The resulting book is titled “Inday Goes About Her Day,” and was launched during her 90th birthday celebration last Sept. 1. This is an excerpt from that book:
This is a chronicle of a conversation about a life well lived.
Inday was born–the eldest of four sisters and a brother–on the first day of September in 1922 to Judge Luis Francisco de Castro and Simeona Lezana Montenegro. Her father was from Sorsogon, a law graduate. In 1920, he applied for a legal post in Dumaguete, and eventually became its first judge.
Dumaguete in the 1920s was a quaint ramshackle of a place, laid back and gentle, a beach town with small pretensions. A narrow strip of land, strengthened at the sides and guarded from the waves with heaped rocks, jutted from Guy Hall in Silliman Institute, and served as the town’s pier. The roads were small and mostly unpaved, the boulevard as we know it had yet to exist, the acacia trees were young, and the center of town was a line of shops housed in wooden affairs.
Luis De Castro arrived in town and was boarding at the Tapias’ along Luke Wright Street, in a house some distance away from the residence of Tia Aching Alviola. He was staying there, a bachelor, and then the Tapias made note of teasing him to go ahead and court Simeona, who happened to be a neighbor, and who happened to be a little older than him. “The Tapias told him that you better court that woman because she is good and all that,” Inday remembered with a chuckle. “And so, he married my mother. However, it was my grandmother [Ines Lezana de Montenegro, d. Jul 4 1939] who liked very much that she would get married.”
After a year of marriage, Luis and Simeona had a daughter. Inday–as Maria Luisa becomes more intimately and popularly called by–was born in 1922. The doctor in attendance was Silliman’s own Dr. George Cunningham, a teacher and missionary stationed at the old Mission Hospital, with Alice Fullerton assisting the birth.
Some people say that our earliest memory of anything often determines–or predicts in some form–the kind of people we become, or the kind of lives or personalities we soon embody. For Inday, her earliest memory was an earthquake in Dumaguete. She was only six years old, and the family was living in Pulantubig at the time. They had a house after the old bridge in Pulantubig, and the earthquake must have been quite intense because she found herself, along with the rest of the family, evacuating and then sleeping over at the house of Dr. Gallardo, which was located at the back of where Philippine National Bank is now.
That earthquake was perhaps a precursor for the kind of spirit Inday would soon be known by–and there is a sepia picture of her at age two that perhaps illustrates this, if only by its notation. In that picture, she is seated–with evident bodily arrangement made by the photographer–on top of an ornate box of a table. She is dressed all in white, the hems of her skirt edging past her bent knees, the whole of her punctuated by immaculate white shoes and white socks. Her head is wrapped in a pristine bonnet, the laces of which frames the unreadable innocence of her face, even as her eyes dart past the photographer’s view. In her arms, she is carrying a bouquet of flowers. At the back, an inscription reads, addressed to a relative: “Oct 9/24. This is your niece Maria Luisa. She is 2 yrs 1 mo. and 9 days old today. She is very naughty. Everybody at home is sending you best regards.”
“I don’t remember myself as being a naughty child,” Inday explains, as she holds the old photograph in her hands, scrutinizing her image as a baby. But she says this with a kind of mischievous twinkle in her eyes. She smiles as she tries to remember. And then there is a strange crackle of significance in that moment as you see her 90-year-old self looking at a picture of a two-year-old her–and you think: this is how the span of time and age should be measured, in the gracefulness underlined by this very picture.
