Eyebrows-raising memory

IT didn’t really matter that much to me if there were firecracker explosions or not on New Year’s Eve. Less bang, fine. More bang, fine. Moderate bang, fine. As I was telling my kid’s three kids, there was not much firecracker exploding in the town where I grew up in.

“Only kanyon (canon) made of bamboo was the only paputok (explosion) that we had back then,” I said to them.

I also shared my observation that firecracker explosions are seemingly done only in the Big City.

In the countryside, you could hardly hear a firecracker exploding to meet the New Year. At least that’s how it was in the country where I was raised.

The truth is, I only came to know of the city-bred’s obsession to explode firecrackers on New Year’s eve when I finally came to Manila.

I had honestly thought then that our relatively calm, if not sober, way of meeting the New Year was also the practice in the Big City.

We make noise only through our bamboo kanyon, the not-so-loud explosion happening few and far between as it was hard to spark a thunderous shot from our improvised canon.

We poured what we called petrolyo into a small hole bored at the foot of the five-foot kanyon.

Then we lit a fire underneath the kanyon to heat up the petrolyo.

When the petrolyo was hot enough—you could see it by the thick smoke billowing out of the kanyon’s small hole—we would blow air from the deepest of our lungs into the hole to suck the smoke out.

Then, after lighting a petrolyo-soaked stick, we would next kiss it into the small hole. Boom! The explosion would almost always draw an applause from my fellow kids circling the foot of the kanyon.

Sometimes, we would feed the kanyon with empty cans of milk for bullet effect, sending the cans flying with every explosion fired.

Unlike the firecrackers like piccolos, bawang and sinturon ni satanas, our kanyon was safe 99 percent of the way. Fingers intact after every explosion.

But the remaining one percent?

The petrolyo, once it gets overheated, could spit a mini ball of fire out of the kanyon’s trigger hole. I was a victim of it. As I was about to unleash a second big blow of air into the kanyon’s hole just hours before midnight, the ball of fire came.

To this day, my thick eyebrows remain a memory.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!