RR [GEM's Enterprises]

GEM's Enterprises
July 9, 2002

"Bet, bet, bet, beret, bet."

My mother Mamay, used to wake me up with these sounds while lightly shaking my shoulders or my legs. It would effectively wake me up very early in the morning to open our sari-sari store. Not so much for the shaking but for the fact that I cannot let her do the opening by herself. After all, she was already in her 40's then (and quite sick too, it turned out) and I was already in my teens. This was the time when only Buboy, Tess and I were with Mamay. Doris and Flor were studying in Los Banos, Laguna and Manila, respectively. Frisco was already married then and was living with his wife in Anislag, Albay. Lito and two other brothers were also married already and on their own.
The store also actually was our home. It was one of the doors of a commercial apartment that prominently lined Regidor Street, one of the main streets of the town of Daraga, Albay that bordered the town's crowded marketplace. From our street, Mt. Mayon volcano's famous conic peak could be seen as a picturesque backdrop.

I remember the other tenants in the building. The first two doors were occupied by a bakery which also had a restaurant on the second floor. These were followed by another two doors occupied by a Chinese merchant married to Aling Charing. Our sari-sari store was next. The last door was occupied first by a warehouse and then by a tailoring shop in later years. At first, we were the only family that lived in the apartment. Later, the tailor also housed his own family in their apartment.

But all of us kids of the tenants somehow found a way to bond as playful playmates. I remember being invited to Tess' birthday one time. Tess was one of the daughters of the bakery owner. I was made to dance to "Tiny Bubbles" and "Pearly Shells". Embarassing to recall now but I was not shy then. But as we grew up into adolescence, we grew into our separate ways until we only became nodding acquaintances.


The apartment had two floors with the second floor turned into our veritable living quarters and the ground floor as the store area. The ground floor also had the kitchen and the "toilet of our youth". The apartment used to be a wooden structure but it was gutted down by fire in the early 70's. An entirely concrete building went up in its place like the proverbial phoenix so much so that there was talk the fire was really meant to get rid of the old apartment. We moved twice to nearby apartments while the new structure was being built. We were quite fortunate in that we were able to re-occupy the same berth in the new apartment building.

I remember the apartment as the only home I had in Daraga even if my mother used to tell me that it wasn't the family's first abode in the town and despite the temporary shelters we lived in after the fire. It was the home of my growing up years, and I am sure, it is also memorable for my other siblings who grew up there.

As store opener, I would pull out the huge wooden tables (papag) from the inner sanctum of the ground floor toward the wide patio or the printera of the apartment. The tables would then be filled with a number of equally huge bilao that displayed red bulb onions, yellow bulb onions, Irish potatoes and garlic (which we would painstakingly make himay by the bulb from a braided packaging). If it was the season for tomatoes, we would have them too, on top of huge heads of cabbages, red and green bell peppers, curlicued Chinese pechay, bright orange carrots and hairy/thorny chayote. Fruits of the season would be melons, watermelons and mangoes in summer and apples in December. Sometimes, there would also be siniguelas in summer and castanas for Christmas but very rarely.

These would all come from Divisoria by train (these vegetables and fruits would invariably come from Baguio and from the northern and central Luzon provinces). These were always shipped to my mother by my father who was based in Tondo, Manila. They would come in many a kaing or in a lot of sako. Sometimes, in interesting buslo or in wooden crates. The slats of these wooden crates would be my mother's pamalo every time we kids would be caught misbehaving (which was not very often, angelic children that we were, problem children we were never). She would make us all lie face down on the store's floor and we would all get the same hits. There was no Bantay Bata 163 yet then. Anyhow, despite corporal punishment, we felt that we weren't a bit a victim of child abuse.

Complementing this sari-sari store tableau would be the usual istante on the wall, portable timbangan and the money box. The shelves would have a few bottles of Silver Swan soy sauce or a few packages of sotanghon. Mamay would sometimes wear a delentar (apron-like money holder) around her waist when the store got busy so she can better keep track of the bills. Only coins would be stored in the money box. This money box was nothing fancy; it was in fact just a crudely made wooden rectangular box --- a make-shift cash register more than anything else. But I thank this money box for those valuable coins that allowed me to rent comics after school hours and to watch old movies shown as double programs at Plaza Theatre on lazy Sunday afternoons. I must admit I sometimes made kupit, but at many other times, it was with Mamay's grudging consent.

For a busy sari-sari store, it never had any signage. But one time, when our eldest sibling Kuya (he was actually baptized Dominador but we all called him by this term of endearment; no one else was called a diko, sangko, sanse, or ditse in the family) came home from the USA after a stint in the US Navy, he drew a sign on the store's concrete wall with chalk. He named the store, GEM's Enterprises -- G for Gaudencio, my father's (who we also called Papay) name; E for Emiliana, Mamay's full name and M for Magno. So sentimental that name has become to me that until now, in the recesses of my consciousness, I have this dream of naming my future business endeavors the same way, if they ever materialize.

Growing up, I saw the store flourish. Mamay had a way with clients; they instantaneously became her suki. Mamay's customers came from near and far, from the other vendors from the town's mercado to as far away as Virac, Catanduanes; Matnog, Sorsogon and Masbate. They are sari-sari store vendors in their own right who would re-sell Mamay's by-then exotic merchandise. Our vegetables and fruits were so unfamiliar to our shopping public that some would mistake the potatoes for kamote.

