Tito Genova Valiente

The city will wake up on Monday with the streets suddenly quieter. Till the next festival. Till the next fiesta and till the next Traslacion that perhaps will also end in a riot. For that was how GMA-7 presented the land procession that opened this year's nine-day devotion to the Lady of Peñafrancia.

Till the next media bias and dumb reporting.

This coming Friday, the Virgin will be taken out of her Shrine and brought to the center of the city. If we follow the chronicles of old, and by metaphor of geography, She will be coming from Naga - the old settlement across the river - and to the Nueva Caceres, the colonial capital.

What does it entail an artist to represent the nation? If you are following the debate, we have newly selected National Artists. Two of them are being disputed: one is Carlo Caparas and the other is Cecille Guidote-Alvarez. Caparas is to be conferred the title for Visual Arts (he did not draw those komiks stories for which he is being recognized) and for Film (when in fact he is notorious for making those bad massacre films).

In 1909, an American teacher was assigned to Laguna; her name was Lucetta K. Ratcliff. In 1911, she was, in her own words, "engaged in teaching for the United States government in the Camarines High School, Nueva Caceres." Like what she did when she was stationed in Pagsanjan, she asked also her students in the first and second year to write "about their lore."The stories became part of the paper that she submitted to the journal called Western Folklore in 1951.

There is almost revivalistic or nativistic about the news that the trains will run once more to Bikol. It has the feeling of the Second Coming. For me anyway.

The major papers carried already photos of the coaches, some being refurbished and some just needing some cleaning. I can picture these trains passing by towns and villages that have died temporary deaths when the trains stopped running.

I am once more, carefully and giddily, turning leaf after yellowed and brittle leaf of pre-war journals. It is the famed Philippine Journal of Education this time. Dean Francisco Benitez and his wife, Paz Marques Benitez are two individuals linked to this publication, which guided the early years of public educations.

Naga is vanishing. It is vanishing fast. In the place of those that are quickly disappearing come forth places that I yet have to know. In fact, it can be said that while I mourn the disappearance of the city of my youth, some are finding spaces that fill their lives with meaning.

But for the moment, I search for those things that made this city for me and my remembrance.

Yesterday, I traveled with my students to Kamakura, in the Kanagawa Prefecture, our equivalent of the province. That was our second day in Tokyo, after the sedate urban life of Nagoya, and I was attempting to show them-in a very old fashioned way-how in a country different time zones and generations can find themselves linked to each other.

I am not giving up yet the journal called "Philippine Public Schools." I am getting answers that are beyond the anecdotal and I am beginning to understand now the nostalgia for good education - under colonial administration it may be. The information on English language acquisition and the creation of a system to instil good manners and right conduct are gems about the past that may explain what we are today as people.