for Mom’s classes to end, I would sit in the library and look through books. Tita Charito would ask me what I was reading, and recommend other titles. Those were happy times. I always preferred the company of books to that of children my own age. My mother would try to work on my social skills by arranging what parenting manuals now call “play dates” with the kids of relatives and friends. It didn’t work: I simply made a beeline for the shelves and skimmed whatever books were available. Let’s just say I read a lot of Reader’s Digest , encyclopedias and, in a pinch, dictionaries. Mills and Boon pocket romances never appealed to me; they didn’t have a body count.
I did not live by the code of student behavior (“Don’t tell on your classmates”). I obeyed the code of my mother the teacher (“Cheating must be punished with extreme prejudice”).
Often, we didn’t have a maid so my mother brought me every- where—the supermarket, her friends’ houses, her tutoring jobs and “sidelines.” She didn’t sell tocino and other cured meats in class, but she sold Tupperware and real estate on the side. I did not complain of this peripatetic lifestyle as long as I had something to read. Since at an early age I was already criticizing other people’s taste in books, our trips came to include stops at the bookstore so I could get my reading supplies.
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