Sitting at the bar at 3 p.m. at Jimmy’s Pub slowly sipping on a very chilled martini I recalled the moment of my kindergarten graduation when I proudly recited on stage that when I grow up I wanted to be a nurse.

Perhaps it was the martini or the occasion, but something got me to talking about my childhood to my husband. I told him about the richest kids in my school…so rich they came to school with bodyguards and nannies. I also remembered that girl during my first week of high school whom I shared the same school bus. She told the kids in school that I lived in a house made out of wood, implying that my family was poor. This was a new knowledge for me, as I never considered our lifestyle as poor, and it seemed house construction and architecture just placed me on a disadvantaged point in the high school social clique in the mid 80’s. This was out of my control, I was only fourteen and my parents didn’t even own a home. Before then, I never worried about or thought of social classes in school.

That house made out of wood was my grandparents’ house. It was undoubtedly the best home of my childhood and no amount of money could replace what it had given me. For me it was the richest and I spent most of my younger years in that wooden house.

My grandmother passed away on a Tuesday afternoon in September of 1984. My family was living with my grandparents at that time. My father had just left us weeks ago. I was in 6^th grade and going to the public school, which was walking distance from my grandparents’ house. That afternoon when I got home from school I went to my grandmother’s room, where my grandma was tending to my two-month old sister and nursing a terrible headache. She told me she wasn’t feeling good and minutes later she died of a heart attack in front of me. She was my champion. She believed I could do anything and be anything I wanted to be. She was so proud of my little accomplishments in school and was always bragging about me to her friends and neighbors. The day she died was the saddest day of my life.

I don’t recall exactly what the next order of events were but I remember my grandfather telling my mom that we keep the same set up after my grandma’s death since my school is so near his house and that he could look after me. So I lived in his house made of wood up until my first year in high school. He made me breakfast in the morning and was there when I came home from school. BTW, in our town, the Cristobals were actually considered a well-to-do clan not by material possessions but rather the intrepid character my grandfather possessed…he was sort of the town’s Godfather. This memory made me tear up today at Jimmy’s Pub… the loss of my grandmother and the memory of my grandfather insisting that I stay in his house. I suddenly longed for him.

My grandfather died in 1994, I was 22 years old, 8700 miles away and too broke to fly across the universe to say goodbye and to thank him for all he had done for me. Two years before his death, during my visit from the USA, my grandfather and I had a disagreement and lost touch because I was stubborn and selfish. I had chances to fix that but I didn’t take them. Perhaps, I was too proud and didn’t take into account that life is short. I regret that now and it’s a struggle that hits me from time to time. I mourned his death alone, faraway from my family, thousands of miles away from the only people who could comfort me.  I don’t think I ever really stopped grieving this loss…

Last week one of our old neighbors in our little town in the Philippines posted on her social media an old clipping of my grandfather’s campaign flyer from a time perhaps before my existence. I once again had the longing for my grandpa’s presence.

Today on my 45^th birthday, I wish I could tell my grandparents I turned out fine and that despite the turbulent first two decades of my life in the US, my forties actually turned out pretty awesome. I didn’t become a nurse. I became a chef, a wife, and a mother.

I also wish I could go back to that girl in high school to tell her that materials used in housing are irrelevant in constructing the love for the people in it. That house nurtured 16 kind and loving grandchildren. And I will forever be grateful for my life in the house made of wood.