FATHER’S DAY ESSAY | Daddy, can you please buy me time? | Lourdes M. Fernandez

AMONG the most iconic Filipino images of fathers are those showing our overseas Filipino workers coming home from, or leaving for, foreign shores to take on jobs for a better future for their families. And more often than not, beyond the hugs and kisses and tears, are the gifts—that long-sought PlayStation, branded rubber shoes, cell phone or some other gadgets, and fancy clothes.

Because I grew up in the pre-OFW era, graduating from high school just as the labor export policy was laid down, most of my memories of my father related not so much to gifts he bought, but gifts he made—in those precious moments he spared for us his nine children, because this was a daddy who always had time for them.

Daddy devoured history books, like most of his wartime generation, and had a particular liking for military history. This explains his fixation with building ship replicas. One fine Saturday he told us, “we will play ‘naval conquest’ like the great admirals did.” On some precious Saturday afternoons, the workshop was replaced by movie theater festivals. He idolized Fernando Poe Jr., and I can’t think of a time he said that “oh, I didn’t get to see that one.” He devoured FPJ movies so much that, whenever the Manila theaters scheduled their yearly “FPJ festivals”—when one can watch two, even three, back-to-back FPJ films of the past year in one afternoon, for the price of one ticket, he made it a point to go.

This “sword” by daddy is still occasionally used by his grandchildren for school productions and cosplay. It’s made from an old umbrella spine as the “blade”, with an old “polvera” serving as the cross-guard. The most challenging was the mild polio that struck when I was six, months after I entered Grade 1. For the months I couldn’t walk, and subsequently when I could walk but needed several more months of therapy, Daddy was there. He worked it out with the school so I could continue studying, and got my eldest brother to take home all school lessons and assignments, returning them the next day.

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