"A man cooks and eats stray cats." A nightmare in a Nabua vacation [Nabua is a small town in the Philippines from where this author hails]. I quickly stood up, walked out to the front porch and leaked on the facade. Then it hit me. This was how I pee in the morning when I was a kid. Embarassing but funny. Then I noticed that it was a misty morning. My eyebrows gathered dewdrops and my memory the joys (and importunity) of childhood. Last night at the "perya" (local carnival) an adult dealer helped elementary kids gamble. I like the perya because of the popcorn and the warm softdrinks that would make you weep in the dark corners of the night (Warm soda hurts your mouth). The air is abundant with odors of sweet gas from the many Petromax and the kerosene-powered cotton-candy spinner. I would partake of the goods of the perya like I was a kid. The old laughs. The old talk-to-strangers habit. I love giving candies to kids who don't know me. They don't mind if I was a tall, dark man in a grey YSL cardigan. Everyone here is kindred spirit. This is a festive summer in Pablo Neruda's world -- tender and seductive. This is Nabua.

The memories that a simple coming-home vacation gives cannot be put in words. It is a bittersweet experience that makes your reconnect with past failures and victories. Whatever that memory is, you are the better for it because you can experience the aliveness of who you are. French Novelist Marcel Proust in "The Captive" said, "We find a little bit of everything in out memory; it is a sort of pharmacy, a sort of chemical laboratory, in which our groping hand may come to rest, now on sedative drug, now on a dangerous poison."

A rush of memory is agonizing to those who wish to forget. Raped as a child. Mugged as a teenager. Surviving alcoholism or substance-abuse. These things may come to haunt, nay, paralyze a person for the remainder of one's life (that is, if one considers oneself as alive). This becomes the driving philosophy of one's life. A person's promising life shattered by a debilitating event -- a woman weeping over things forever lost.

Memory can be seized to mean something else other than fearful gloom. Almost always a mature person will have the ability to look at his past and make it functional for his present life. Take the case of Filipino Efren Penaflorida, 2009 CNN Hero of the Year. As a young boy, he was bullied by gangs in the slums where he lived. Instead of situating his response in vengeance and defeat, he decided to "return...to the slums of his childhood to give kids the education he felt they deserved." The past did not haunt him but a reminder for him what to do with life.

Memories are a-good thing. You can never replace a good memory even with a good SLR camera. Hi-res pictures are merely material data; memory, a spirit -- an evil or a good spirit. It is better to take Proust's ideas as a description of the choices we can make with our memories. Now that you have grown enough to decide why a brand of toothpaste is better than the other, you have developed an ability to compose something that will yank you towards action. What are memories that haunt you? Ask yourself, "how can I seize this memory and make me better person?"

With a torn toenail and a punctured lung -- life in the fastlane and all those trite descriptions, a career woman would forget about growing her life from the fertile land of her past. A trip back home to where you grew up may not be the most pleasant experience there is -- especially in a byte-sensory world of iPods, gaming consoles, Blackberry and DVDs -- there is nothing byte-worthy in an old home -- not even a hanker to take pictures. But it is a ground worth visiting back.

To explore the land of your flesh is like a wet towel on a humid day. The other day at the Kamarin, I wanted to snack at Bicaldo's pansitan when a near-sighted, pigeon-toed child approached me asking, "Taga sari ika?" (From where are you?) You never get that anywhere. I told her I am from Lourdes Young (a local baranggay). "Naggayon na kaya ito bado mo" ("You look fashionable!") she said, pointing to my Chris Anderson Nuggets jersey.

Before I took my seat at Fredo's, a mentally unstable panhandler asked me for some change. It was Jane Roldan (not her real name), a girl I liked back in high school.