Legacy #2: Snapshots of a Past Frozen in Time – A Tribute to Relly S. & Marden I.

I intend my “Legacy Series” to be a short story of old friends with whom I’ve had the opportunity to be reconnected recently. It certainly will not capture the persona in detail much like a biography would. But that is not the intention. 

It will however, give a glimpse of something special in each of them and how that has touched my life or what lesson I have learned from it. I’m sure I will miss important details here and there but that’s because I failed to make notes on everything, relying only on my recollection of our conversations.

This being the second, I will call it Legacy #2: Snapshots of a Past Frozen in Time – A Tribute to Relly S. & Marden I.

Relly Salle and Marden Iglesias are two of my childhood buddies in elementary grade because we all lived in Mandaluyong when it was still a town and not the urbanized city it is now. We could walk to each other houses and sometimes rode on the same jeepney to school. We seldom saw each other in High School and never after that, but as fate would have it, we got reconnected as recent as about 2 years ago through Facebook.

Relly is now a Colonel with the Technical Services of the AFP and I hope he will make it all the way to being Dental Surgeon General before his retirement in a few years. But that’s just me hoping. I do not know his career path so more than that, I hope he will enjoy more of his time stress-free. He had a heart bypass surgery in the recent past but he looked marvelously fit in the two times that we sat down over coffee and talked for a couple of hours about life’s twists and turns.

Marden, is now based in New York. He is a successful personality in the arts as can be gleaned from his FB wall. Marden had always excelled in fashion because I can remember reading his name occasionally on the fashion pages of Manila Dailies back in college. 

Although we still have not met each other since our elementary days, it is always refreshing to read Marden's comments as he drops in on my FB wall from time to time. You can tell he has an eagle eye for detail by the way he appreciates your photos and other posts. Most of all he holds a warm appreciation of life.

It was in my Mandaluyong ancestral home that Relly and I met for the first time over coffee. He recalled how 3 young grade-school boys rode the bus all the way to Cubao to watch the Harlem Globetrotters at Araneta Coliseum. The three boys were myself, Relly and my elder brother, Lope. Harlem was a team that played wacky basketball against a serious pro team and that they made bumbling fools of.

After a few months, it was time for a second coffee sit-down and this we had at Relly’s ancestral home in Tanglaw street. Although it was renovated, I could still picture the basic structure of an apartment complex that Relly’s parents owned years ago. His dad played pro tennis while his mom worked in a mental hospital that Mandaluyong is famous for. Both his folks are gone now.

The first thing Marden recalled as we exchanged messages on the internet was my old house and its stair steps. It was atop an elevated sloping terrain that you can reach first, by crossing a sturdy wooden bridge that my dad constructed over an open canal by the road, and second, by climbing a series of uphill ground steps. By this time you would have reached the elevated wood balcony of our house but you need to take another 3 stair steps to enter it. I guess this is why among engineering topics, I hold a fancy for the stairs the most.

Marden is an only child. His home was one of the plushest houses I’ve seen as a kid, although, to reach it we had to pass open fields where the uncouth indiscriminately dumped their garbage. He told me that both his parents had passed away and that he left this patrimonial home in the care of a relative.

If you think hard about it, the blessing that childhood friends bring is that they are repositories of memory. In IT lingo they are like our backups or redundancies – the memory storage devices, in case ours crash or get deleted in oblivion as we take our life journey. They can give you a snapshot of a common past that is frozen in time. And when the memories come rushing in, they will jolt you pretty much like lightning, you will get goosebumps as you visualize images of a pleasant, distant past.

To Relly and Marden, thanks for the memories. Cheers.