that one instant of time having everything, made me a little ashamed of myself for falling into the trap of wanting way too many things over the years. It’s probably true: you’ve got to be a child again to enter the kingdom of God, however you interpret the kingdom of God for the non-religious. Children do tend to see things with simplicity, enough to tell emperors they are not wearing finery, they are in fact stark raving naked. Maybe all it takes to be blessed these days is to hug your loved ones a little more tightly, to be thankful for life’s little kindnesses, to play with your kids, or your apos (for those of us who have one). But I ramble.
Merry Christmas everyone.
By Conrado de QuirosPhilippine Daily InquirerFirst Posted 05:08:00 12/23/2010
IT WAS some weeks ago. It was early evening, the traffic light had turned red at an intersection on Congressional Avenue. I saw a couple of kids on the sidewalk. They hadn’t joined their companions who had gotten to the head of the line, which was the columns of cars idling in front of the traffic light, streaming around them like floodwater as soon as the light turned red. The two had stayed behind, and they were playing.
They couldn’t have been more than 5 and 3 years old, though you can always be wrong about these things. The soot and grime of a hard life can play tricks on age, masking it in a way that no make-up ever can. The older kid, a boy, was cradling the other one, a girl, in his arms, and he was tickling her with his chin, rubbing it on her face and body and sending her into spasms of giggling.
They were barefoot. All they had on were shirts that were too large and too long for them, blackened now by dirt and mud and smoke from the exhaust of cars. Their own skins were blackened by the hard knocks of life, which are probably not completely metaphorical, and blackened even more by the deepening dark. If their Fagins had been around to see them, they would have gotten a savage tongue-lashing or a few more hard knocks for goofing off when they should be hard at work earning their keep, or scraps at the table.
But there wasn’t one—or one in view. And the two kids, under the influence of something more powerful than rugby, had lapsed into what they were doing. That influence more powerful than a drug was childhood. For an instant, driven by the compelling force of what they were, they had forgotten what they were supposed to do, they had forgotten what the world bid them do, which was to work. They had remembered only they were children, and they had remembered only that children played.
And so for that one instant of time, for that one respite in time, they played, the older boy tickling the younger girl with his chin, their oversized shirts lying loose on their bodies, the hems of them splayed out on the ground, dragging dirt along as they moved. For that one instant of time, for that one dazzling, mesmerizing, magical crack in time, they were happy.
I was filled with mixed emotions when I saw this.
The first was a flash of anger and a fit of depression. It brought back memories of why I became an activist a long time ago and why I have remained so, in spirit at least if not in body, all these years. Why something as cruel as this can happen in this world, the abject deprivation of the kids emphasized by the fleet of cars gleaming in the lamplights—that was what drove me to go underground during martial law, the first couple of years full-time, the rest part-time while maintaining a government front (to which I was assigned), and remain so long afterward. You’ve got to rebel, physically and mentally, at this oppression.
To this day, I cannot look at a child that knocks on the window of my car without feeling a sense of dread. I don’t know, maybe some people have learned the trick of rendering them invisible, they are no longer bothered by the sight and sound of them, except when they become threatening or annoying. Or maybe they don’t even have to play mind tricks, they truly can no longer see them, comfort in the form of an air-conditioned car with lush sounds pouring out of the speakers making them blind and deaf to the fleeting shadows around them.
I still can. And I dread looking at them in the face because they cease to be a generic huddle, a tangle of arms and legs and appurtenances flitting by me, and turn into human beings. They become persons, they become individuals, they become flesh and blood. They become real. They become children. They become the brood that might have been my own, my daughter, my son, but for an accident of fate, or life, that plunged them into this maelstrom, that birthed them into this lot. Like these two tots playing on a curb one early evening in a busy street.
My second reaction was to wonder what in Christ’s name has turned Christmas into the plenitude-amid-want it has become. Or to the abundance and superfluity and gift-giving (or gift-wanting) it now is. The songs are pretty much gone now, replaced by the sounds of ads talking about the latest laptop, the latest car, the latest television you need to get for yourself for the holidays, you deserve it, you worked for it, you can pamper yourself with it without guilt, without even a down payment. I can’t get no satisfaction, “Wowowee” on a grand scale.
When the original Christmas had to do with a couple that was so penniless they were turned out by the inns on a cold wintry night the woman had to give birth to a child in a stable among the animals. How has an event that encourages contemplating the plight of the poor turned into raising a toast to the life of the rich? How has a season that is meant to make one rich in spirit even if poor in body turned into making one rich in gifts and impoverished in soul?
The sight of two kids who had nothing playing, and in that one instant of time having everything, made me a little ashamed of myself for falling into the trap of wanting way too many things over the years. It’s probably true: you’ve got to be a child again to enter the kingdom of God, however you interpret the kingdom of God for the non-religious. Children do tend to see things with simplicity, enough to tell emperors they are not wearing finery, they are in fact stark raving naked. Maybe all it takes to be blessed these days is to hug your loved ones a little more tightly, to be thankful for life’s little kindnesses, to play with your kids, or your apos (for those of us who have one). But I ramble.
Merry Christmas everyone.
posted by kitsch at 5:47 PM
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