The life of Pye

As a toddler, I ran through the legs of my extended family and family friends. They stood rooted like trunks of wisdom, rigid with years of experience. I reach a clearing and halt in front of a particularly settled set of roots, my great grandfather’s ankles. I take two steps back and scan up the body to take in the towering figure before me and find his gentle smile. This is the only memory I have of my great grandfather, the man that the three women who raised me revere with such fondness.

My great grandmother, who, to this day, damns tattoos as “pooleeshness" with the full venom of her Tagalog accent, removes any offending progeny’s pictures from her sight. Such as my cousins, who, after receiving their bodily modifications, no longer have their portraits on her nightstand. Only photos of me remain, including one from my first communion as a gentile, unrebellious ten year old with a rosary in his clasped hands and eyes tilted toward the light of God. But still my great grandmother finds no irony in affectionately retelling the story of her husband having a tattoo done of a crescent moon on his left shoulder, symbolizing his devotion to his wife, Cresencia Reyes. My great grandmother, at the recounting of this story, slumps into the image of a schoolgirl in love but immediately snaps back to warn me of all the negative repercussions of the taboo that is tattoo, threatening me to leave and go back to the Philippines, presumably never to talk to me again. My great grandfather, in getting a tattoo, endured pain to preserve love and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. As a child, my grandmother lived through the Japanese occupation in the Philippines during the Second World War. Her mother and father, my great grandmother and great grandfather, naturally did everything in their power to keep their family alive. When the Japanese barracks overflowed, the soldiers resorted to quartering Filipino citizens’ homes. My great grandfather observed their children bouncing on the laps of foreign soldiers, as his family friends were left to the whim of the troops. A company finally knocked on the door of my grandmother’s home, my great grandfather responded saying he would not allow the armed men to live with his family. As the soldiers cocked their weapons, readying to kill my great grandfather, he asked to speak with the captain. One of the soldiers pressed a rifle barrel to the back of his head; my great grandfather spoke directly to the captain and said unflinchingly, “Shoot me, steal my possessions, but let my family go." My grandmother’s house would be the only home in the neighborhood without Japanese soldiers occupying it. Winning through courage instead of through force, my great grandfather possessed an unyielding nature to fight without fighting. One lesson my great grandfather imparted in my mother was how to put out a candle by pinching the wick. “You have to know how to take pain," he would say to my mother as she’d wince from the flame. As a young man, he worked at the pier. He was confronted by a cargo loader, a man of much bigger and stronger build than my great grandfather. When this brute harassed my great grandfather to do some work for him, my great grandfather refused to yield to his arrogance, accepting a challenge to fight. Effortlessly, the hulking man knocked down my great grandfather, but he calmly stood back up and looked the rhinoceros of a man dead in the eye. The rhino would continue to punch my great grandfather down and with each earthshaking strike, and despite being painted with his own blood, my great grandfather would continue to stand up, looking down on the man. Finally the cargo loader forfeited, not having the heart to strike my great grandfather once more. My mother says that if he was still alive, my great grandfather would have taught me to fight, just like he taught his children and grandchildren, my aunts and uncles. Francisco Reyes, or as we in the family knew him, Pye, outlives himself through our affectionate memories. At eighteen, finishing my high school career, I feel as though I am running out of youth, rapidly. The motto “live fast, die young" written across the cigarette-toting faces of horny teenagers across the world provoke me for my uneventful life. Missed opportunities at near-death experiences taunt my ego, riddling my self-confidence with holes of self-deprecation. But at times of wavering self-worth, I think of the life my great grandfather led. Like in the quote apparently inaccurately attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, “To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded." At ninety-four-years old, my great grandfather passed away with many people left not only breathing easier, but breathing more purposefully, with aims to live happier, to laugh and love, and so on. - GMANews.TV Deo Deiparine, 18, lives in Glastonbury, Connecticut and just graduated from the Loomis Chaffee School, a New England prep school. Tuloy ang kwentuhan! Mga Kapuso, sana’y hindi kayo magsawa sa pagtangkilik sa ating pitak na ito. Habang may mga kababayan tayo sa abroad - pati ang kanilang mga kabiyak, anak, ina, ama o sinuman na kabahagi ng kanilang buhay - na nais magpaabot ng kanilang saloobin mananatili po ang inyong Kwentong Kapuso. Katulad ng dati, hindi kami magsasawa na basahin ang inyong mga kwento - maigsi man o mahaba. Kahit na ang laman nito ay naglalabas ng sama ng loob, nagbibigay ng inspirasyon, gustong magpayo, magsumbong, magpatawa o kahit nagpapalipas lang ng oras. Kaya hihintayin namin ang inyong mga email na maaari ninyo ipadala sa Pinoyabroad@gmanews.tv Sa inyo mga kababayan namin saan mang dako ng mundo, kami po'y saludo sa inyo. Kaya ilabas ang iyong saloobin, ikuwento mo Kapuso!