market. They carried a bayong of used clothes that she said she was going to give to friends. They walked all the way to what was locally known as Hilltop. Beng says, “At one vegetable vendor, Lola brought out a striking red sweater from the bayong and the Igorot vendor would hand her a kilo of cabbage and half kilo of green beans. It was some sort of barter. At the meat section, she took out two pairs of still serviceable rubber shoes, and got a kilo of pork.” When there were ravenous mouths to feed in Brookside, Lola used street smarts to enable us, the vacationing grandkids, to live another day. Lola also donated clothes to indigents in Baguio and to char- ity bazaars sponsored by the church. Her example, although I’ve known about it through hearsay from my cousins, I attribute to my own modest efforts at charitable work: among others, I’ve been doing work for the native tribe displaced by Mount Pinatubo. Her example was better education than a classroom teacher, which Lola was in her bachelorette days, could have done.
Among the qualities Lola Purang was
eulogized for when she died in 1988 at the age of 83 was her being “a collector of quotable quotes.”
Another cousin from a younger batch, Jing Lolarga Deco, recalls at age nine joining Lola in her garden while she turned the soil over. Jing saw her do this almost every day. When she asked why, Lola said it was to allow the roots to dig deeper and
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