Reprinted in 2022 in USA by
TATAY JOBO ELIZES, Self-Publisher, under the permission and authorization of
Joselita Ligo Rodriguez,
author and owner of the copyright to this book.
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I am willing to bet a thousand, nice pause, toothpicks, that I was raised Roman Catholic the same way other children in the world were - church on Sundays, novena to our Lady on Wednesdays, church on holidays of obligation (there were more of them then), church on first Fridays and first Saturdays, family rosary in the evenings, monthly novenas to our saint of choice, processions around town on certain feasts; more or less. As soon as I was old enough to do it, I was saying my own rosary. I am guilty in a way because I used to do it the way one converted Chinese man did. He said one Hail Mary at the beginning of the decade of beads and then said, "same one", "same one" on the following beads. It is even funnier in our dialect because since the Chinese have a hard time pronouncing the letter "r" and use "I" in its place, he was saying, "paleho la, paleho la" instead of "pareho ra, pareho ra."

Anyway, I was never asked as a child why I went to church. I'm glad I wasn't because my quick answer would have been, "because my mother made me", like children now would say, or worse, "I had this new beautiful dress to wear."

My hometown Tanjay, an eccentric medium sized town where the phrase "everybody knew everybody" probably originated, is in the island of Negros, on the east side, in the Philippines. Yes, the country made famous not by WW II but by the three thousand pairs of shoes. I love walking barefoot and I hate wearing heels so it's not me.

Our patron saint is Senor Santiago, St James the Greater in English, and don't ask me how Santiago would be James. Legends abound about him but that would be another book.

We did not have catechism on Sundays before or after the mass like it is done here in the United States. Instead, we spent the whole month of May, in the afternoon, learning the basic prayers from the sign of the cross to the creed. We were not classified by age or grade, whoever memorized a prayer faster was promoted to the next one. And in those clays, when you could recite the creed, you were a genius and everybody looked at you with awe.

We did that in May because it was Mary's month to be honored with flowers. We used to wake up really early so we could find flowers from neighbor's yards or wherever it was we found flowers at - the town dispensary, a vacant lot that had wild flowers growing.

Roses were out of the question, they were rare, and whoever grew them would not give them away. Even if you said it was for the Lady who particularly loved them. Honest.

After our prayer sessions, we would line up from the Call to the church, where an old lady led the thirty-one day novena prayers. By this time, one would be wondering what kind of carrots were dangled in front of us kids to keep us coming each day when we could have been playing somewhere? Simple, cookies. A local bakery donated them and after the novena, we lined up again and the catechists or their designated assistants would distribute the cookies to each child. Needless to say, they disappeared without a trace before we even stepped out of hallowed ground. Nothing was ever more delicious to a child in those times than free cookies. Second only to free candy that's why a lot of us were front-toothless just about.

When my son had his first communion, there were only about seven of them. It made me think back to my time when there were hundreds of first communicants. On the last day of May, we were up early, dressed in our bleached-to-perfect white dresses, beautiful veils on the girls especially, and one could see a sea of white lined up in front of the church.
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