Farewell to a Great Isinay Teacher

She sang to us the Indian Serenade and Sweet Afton like we were kids that needed pacifying with a lullaby. In her characteristic mellifluous voice she animatedly recited several stanzas of Longfellow's Song of Hiawata. She taught us how to conjugate sentences in English and introduced us to such phrases as apple of one’s eye and emotion recollected in tranquility. And one time that the unmistakable aroma of green tamarind wafted in the classroom, she called our attention to the fact that the correct Isinay word for “sour” was maesom and not mapayit.

A

t the St. Mary’s High School in Dupax, Nueva Vizcaya, easily the teacher who inspired me the most was Mrs. Ermelinda Castañeda Magalad -- or Madam Magalad for short among us her students. Born December 1st, 1910, she passed away in Quezon City last February 19 at the age of 100 years, 2 months, and 18 days, and got interred at the Loyola Memorial Park in Marikina. 

I’m doing a full post about Madam Magalad here not so much because she was the best English teacher I ever had in my 24 years of attending classes (since Kindergarten up to Graduate School) as because it was she who had unwittingly blazed the trail for me to take a second look at the beauty of the written word, including the Isinay language.

A Stickler for Correct Usage

It was Madam Magalad who taught me how to conjugate English sentences. You know the kind -- subject, predicate, object, indirect object, apositive, and all that stuff. (In fact, when  my cousin and St.Mary's classmate Jessie Lopez Castro texted me about our teacher's passing away, that was one of the things that immediately came to my mind. I recalled how one time I was the only one who correctly conjugated a difficult irregular sentence on the blackboard, and my two rivals for the top of the honor rolls looked like they just bit sour tamarind.)

Indeed, aside from introducing us to the concept of idioms, Madam Magalad was also a stickler for correct grammar and correct usage -- be it in English or Isinay. Her pet peeve was "taken cared of" -- it should be "taken care of", she said, as the "care" here is a direct object and not a verb. 

It was from her that I got to learn that the proper Isinay phrase for the English "a while ago" is besan ye and not umommo ya which in itself is wrong grammar. Umommoy, she said, is in the future, meaning "in a little while" or "later."

Today, we lesser mortals would of course refer to umommoy as "by and by."

Inspirational Poem-Songs

I'm not sure now (I too have my "senior moments") but during my time I think it was Madam Magalad who introduced "Laarni a Dream" to us First Year St. Mary's students.  But this I'm sure of: when I was in 4th year, she taught us the tune of "The Indian Serenade":

I arise from dreams of thee 
In the first sweet sleep of night 
When the winds are breathing low 
And the stars are shining bright.

I don't know if it was by design. She also taught us that the very lyrical "Sweet Afton" also had a tune, one that I learned decades later was similar to one of the tunes of the Christmas carol "Away in a Manger."

Anyway, I liked the poem/song's Nature-attuned words:

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream

Thou stock dove whose echo resounds thro' the glen
Ye wild whistly blackbirds in yon thorny den
Thou green crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear
I charge you, disturb not my slumbering fair

How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighboring hills
Far mark'd with the courses of clear winding rills
There daily I wander as noon rises high
My flocks and my Mary's sweet cot in my eye

How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below
Where, wild in the woodlands, the primroses blow
There oft, as mild evening sweeps over the lea
The sweet-scented birch shades my Mary and me

Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides
And winds by the cot where my Mary resides
How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave
As, gathering sweet flowerets, she stems thy clear wave

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes
Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream
So flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dreams!

Madam Magalad sang these songs (actually poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Robert Burns, respectively) as if we were kids that needed to be pacified or lulled to sleep with a lullaby. But looking back now, I did love not only the way she sang them but also the way the two songs helped me fight bouts of homesickness years later in UP Los Baños.

I loved to sing snippets of the rhythmical lines each time I felt like quitting school and wanting to be just a child again and free to roam the hills and fields and rivers of Dupax. For instance, I would surreptitiously hum them when I did my laundry at the dorm. Or when I crammed for my Trigonometry exams. Or reviewed my bayong-full of leaves and twigs for my tree-identification subject. And when one summer I painted a long-horned carabao amidst the backdrop of a red-orange sunset as a requirement for passing Humanities.

