Homeward Bound

Home is where you belong, and it is where the heart is.  These are old clichés along with, from dust you came, to dust you will return.  These basic truths show the significance of one’s origin, and best exemplified by the Atlantic Salmon that wanders more than 2500 miles away from the coast, and still finds its way back not only to its home river, but to the exact spot of its birth!  This is the circle of life, common to all living creatures on the planet, like this man in his attempt to make a full loop in his own circle of life.

My father grow up in a fisherman’s village in his hometown Cordova, Cebu.  While still a teenager, he emigrated with his older brother and father to Zamboanga.  He stayed there the rest of his life.  But in his mid-fifties, father got the Big C at its advanced stage.  He was diagnosed in Cebu City, and had only a few days to live.  We were going back to Zamboanga that day when he asked to be brought to Cordova which can be reached in an hour.  But we neither knew anybody there, nor any particular place to stay.  We didn’t directly say no, but simply brushed it aside as a trivial request.

Maybe too weak to strike an argument, father didn’t insist.  But he longed for his hometown.  I can tell now from the sad look in his eyes then.  There was no particular reason.  He wanted to see the place, plant his feet on the ground, and look at the same dirt.  He wanted to smell the air and gaze at the same seas of his youth. I didn’t realize it before.  But one thing’s for sure, near the very end of his life, father sensed that primordial instinct, and he was drawn to it like magnet – that is to visit home for the last time….