All of us seem to have experienced some event that we’ll never forget during our school days. Whether it’d be fights, terror teachers, terrible breakups, we’d always have a memory that will make us say, “That’s how I was at that age (Ganun ako nung edad ko).”

Being the lucky person that I am, mine happened on my first year in school. Yep, all cute and powder-scented four-year-old me. It was not even a year since my family and I moved from the province to the big city. I came from the province of Pampanga, was born there, was raised the first few years of my life there.

So there I was in the city of Makati, on my first year of school. I was a vivacious child so I made friends easily. I got along well with the teacher. So what was the event I could never forget? The horror happened when we were asked to identify the objects whose pictures were drawn in the blackboard.

Each child had his turn in standing up and saying the name of the object or thing that the teacher pointed at. My classmates all got theirs correctly, and so my turn came. My name was called and I stood up and looked at the teacher. She pointed at a picture of a spider.

“Can you tell me what is this picture (Masasabi mo ba kung ano ang larawang ito) ?”

I knew what the image was and I said it with supreme confidence. My voice was firm and sure when I said my answer. It felt great to be right.

The whole class was silent for about two seconds and then, to my utter horror, everyone burst laughing.

Why did they laugh? Did spit come out of my mouth? Did I stutter? Was my zipper open?

None of the above.

I said I came from our province Pampanga, yes? Well, we have our own vernacular or regional language there. Actually, most of the provinces in the Philippines have their own regional languages, besides the national language called Tagalog. We are a diverse mix of culture and heritage, mainly because we’re been invaded by different countries in history, so every part of the country have their own regional dialect.

Because I was born and raised in Pampanga, I knew the regional dialect there called Kapampangan. I already knew Tagalog before we went to the city but Kapampangan was still my native dialect then, having learned it early on. I could converse in Tagalo well, though there were some words that I still needed to have a translation for in Tagalog. Unfortunately for me, one of those words was ‘spider.’

So in class that day, instead of saying the Tagalog word for spider which is ‘gagamba,’ I said the Kapampangan equivalent which is ‘babagwa.’ Imagine the shame I felt when everyone just started laughing at what I thought was a perfectly good answer. They didn’t know what the word I said was, but because they knew the answer and because I didn’t give the same answer as them, they thought I was wrong. Worse yet, stupid. I was horrified. I knew I identified the spider correctly, just in a different dialect. I went crying all the way home.

Since that day, a rule was enforced so that only Tagalog was ever spoken in our house.

Well, with the ocassional English thrown in.

Four people were on a roadtrip. A man, a teenage girl, a middle-age woman, and another. The man was the one driving the car along the countryside. He looks back and sees a huge black twister behind them, coming closer. He accelerates the car so that they can escape the catastrophe. Upon reaching a road tunnel, the man decides to stop the car and he tells the others that they’ll be safe there while waiting for the twister to pass by them.

After a few hours they decide to head out again and find shelter for the night. They find a nearby hotel with a circular driveway. They enter the establishment and headed straight for the reception area to secure their rooms. The man handed the receptionist some cash for their stay. The receptionist looked at the money strangely.

It seems that their rooms were on different floors, except for the man and the teenage girl, who seemed to have rooms on the same floor. They take the elevator to go to their rooms. The middle-aged woman and the other companion were the first ones to get off the elevator. The man pressed the elevator button to the 10th floor. They stood there in silence but it seemed that the elevator was running on and on, and they were wondering how come it took so long to get to the 10th floor. The teenage girl then panics and looks at the man in terror and backs away from him. She says that she has to get off the elevator now; that she can’t go with him to his floor. The man is then left alone in the elevator.

The elevator finally stops but instead of the doors opening in front, they opened at the top. Puzzled, the man climbs up the elevator to get out. The moment he raises his head out of the elevator, he sees that he is on a road, with cars passing by or even parked nearby. He is puzzled as to how this could be. He then sees a man wearing a suit looking at him. The man in ths suit tells him that it was good that he was able to travel all the way from where he came from. The man in the suit tells him that, “You have traveled 10 kilometers from down there. You just came from the Land of the Dead.”

Then, a replay of the previous events unfold, back to the time of the tornado. The people in the car didn’t survive the tornado that swept the car. The money they gave the receptionist a hotel were in truth, dead leaves of a tree. The scene where each of them were getting off on their own floors in the elevator meant that they got off at their respective places in the land of the dead. By reaching the highest level in the elevator and reaching the borders of the land of the dead, only the man was able to escape the catastrophe.

I wake up from that dream feeling spooked, not only because of the reality of what happened to the man but also because of the guy in the suit. I see my mother and my cousin at the dining room table and I relate the tale to them, all the while wailing like a child. My cousin tells me that she has recently seen a movie like my dream. I think and recall that I do remember a movie like that. I look at my mother and then gasp as I see her soul floating right behind her, while she kept on talking to me. I open my mouth to scream.

Then, I wake up. Again. But this time, it’s for real. My dream inside a dream.

Ever gone to a government office lately? Yes? Did you notice anything? I mean, besides the slow service. Anything?

I went to the local post office a couple of weeks ago to inquire on the requirement for getting my own P.O. box. I asked the first person I saw at the desk as to who to inquire about the requirements. I was told to go to the second floor. “Second floor?” I said as looked around for a staircase or an elevator. I didn’t see anything of a case resembling an ascending device or place so I became worried. I looked around and tried to see who among the employees there looked friendly enough to ask my stupid question as to how to get to the second floor.

As I was studying the faces of the employees, I saw some of them were wearing wearing frowns, looking impatient, or just plain tired (it was, aftel all, late in the afternoon). I’ve also noticed that most were women, in the forties or even fifties; maybe even some who looked like their retirement was only a year away. I then remembered my public school teachers, the employees at the professional licensing agency where I got my license as an engineer, the voting precinct in our minicipality and then the postal service employees.

So I asked myself a question. Is this what happens to elderly females in our country who are below the middle class but above the lowest class? If this is an inevitability, I shudder at the realization.