"Bago ako naging ham operator, tambay lang ako sa kanto." "Before I became a ham, I used to hang around a lot at the street corner."
"Bago ako naging ham operator, tambay lang ako sa kanto." This roughly translates to "Before I became a ham, I used to hang around a lot at the street corner." Sometime back in the early 70s, somebody decided to put up a Radio TV repair shop at the main corner of our barrio. The shop would play Beatles vinyls often and soon I go to sitting on the long bench at the shop's entrance watching people go by and enjoying the good music off two baffles hanging on walls of both sides of the shop. In the 60s and earlier, a favorite pastime was to sit at the corner "lamyaan", an elevated wooden platform positioned at strategic corners of the barrio where men would sit around and share stories after a hard morning's work in the rice fields and river vegetable plots (called "tumana"). The PInoy word "tambay" is from the english "stand by". So indeed I was a "tambay sa kanto" I got to know the owner well. He was traine...