Now Photo Gallery

Year of Our Lord June 1964 – May 1965; In my mind, I can see us walking the corridors of our beloved Meycauayan Institute for the last year as a high school student. The girls in their white blouses and blue skirts with its pleats and creases that we painstakingly tried to preserve to the extent of preferring to stand rather than having those pleats unaligned and bobby white socks, shoes I can not see. Perhaps I never looked down that long for the fear that I will bump into somebody and lay flat on my rear end. The boys, handsome, gangly, young full of vigor, sex appeal (they believed) with their khaki pants and white shirts and sometimes with their PMT dress uniforms. I am just imagining if we were not required to wear uniforms, will some of us be bold enough to bare our midriffs? (We had the body then to carry the skimpiest outfit, which would have shamed Brittany Spears!!) I think not our parents will not allow us to do so!

The girls in three yards of skirt over a starched petticoat, ponytails moving side to side or our bob do’s shaking; and the boys with a swinging swagger that only a boy can do; the corridors we walked leisurely between classes. Those of us who were a partner to what we call then a “love team” are silently hoping that they will see their lovely dovey, to exchange a smile, a secret signal, a sidelong glance and sometimes to exchange information re – tests. Those of us who were unlucky (???) to have no “love team” at all survived immersing ourselves in our books. The sidelong, soulful, suffering looks of the real “unlucky” ones whose crushes did not reciprocate their ‘amore’. With baby powder as the girls’ only allowed cosmetic help to improve our looks we were still pretty because of our youth. No dental braces to straighten our crooked teeth and yet with smiles that bedazzled the love of our youth – puppy loves. The only two instances that I used real make up was, Junior- Senior Prom and at Lyric Studios for our annual pictures.

The physical changes that transpire within the four years of high school was caught forever in the Bamboo, those are the faces we remember or vaguely remember, smooth, smiling, open, eager faces, those are the faces which remind us of the way we were. Each tiny flick of the brow, that little smile etched in time we remember, we cherish every moment spent together in MI. Graduation came and the same faces wore a mixture of pride, happiness, hope – despair; pride for the diploma we had worked so hard for, happiness mostly for our family for finishing high school, despair with the thought of our beloved friend that we may not see again, hope for the future that lay wide ahead. We were afraid; we were hopeful; we were young!!! We were not sure of what was in store for us and what road we have to take to achieve our goals and make our dreams a reality. Then!!!

After high school some of us meet by chance or purposely and oh boy did we change!!! In college and years after, I see familiar faces occasionally and the traces of the youthful us can still be seen but some had completely changed physically!! The tall, skinny Teresita Castro turned out to be a very, curvy Tessie when I saw her last in the early ‘90’s. Familiar faces that had changed with the time, some still smooth with traces of laugh lines, some totally different from the face in the Bamboo, but, mostly the girls retained the exuberance of their youth, the boys distinguished with the lack of hair or a sprinkling of salt in their once pepper dark shock of hair. The girls’ hair, who knows, with Clairol, L’oreal, and Revlon around, we still have our hair or a change of color. Allow us the privilege boys; unless you would want to go to the “torture” we go through to have the hair we want to show the world!!! Some have the same hair color and number of strands of youth, amazing!!! Yes indeed, the long winding, sometimes bumpy, sometimes smooth roads that we tread brought us life experiences that had left their mark on our once young, innocent faces and in our souls and spirit. And Now!!!

Years after high school when classmates/school mates reconnect, one of the foremost questions asked is “ How is your family?”(After secretly {it is rude to stare or even ask,} scanning the physical change, of course!!!). Human as we, are we instinctively proned to be one with another and thus we follow (or not) the pretext of the accepted normal pattern of life: high school, college, work and then raising a family.

To a greater majority family means man-woman exchanging marriage vows and a year or some years hence a child or two or more. But what is the meaning of family? Through the years of my early and “later” adulthood, I had come across several definitions of family and the one that struck me most apt is a definition by one of our “mi classmates” Gerry, F – ather, M - other, I, L - ove, Y- ou!!

For some of us, marriage and family go hand and hand for others it may not, but all the same, we are proud of our family!! Our better half, children/grandchildren, our joy and our pride. You can almost feel and touch these emotions in the pictures of us now!!! Come share with us your family and forever be!!! And for those, who haven’t found their “kasukat na tungtong”(yet), share us what a score plus nineteen had dealt you. I know too that time had left its marks thus making the “boys” we knew more distinguished looking, and the “girls” more beautiful than ever!! Strangers we might have been for the past 39 odd years after graduation from our beloved Meycauayan Institute, let us be strangers no more but friends forever and to do that we must see each other as we see our selves now.

“ If a picture paints a thousand words, then why can’t I paint you? ” Yes, I agree only you my beloved classmates on MI 1965 can show us how mother nature had painted you since we last met. Show us the pictures!!!! (Pictures should be at least 540x375pixels or higher resolutions. E-mail the pictures to rmalinis@sbcglobal.net ).