Redoble Family

Nong Agustin passed away last year December 2009. He left behind a lovely family.

His forever young looking nurse wife, Nang Linda, was responsible for giving us our immunization shots in our childhood, and “grates et amore”( free of charge). Our family will always be in her debt and would never forget those humanitarian acts. We admire her perseverance, despite the bites and kicks we gave her to resist the painful injection, she still wins. After our vaccine shots, we would always go home from their house with our arms swollen and our ego shaken a bit.

Mimi, and Yangging, Nong Agunstin’s elder daughters were our playing buddies. We walk the same dusty road, scaled the same hills, climbed the same trees, eat same fruits (some were from the spoils of bats the night before), play the same games, swim the same river, go to the same neighborhood parties, go to same church, and graduate from the same elementary school. Hanging on trees on moonlit nights is part of the fun in a neighborhood deprived of a 24/7 light and power service.

Nong Agustin’s two other children were too young then to enjoy life the old fashioned way(circa 1970’s). I’m too old to remember the younger siblings.

Yes, I have one memory of Dodong Ronnie, his high tolerance for pain as a toddler. When he plays, no one meshes with him. Even the ants and its bigger relatives, the “hantiks”(the big black ants), could not move him from where he’s doing his thing. He would never cry of ants or “hantik” bites. He just brushed the insects off his body leaving teeth marks and blisters on his skin.

Nong Agustin was close to our family. He’s a close friend and a cousin to our father, Benjamin Redoble. They wrote and painted a colorful chapter of their lives together, and they raised their children in the same neighborhood, Barangay Tirso Babiera, Ipil, Zamboanga Sibugay, where Nong Agustin served as the elected Barangay Captain before he passed away.

Our father would call him “Tingan” ( spoken aloud ), as our father would shout the word every time Nong Agustin visits us. When they see each other they talk with their voices in full volume, they laugh with their faces fully stretched and deformed as if they would explode in laughter, and they chat without tiring as if tomorrow would never come.

Nong Agustin was Mr. energizer. His antics gravitate friends, his jokes could bring the house down, his stories bring life to the dead, but his political will irritates his detractors.

He was predestined for public service.

He’s gone full circle in the government service spending more than half of his life serving other people. He started his career as a public school teacher, retired as a policeman, and died serving Tirso Babiera as its Barangay Captain.

Now that he’s reunited with the creator, and with some of his friends there waiting, one of them is our father, their place up there will never be the same again!

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