‘But the icing on the cake is to live on a street that beats your family name, the town’s token of appreciation for an ancestor who had the energy to petition the authorities to separate a segment of land from a bigger pueblo and, voila! the town of Alaminos was born.’
TODAY, I become a full-blooded promdi. Today, I am filing my application for registration as a voter-transferee from Rada St. in Barangay San Lorenzo, City of Makati, to Baylon St. in Barangay Poblacion 1, Municipality of Alaminos.
While I have been paying my cedula here almost uninterrupted for over 20 years, this is the first time I am registering as a voter here, which must have my father chortling wherever he is.
I have ended up following his footsteps and “uprooting” myself from the city, albeit about three years earlier than he did. He moved here to the house he had bought for P15,000, from the childless aunt who raised him, only after 1994 when he retired from UP. He was 62 by then. My mother had just died the year before, and for a while my father shuttled between Laguna and Canada because he had been petitioned.
But he gave up the petition (much to the surprise of the Canadian Embassy staff) and permanently parked himself in Laguna by the turn of the century, and enjoyed his promdi roots for 16 years more.
That I am finding out why he enjoyed it here is surprising me but is satisfying as well. To be frank, having a house to stay in relieves me of so much pressure given that once I retire from work it will be difficult living in a condo, what with all the monthly charges and all that, not to mention the sky-high real estate taxes. I missed five years of paying in Taguig and had to pay almost P100,000, inclusive of penalties; I missed paying five years of real estate taxes in Alaminos and the municipal employee embarrassingly and apologetically told me I had to pay penalties, raising my total payment to almost P1,000.
I need not stress how the air quality here is 100 times better than the air I breathe in when I go to the penthouse of the condo I stay in at in BGC and inhale deeply while staring down at Manila Golf Club. Nor do I need to state how fresh the air is inside the whole house when you leave the windows open on the sides facing south, east, and west — something I cannot say for condo living. And when it rains you don’t even need to use the air-conditioner — though the raindrops pummeling the tin roof took getting used to since it was something you never hear in a condo unit.
And because the house has two floors, I can now escape my doggies if I wanted peace and quiet and solitude and Netflix; they have one whole floor with old tile flooring in which to romp and even if they had accidents it was easy to clean, while I reserve the second level, with its hardwood flooring, to myself knowing I would never end up peeing on the wooden floors (I am not yet at that stage anyway).
What makes it much more convenient for me to choose to become a promdi is the SLEX that has made traveling to and from Metro Manila a breeze. San Miguel Infrastructure is in fact building an SLEX extension that will allow me to exit at San Pablo after perhaps just 45 minutes driving from BGC; add five minutes more and I am home.
But the icing on the cake is to live on a street that beats your family name, the town’s token of appreciation for an ancestor who had the energy to petition the authorities to separate a segment of land from a bigger pueblo and, voila! the town of Alaminos was born.
My father, who was orphaned by the end of World War 2 and was raised by an aunt, never really grew up owning a house of his own — until the last 20 or so years of his life. And I suspect it gave him much inner satisfaction to be living in the town that a great grandfather made real, and on a street that was named to honor him. Why do I suspect that? Because that’s how I feel. In the city I can feel alone, even lonely.
Here, I know I am home. A full-blooded promdi!
