y own “most influential teacher” would be Miss Cacabelos, who taught grade-school English in the provisional classroom on the ground floor of an old, dilapidated Spanish colonial house just across from our old and dilapidated Spanish colonial house in the center of town in Narvacan, Ilocos Sur. Miss Cacabelos patiently corrected my grammar and my spelling in our composition class; one day when she was frustrated with everyone else’s composition, she announced that it was only me that had the promise to take up journalism. I had the vaguest idea of what journalism was. Was journalism the articles in the Free Press, which I read to my father, from cover to cover, seated on a stool beside him in his botaca, his legs splayed out on the long arms of the reclining chair? I don’t know if he was losing his eyesight then; maybe he just wanted to see if I could read. I was in Grade 5 or 6 then. “That’s pronounced de-nu-ma ,” or, “That’s ki , not kway [quay],” he would say with a tinge of irritation, or was that conceit? Father spoke a little Spanish and, maybe, a smattering of French. He was wont to say that the Ilocano language was no more than fractured French.
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