In other words, those songs that I learned from Madam Magalad kept me attached to my Dupax roots. Mind you, it had not been easy. This was because it was fashionable then to belt out songs by the Beatles then the Cascades then Bob Dylan then Peter, Paul & Mary -- then the "Internationale" and "Awit ng Mendiola" and other such activist songs before Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972.

Tamarinds Are Sour, Not Bitter

Ah, memories! One time the unmistakable aroma of green tamarind wafted in the classroom, Madam Magalad didn't castigate whoever it was who brought the fruits to be shared among the girls in class.

Instead, this Isinay teacher of several generations (and daughter of the former Nueva Vizcaya Governor Alfonso Castañeda) went into a little lecture that the correct Isinay term for “sour” is not mapayit but maesom. (Sounds almost the same as the Ilocano naalsem and the Tagalog maasim.)

For the sake of this blog's readers, the Isinay mapayit is of course “bitter” in English (napait in Iloco; mapait in Tagalog). Thus, it is correct to say, in Isinay: “Mapayit di tamtam di apalyar” (The ampalaya tastes bitter). But it is wrong to say: “Mapayit di tamtam sompalo war an mata” (Unripe tamarind tastes bitter).

How I wish Madam Magalad was still in Dupax when I was asking around for the correct Isinay word for "smile."

For, indeed, it took a long time for senior citizens, including Bona^ si Isinay (Isinay Culture) Vice President Abraham Reyes who jokingly proposed mantatawa an marin man-awiwit di tamilnar (literally: laugh but not with twisted lips), to submit their respective guesses before somebody (Uwa Sofia Arroyo) came out with the final word mangumimit.

It took sometime, too, before my wedding godmother Francisca Felix viuda de Mayangat remembered her father use the term burarol when I was almost getting desperate asking around for the Isinay term for "kite." Before then, almost everyone I asked who played kites when they were young just said they grew up knowing that that plaything they call ullaw in Ilocano and saranggola in Tagalog was simply referred to as "kite."

I digress, but the prevalent use in Dupax of the English name for kite is similar to the case of the cricket (yes, the black insect made popular by the cartoon character Jimminy Cricket). My father's cousin Ambrosio Mambear and my former neighbor Guillermo "Base" Abijay Calacala Jr. could not recall an Isinay term for it but they do know that the mole cricket (the brown one) is called e-e in Isinay (ararawan in Ilocano, suhong in Tagalog).

A Church Choir Institution

There is a picture or rather a sound that quite often pops out in my mind each time I go to Dupax and visit the St. Vincent Roman Catholic Church (the most famous place in Dupax del Sur whose baroque Spanish-era architecture got it named as a UNESCO world heritage site).

The picture is that of the combined image and voice of Madam Magalad on Christmas dawn masses animatedly leading --

"Christians arise and loud let us sing
To a sweet baby born as our king
Come to a stable where in a manger
Lies a wee stranger bedded in hay."

I'm not sure now if Madam Magalad also sang during Sunday masses. On regular Wednesday afternoons, however, her sweet voice also filled the air when we St. Mary's students went to church for the novena to the Immaculate Heart of Mary (as part of the requirements in Religion) part of which included the singing of the --

"Immaculate Mary, we come at thy call
And lo at thy altar before thee we fall
Ave, Ave, Ave Maria!"

Had it not been for Madam Magalad's leadership, many of us then would not have loved to sing with feeling the Wednesday novena finale:

"Mother dearest, Mother fairest help of all who call on thee
Virgin purest, brightest, rarest help us help we cry to thee!"

During Holy Week when we sang Tantum Ergo the hymn would not seem to be complete then if it did not include Madam Magalad's voice. She was not only our lead singer but also conductor and metronome as she set the keys that would enable us adolescent boys to sing the high pitches without going "kiyok-kiyok" (like wild cockerels) with our vocal chords.

There are of course other choir singers in Dupax then (like Apu Ane Bastero and Juan Dinu). But somehow Madam Magalad's soprano(?) voice would rise distinctly over the other church cantores as immediately after the officiating priest exclaimed “Gloria in Excelsis Deo!" they rendered the truly glorious and heavenly
  
Gloria… in Excelsis Deo!
Gloria… in Excelsis Deo!

