Time to Smell the Sampaguitas

I grew up in a house full of books. Reading was hobby, not a chore. The books in our house could probably surpass that of a small library in terms of the selection as well as the number of books to be found.

Over the years, I bought more books for us, mainly cookbooks and religious books for myself and children's books for the kids. To give you an idea of the number of books we had, aside from the three bookcases (in Makati at one point), there were books stashed away in boxes, plastic crates and drawers both in Makati and Cebu Avenue.

When we moved to Australia, our books were among our prized possessions. I remember that as we were packing, I asked the children to segregate the books they wanted to bring and the books they were willing to give away. I ended up with two tall KEEP piles and two or three books in the GIVE AWAY pile.

Much as I would have wanted to take all our books with us, it was physically impossible and financially challenging to do so. In the end, I packed away many and left a lot. We had at least 4 boxes/crates filled with books that were shipped along with our things. (Yeah, yeah, most of them were mine.)

By the time we'd moved into our rental and our shipping boxes arrived, we were fortunate enough to have inherited one bookshelf. I thought I'd be home all day, so the cookbooks and the Sinag-Tala books got the shelf space.

I have been wanting to take an inventory of the books we have in the house because I honestly don't remember which books we brought and which ones we left behind. Last night, I decided to START taking the inventory. I sat down in front of the linen closet with a small laptop and brought out one of the HP boxes of books stored in there. I pulled out books from the box in mini-piles at a time and started an excel file to get my inventory going.

There were about six low stacks of books inside the box (which once held a CPU). I managed to get four stacks into my excel, reaching seventy records. I guess I got distracted because I found something of special interest to me. Of the 70 books I keyed into the inventory, there was only one book in particular that I felt like reading -- Time to Smell the Sampaguitas.

This is a very special book. You cannot find this book in any bookstore, anywhere in the world. There is a very limited number of copies of this autobiography. I don't even know how many copies of this book exists. But surely, there are at least ten.

I brought the book along with me today and read it on the bus going home. I loved reading it. It brought a lot of smiles and gave me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

I marvel at the author's writing style. She describes her life growing up in the farm (Chapter 1). She uses words and phrases which border on poetic. She manages to document her life and express her thoughts and feelings with such clarity and vividness.

She incorporated stories about her family life which were funny and memorable. She wrote about how she and her future husband were reunited after she came home from the States. She gave a run down of her children, all ten of them, adding a sprinkling of stories about each one. She didn't whitewash her history nor her personality. She said it as she saw it. She wrote it as she felt it.

I can't quite figure out when she wrote this book. (Late 1980's or early 1990's perhaps?) I wish I could because then I would be able to tell her exactly how many years it took before one of her dreams came true.

On page 43 of her book when she talks about the family tradition of circulating a birthday list of needs and wants, she writes what hers would be like -- " a chapter of a book" or "a clean room".

I have to mention that "clean" is relative but "a chapter" is tangible. So it is entirely possible that she got her 'clean' room (not the quote location) early on. The dream come true I am talking about here is the 'chapter of the a book'.

I couldn't help but smile because FINALLY, after possibly 20 years of waiting (asking, reminding, prodding, and anything short of bribing), she was able to get the chapters of her dreams as we her children kept our noses to the grindstone and produced a chapter each, as per request.

The sequel of sorts to Time to Smell the Sampaguitas will be Rainbow Run.

Hope you are practicing what you preach, Mother.

Relax. Relax. Smell the sampaguitas.