Plucking Leafs from My Tree of Memories

.
Chapter Four
The Beginning of Eccentricity

In 1984, I was a graduating elementary student at St. Mary's Academy in Pasay City, Metro Manila, Philippines. Many people who knew me back then described me as a boy-next-door. Yet, little did they know that at that age I was already shaping my individuality, or "eccentricity" (as how many people called it) in terms of music and fashion preference. The early Eighties was the period I discovered New Wave music through Depeche Mode, The Cure, and other British Alternative Rock artists known to possess a queer sense of fashion and music style.

I spent my elementary years at St. Mary's Academy. I could have been a Loyalty awardee, but because of my family's financial difficulties at the time, aggravated by my parents' marital problems, I had to transfer to and repeat fourth grade at Hen. Pio del Pilar Elementary School, a public school near our former home in Barrio Pio del Pilar, Makati City, Metro Manila.

Retrospectively, I would come to regard that time I spent at a public school as the period in my childhood when I regained my self-confidence and overcame my insecurity which arose from my family's economic difficulty.

Modesty aside, perhaps because I was a transferee from a private school, I found myself to be more intellectually adventurous than my new classmates. I'd been topping every quiz and examination and joining various school activities; but more importantly, I realized that my teachers, classmates, and even my parents began to expect so much from me. This rekindled my childhood thirst for knowledge—which I had lost in the intervening years my parents were drifting away from each other.

Learning of my fate, an auntie who was living in Canada offered to shoulder my education. The following year, I was back in St. Mary's Academy, a fifth grader with a renewed confidence and a recharged passion for learning. I joined again a number of Science and Spelling quiz bees, bagging places in a few of them.

I graduated in 1984, all ready for the new experiences and adventures highschool would lay on my path.