If there would be any semblance of competition then, it could only be the brightly twinkling star of Bethlehem "walking" (manlaar) towards the manger... while in the choir loft above the two gigantic columns at the entrance of the church, the Spanish national anthem is being played in deafening pitch by the combined forces of the rivals St. Vincent Orchestra and Eagle Swing Orchestra... and high above them all the unbroken bells in the kampanario (belfry) went tang-tang-tang!

Part of those bygone sounds and images inside the church, of course, were us kids attending the misa de gallo suddenly going awake, particularly the boys who immediately followed to church -- with unwashed faces, uncombed hair, still sleepy eyes and all -- any of the two orchestras as they went around the almost 8-shaped main road that looped around central Dupax playing Joy to the World or Ang Pasko Ay Sumapit in a recently done-away-with tradition in Dupax del Sur we called diana.

We would stay awake and would stay so until the mass is over or at least until the joyful pe-re-re-re... perep-perep-perep-perep... pe-re-re-re... perep-perep-pere! has stopped as the brightly shining bittuwon has reached the altar and Joseph and Mary and their entourage of shepherds complete with goats plus the three kings have reached the manger.

I hasten to add here that the apart from the huge "star" our eyes would be trasfixed on the belen that almost always had as backdrop a panoramic view of Bethlehem painted (on glued sheets of Manila paper or cement bags) by the Isinay artist Andres Bombongan who is now also gone.

Madam Magalad's Advice

In the late 1960s, it was still fashionable then for students to have slum books where one was asked by an owner to put in his/her hobbies, favorite motto, favorite actor and actress, ambition, etc. Some of them had Susan Roces, Amalia Fuentes, or just photos of red roses on the cover.

Not one to pass the opportunity of having mementos from friendly classmates, I bought this less riotous and definitely not of the artista-fanatic kind of booklet for one peso and fifty centavos. This one contained the same template asking autographs from people, including their photos (which in Dupax was next to impossible for students to have then, so the normal answer one would get was "see me in person"). And it had space at the bottom for remarks.

Towards graduation time (I think it was a break from Mrs. Magalad's rehearsing us with our graduation song "This is the long awaited day, this is the day we prayed to come..."), I suddenly thought it would be nice to have her sign my slum book. You know what she wrote in her characteristic long-hand?

"Remember journalism? You can do it!"

That single liner, along with memories of her maesom and besan ye reminders, became one of my guiding lights for a long, long time when I had to engage in some "emotions recollected in tranquility" even long, long after I left the portals of St. Mary's! -- charlz castro

Holy Week In Dupax

(NOTE: I just found this essay stashed in a blogsite that I could no longer write new posts to because I forgot my user's name and password to it and, no matter how I tried to retrieve them, I couldn't get through the service-provider's barricade. I'm re-posting it here with some modifications in the hope that its contents would still be relevant to the memory of former Dupax busybodies who, like me, certainly miss those bygone days of Lent.)
 
Penitent yet nostalgic Lenten season recollections of an almost senior Dupax citizen 

I just hope the people of Dupax still celebrate the Lenten season like they used to when I was still fully obedient of the Catholic doctrines taught us in catechism school.

The years (not to mention the semi-peripatetic nature of my professional life which made me live in places far from the old town, and which forced me to have long absences from my usual ways) have so blurred the images of those bygone Lents. I have thus lost track of the sequences and even many of the personalities of the events associated with those Lenten seasons past.

Nevertheless, back then, we know it was Lent when one Wednesday we would attend mass and come out later with black crosses on our foreheads. Weekday masses then were held only at 6 in the morning and, if it happened that Ash Wednesday was still school season, we self-conscious boys made sure we avoided touching our forehead when we washed our faces in plain pumpwell (we called the thing gripo or bomba then) water before going to school.

Then came Palm Sunday, which we referred to then as Domingo de Ramos. It was easy to know when it was that kind of Sunday because the Thursday and Friday that followed it was printed red in the red-and-blue calendar that carried the name of saints. It was that Sunday of the year when suddenly the palms in the neighborhood, particularly the buri palms (which we called tahtah in Isinay and silag in Ilocano) of Imong Calacala, became useful. Otherwise we would only notice the palms when we needed material with which to tie sacks of palay to be brought to Mercado’s ricemill (kiskisan), or when “District Schools exhibit” period came and we Dupax Central Elementary School pupils were tasked to produce broom from the fibers of the buri stalk.

