Powerless after Reming: The other side

ON THE other hand, there are positives that come with the dark, powerless nights at our Grandview community.

My bubbly daughter Pep -- my "Panaginip"-singing 'pusong mamon' of a daughter -- was fuming mad when Reming unroofed the multipurpose center of our little subdivision, which is located right in front of our house. "Our tambayan is gone," she rued. "We don't have a place to play anymore."

But the darkness that took away the TV, the Playstation 2 and the DVD player has forced her, sister Pia and their playmates to improvise. Now, during evenings, I hear them doing school programs -- where vocal solos and dance numbers are common fare -- that sounded much too familiar, because in my elementary days, when my teachers get tired of delivering their lessons, this is what they ask us to do as they rest for their second wind.

As a result, Deal or No Deal's loss became female bonding's gain. Technology's unscheduled outage has strengthened the social ties that bind childhood friends. And I believe our little community is all the better because of it.

Which makes me pine for the days of my youth when I and my childhood friends from Pili and Minalabac would drink the night away, mostly to the tunes of the '60s and the '70s, aided by a solitary guitar that becomes jukebox-like in the hands of Pol-Art Bautista: a dying rite of passage that karaoke and Manny Pacquiao's Magic Sing-Extreme have all but consigned to oblivion.