Many well-to-do families, on the other hand, would also do their weekly marketing at our store since they could not get the vegetables anywhere else in the vicinity. I remember seeing Dr. Alberto (an old but well-known medical doctor with silver hair and a very Spanish and regal bearing) many a time alighting from his Mercedes Benz, with a well-dressed younger woman who was always in pants. It was said she wore stockings even while wearing pants because she suffered from a bad case of varicose veins. It was also said she was the doctor's mistress or second wife, and not really the true one. Almost always, Dr. Alberto and this woman would be accompanied by young girls in the blue uniform of St. Agnes Academy. The girls were remarkable in the sense that they wore their long tresses curled like a bunch of black borquillos on their heads.

The Philipine National Railroad (PNR) trains were the only practical means of transporting goods and passengers then. The South Road, as the highway between Bicol (the South) and Manila, was already called then, still wasn't the efficient, safe and modern way it is now. If the trains got stranded due to repairs or damage to the tracks, and if rivers overflowed during heavy rains and the tracks got covered if not ruined, or if Mayon's ashes buried the tracks, then the highly-perishable merchandise got to us almost decayed if not totally rotten. By which time, we would work doubly hard, even into the night, to salvage what we can to recoup all costs. Thus we would cry while peeling off the soft, decaying and almost mushy parts of the onions and sevolleno, dry the wet tomatoes with electric fans while the tomatoes are strewn at every available square meter on the store's floor, and nearly puke from the stench of the rotten cabbage leaves as we chop off those parts fit only for the pigs.

Once, after a really strong typhoon, Mamay came home drenched to the bones. She had to personally supervise picking up her goodies from the train station in Ligao, Albay. The train could not proceed to Daraga anymore because of flooding in the railroad tracks. All I could do was embrace her on seeing her and staying embraced to her even while she was trying to dry up herself with a towel. Looking back, I am now amazed she for once did not shoo me away. She just went on with the business at hand while I was wound around her. She later recounted it to Doris in a letter she wrote to her (Mamay was a prolific letter writer in those days; that must be her way of making up for the loneliness she felt when her daughters went away to college or to let them know how much she misses them; I remember her writing to Kuya frequently too when he joined the US Navy), that "wala siyang ginawa kundi yakapin ako ng yakapin".

As kids, we would do our share of generating business from these re-cycled merchandise by spreading a piece of plastic sack by the roadside during market days (these are the days when Regidor Street turns into a hawkers' paradise) and selling onions and garlic by the tumpok. Some would buy from us because they thought we were so cute --- still so young but already enterpreneurs --- and would pinch our cheeks. Mamula-mula daw kasi. Others would buy but would trick us or cajole us into adding more to the atado. I even remember one surreptitiously sneaking a couple of bulbs into her bayong while I was busy trying to sort out her sukli.

These goodies were as good as new. They were not bulok or leftovers. In fact, one time, we were all surprised when a playmate chewed on a large red onion bulb like he was chewing on a singkamas. While we were all aghast that he ate what we thought was ma-anghang, he simply chewed on because he claimed it was masarap.

The merchandise we all did not like so much was the tamarindo. It was quite popular with some vendors because they could cook the tamarind into candies that they can sell as chichiria. Papay, however, would ship the tamarindo by the sackful, already without the balat and resemble huge concrete slabs used to cover drainage in sidewalks. They would come to us complete with crawling little black insects (we called these bukbok; they're harmless and part of the whole thing) coming out of tamarind seeds. We would re-pack the tamarind into one-kilo, two-kilo and five-kilo chunks for easier retail sales. Doing so was back-breaking manual and menial labor. To ease the hard work, we would usually do the re-packing at night while listening to "Sa Loob ng 24 Oras" and "Mga Mata ni Angelita" on the radio.

Sadly, the once-flourishing business did not do well in later years. This was when Mamay's health seemed to deteriorate fast. A series of typhoons also contributed to the business' decline. But I think, on hindsight, it was the competition that eventually demolished the business.

Mamay's success was the envy of the other vendors so that some of them tried to copy her formula of "importing" the exotic-looking fruits and vegetables from Manila. One or two of them in fact went one better than Mamay by using the South Road to transport the goods. Ferdinand Marcos has improved the road infrastructure by then while the railroad was already in its death throes. Ironically, even as he built highways, he did not do the same to the railroads. In fact, the train would not proceed to Legazpi anymore and would just stop at Camalig. Eventually, Mamay's competitors were doing better than Mamay and even acquired their own trucks for use in the South Road.
I also think Mamay's business acumen failed her at this time. She used to just roll over her capital without thinking of investing in other endeavors or in diversifying her business. She put her eggs all in one basket.

But I could not fault Mamay anything at all. She gave it her best. She gave it her all.

During the boom years, I never for once thought we were poor. I always felt bastante. Mamay served us the best home-cooked food using the freshest ingredients from the store and from the nearby palengke. The karnehan and the isdaan were just a leisurely trek away. We in fact never owned a refrigerator all this time because what we needed, we bought at the time we needed them. Sugpo, kangkong, labanos and sitaw for sinigang; alimasag or lobster for halabos, pork liempo for tocino, veal for Mamay's Korean beef steak, pig knuckles for her estofado, and lapu-lapu for her escabeche.

In the end, the store went kaput when Mamay died. Frisco tried to revive it but he was not successful.

There's another tenant now occupying what used to be our apartment. Aling Charing has downsized his husband's business to one door. The bakery's restaurant has since metamorphosed into a videoke club and then into a billiards hall. The tailor has remained.

We ourselves have moved on although from time to time, nostalgia hits me and makes me cry. For GEM's Enterprises. For Mamay.