Domingo de Ramos (Palm Sunday), as far as I recall, was also the only day apart from Christmas when I saw my grandmother Inang Feliza go to church. Before she went to the centuries-old (the belfry carries the year 1776) St. Vincent Catholic Church, however, she made it a point to first drop by the house to kiss my sisters, bring bananas or karabasa or utung or tugi or whatever their produce in the bangkag or their uma was, and give us our share of the palaspas (coconut frond handicraft?) that Apong Pedro made for the occasion. Apong used yellow coconut fronds then and his artistic pieces almost always had a pineapple-shaped body and figures of birds or grasshoppers on the tip of the midribs. After mass, Mama would put the palaspas on the door or in a corner near the kitchen – it was believed to be an-anib (talisman) against kimat (lightning).

The days that followed were marked with certain stillness. Even the wind stopped blowing. I guess even the birds that used to be noisy during other days of the year, also stopped chirping, cawing, and tweet-tweeting. But ah, the tamarind, the anonas, the mango, the lumboy, and the guava trees along with the sapang bushes had ripe fruits by then and their irresistible calls to self-taught tree-climbers like me were only rivaled by the seemingly increased population and tame nature of birds in the nearby groves.

Yet, as if on cue, normally boisterous, itchy-footed, and slingshot-happy kids like me stayed home then. Suddenly we were well behaved. Suddenly nobody climbed the fruiting trees in the neighborhood. Suddenly no one ran after the neighbor's cat that earlier chewed a pet martines bird sunning itself after a bath.

As if by miracle, too, we became useful in mending fences, splitting wood with axe (agbalsig in Ilocano; manisih in Isinay), guarding pre-harvest rice or palay let out to dry on mats on the roadside, watering wilting coffee saplings and eggplants, and baby-sitting (agaw-awir in Ilocano; mangahayam in Isinay) kid siblings. Oh well, that's penitencia as we knew it. You could almost hear the saraguelas trees (with their now leafless branches starting to go heavy with hundreds of marble-sized green and stony fruits) laugh and seemingly whisper gunggunam! (in Isinay: sanat naeyam! In Tagalog: buti nga sa iyo! In English: it suits you!).

Oh yes, even the Spanish-era church bells (the peeling of which provided our only time-piece then, usually at 7AM, 1PM, and 6PM) also became silent, starting Maundy Thursday (Huebes Santo), the whole of Black Friday (Biernes Santo) and up to Holy Saturday (Sabado de Gloria). Pity for those who die during such days when the bells are silent as they would not have the privilege of having their passing away announced by the then familiar mournful and seconds-apart peeling of the bells.

In place of the ringing of the bells on Good Friday, particularly when it would have to be announced that the libut (procession) was about to start or was already on its way around the town, was the tai-ta^ (palakapak in Ilocano; bamboo clapper in English). A dozen or so boys each with his own bamboo clapper would be perched on the topmost part of the torre (belfry) would make their bamboo instruments make sound with all their might.

The church sacristan mayor (at the time, it was Eligio Seangoy and then Eufracio "Parasyo^" Dinu) would prohibit us lesser boys to also go and grope our way on the very narrow and dark winding stairs up to the topmost level of the torre -- for our own safety then, I guess. And so, if ever we would get past him, one of the boys would be instructed to pull the shaky wooden ladder up to the top where there is a flimsy and also centuries-old brick railing. And we would just content ourselves peering through the huge bells to look at the "ant-sized" church-goers below.

