Shoe shine

My father taught me very well how to shine shoes.

When I was in high school, he would pick up my shoes and demonstrate the best way to do the task: You apply the polish and let it stay for a while to dry. Then you brush the shoes in a light but swift way. He taught me this lesson with such buoyancy and pride, like it was the one thing that mattered most in life, wisdom of utmost importance. Then he would hand me my shoes—polished, gleaming. I would receive them, not realizing then that this was one of the things that only my father could give me, and one of the only things my father could give me.

My father was never a successful man, but he was not a failure either. He was not successful because he was a poor man all his life. But he was not a failure because he was able to raise a family that, no matter what happened, no matter how difficult, ate three times a day, went to school, and learned what was right and what was not. It was a family that surprised the people who knew him as a man of the streets, a vagabond, in his youth.

With the same enthusiasm he had when he taught me how to shine shoes, my father loved to tell me that in his childhood, he worked as a shoeshine boy downtown in the old Iloilo. He grew up in a family that was entirely different from the family he raised. He was the fifth of 11 children raised by a father who constantly beat them as a means of disciplining them. One time, he said, he had to sleep beneath the elevated floor of their house to escape his father. In the fourth grade, he could have joined his school’s folk dance team had his father allowed it.

But I can only remember the fondness when my father told me these things when I was a child, when I told him of my own folk dance team in school. There was not a hint of pain or hate toward his father. Thinking about that moment now, I realized that it was his way of telling me that we had different childhoods and different fathers.

His vagabond years began in high school, the details of which I have no means of knowing now. What I knew from my mother was that my father was stubborn and ill-tempered as a young man. He was always in a brawl. He lived a life that was mostly on the streets, always running away. He did not complete his high school until he married my mother.

My father’s drifting existence ended when he met and fell in love with my mother. They started a family and, with three children to feed, he earned his high school diploma. You see, a man can be changed by his own family.

He went on to study marine engineering but failed to even finish his freshman year because of the financial struggles of his young family. He did all sorts of jobs, from hair-cutting to ironing our neighbor’s clothes, but found his niche in the carpentry of coffins. My mother, on the other hand, sidelined as a midwife.

Thus, my father made a living by sending off the dead, and my mother welcomed the living.

I saw my father’s best smiles, the kind that crumpled his prominent laugh lines like the folding of ocean waves, every recognition day at the close of every school year, and every time he had to accompany one of his children to receive an award for a competition won—life events that he never missed for the world, as long as he could. I remember the very first movie we saw together—“Free Willy”—at one of Iloilo’s oldest movie theatres that are now nonexistent or showing only adult films. I remember that glad afternoon at the small amusement park with my older brother. I also remember how I looked forward to his homecoming every weekend, when he would bring home huge piaya.

My father tried to give us a normal life as best as he could.

Remembering these things now fills my heart with melancholy and a longing that cannot be satisfied anymore. My father passed away almost four years ago, and yet his memory continues to visit me. I guess it is always this way between a father and a son who are so alike and yet so different.

Less than an hour before he died, my father gave me some of his old things—a green shirt and a pair of brown leather shoes.

A man can change for his family, and a father always has something worthwhile to give his son. It may not always be a material thing; it may be a memory of a wonderful Saturday afternoon at the rides, or a movie about a dolphin that wanted to be free.

My father did not own many things, but he gave me a lot—my inheritance: a wonderful smile, thick eyebrows, prominent laugh lines that crumple at every smile like the ocean waves, and something that walks with me every day … shiny shoes.

Sonny Tolentino III, 28, a psychology graduate of the University of the Philippines Visayas, is a preschool teacher and sidelines as an English teacher.