Of course, I would join the procession -- as at the time I had this inclination to become a priest (a spinoff, I guess, of my having been a consistent First Honor in Religion from the elementary grades up to 4th year high school). From the St. Vincent Church, the libut first turned left towards Bagumbayan; turned left again at the back of the church; crossed the Bailey bridge across Abannatan at the northern edge of St. Mary's High; went straight to the Dereya part of Domang; turned left again past Castillo's kiskisan and the public market and on to our part of Domang (where Mama has already put out a tiny table where a couple of candles provide illumination to statues of Mary and San Vicente Ferrer); turned left again past the Nuestro, Salirungan and Mejia houses; then left again at the Magallanes part straight to the Pastor Perez, Cirilo Magaway, Jose Castro, Fernandez, Mercado ricemill and Guiab part; then right towards Dupaj passing by the Mamaoag, Castaneda and Guzman houses and then the historic Dampol Bridge. After Dampol, past the front of St. Mary's and the century-old acacia trees, the procession would hit the tip of the church grounds again but would turn right at what would pass for the widest road/boulevard/avenue in Dupax del Sur, past the side of the Dupax Town Hall and the Reyes, Arroyo, Lopez, Albano, Evaristo, Magalad, Felix and Galapon homes; turn left past the Bombongan, Sagario, Boada, Daran, and Dingras homes; then left again past the corner of the Ivilao Road and the Abijay, Guzman, Ramos, Vilde, Daran, Ferrer, Adducul homes; then left again to the Feliux and Galutera homes, then a slight right and left in front of the plaza; then back to the church.

All along the sturdy taita^ boys atop the belfry continued clapping their bamboo instruments and their plak-plak-plak choruses would compete with the solemn procession hymns played by the St. Vincent Orchestra on the front section of the procession and then towards the rear was the Eagle Swing Orchestra. Oh yes, that's how the Black Friday procession typically looked like then but with all the available and appropriate statues in the Church, including San Vicente Ferrer (the patron saint of Dupax) and the "Dead Nazarene" (my term, harking back to my boyhood when we avoided looking at the figure of Jesus lying in a glass-encased bed each time we would enter the church alone to to say a little prayer or just to genuflect).

The following day, Saturday, the uncircumcized among us would troop to Morgado, the town's only panday (blacksmith) at the time, to undergo the right of manhood (called kugit) in nearby Abannatan. The rest of us would join family picnics by the river (wangwang in Isinay), mostly in Iiyo, some at the Yeso, some at the Nazareno/Birayan area, and some further upstream, where we would sun ourselves all day catching goby (sappilan in Isinay; bunog in Ilocano) via our Isinay and Ilocano ways of catching river edibles such as the use of the batbateng, sarep, lipit, pi^yat, and tabukol.

Sunday would be Easter Sunday and -- alleluia!-- the church bells would ring happily and loudly again as if to say through their thick iron-bronze-copper immensities that, indeed, the Lord is risen. This time the "dead Jesus" (again, a name that I invented; see photo) would be pulled away to an inconspicuous corner of the church where it would gather dust and cobwebs until it gets noticed again when another Holy Week came. In its place would be a half-clothed statue of a standing and younger Christ, with its palms and side and feet still red with "wound".

I'm not sure now if the Risen Christ took the right or the left path as it was carried by devotees from the church. What I'm sure of was that the other path would be taken by a black-veiled statue of Mother Mary with its artificial long and curly tresses. And the two statues (along with their bearers) would meet under a square "corral" made of bamboo poles and decorated with colorful crepe paper and fern fronds (no flowers then nor even anahaw fronds in Dupax in April!) where, as climax of the ceremony, a girl seated on a laawe (I'll describe this later in another post) would be very slowly lowered down to Mother Mary while singing "Aaal...le...ee...luuuu...yaa!" to the tune of the church organ played by Juan Dinu (or was it another guy?) and/or the violin (which we called eng-eng) played expertly by Juan Felix.

Still singing with quivering but still sweet voice, the "angel" would next slowly remove Mother Mary's black veil and then the cantores (church singers) Juan Dinu, Juana Bastero, ___ Campo, et al. would sing some more Latin hymns appropriate for the Sabet (yes, that's how Papa used to call it). And then the two statues would be carried side by side back to the church as the orchestra (I guess the combined St. Vincent and Eagle) would play a happier procession music... and we kids jostled or outraced one another back inside the church and to our pews. All the while the church bells would ring "kaleng-kaleng-kaleng!" very loudly again.

Ah, Dupax... when its church bells still echoed in the hills and grass was still green and I climbed almost all the town's tamarinds! -- CHARLZ CASTRO