Matag-Lakang: Step by Step
by Clarissa Camaya
My Cherubim batch used to sing Joni Mitchell’s song “The Circle Game” a lot, but it was much later that I discovered that a verse was omitted in the arrangement we used to sing. The verse went like this:
Sixteen years and sixteen summers gone now
Cartwheels turned to car wheels through the town
And they tell you, “Take your time, it won’t be long now,
‘Till you drag your feet to slow the circles down.”
Sixteen. That is around the age you “graduate” from Cherubim. I put that in quotes because some of us take our time graduating. I stayed around for another year, still attending rehearsals and performing, while I started university. Gabby, my batchmate, stayed a lot longer. We used to joke that he could not camouflage among the children anymore. We did drag our feet a little like Joni said.
To be honest, I wanted to stay even longer. While it took effort to attend rehearsals after school or to do makeup schoolwork when we missed class for concerts, singing with Cherubim felt like a refuge. A week didn’t feel complete without rehearsals, concerts always offered exciting experiences, and summer camps marked another year of growing up.
I think half the good manners I have was learned through the summer camps. From packing lightly and helping in the “baggage chain”, to greeting everyone I meet and making sure members at the end of the buffet line get enough to eat. Those habits could have been learned at home, of course, but being in the group put me in more situations where I could learn.
In 2004, for example, we went on a Southern Tagalog Tour instead of the usual camp for studying new music. We met so many people from Angono to Lipa, we had to interact with children, nuns and priests, other artists, even politicians. We had to move around a lot, and we stayed at accommodations that were unlike our usual. If you were picky as a kid, that summer would have tested your guts.
During one stop, we had the chance to sing for the celebration of the Turumba Festival in Pakil, Laguna. We arrived the day before the festival, so we had to sleep in town. We had to sleep at the kumbento, in a huge room with no beds. The room had religious artwork on every wall and corner, yet the staff and parents who came with us managed to keep around 40 children from offending the holiness of the place.
I have many more stories like this. There were also exciting television appearances from singing for Disney Channel, singing atop the Manila Peninsula with Regine Velasquez to welcome the new millennium, and singing for the awarding of National Artists. As time passed, they became cool stories to remember and which we find ourselves talking about during reunions or chance meetings among old friends.
It was a very colorful time of our lives and personally, I reach for those memories when life starts to feel bleak. My age is almost double of sixteen now, and boy, it can get scary sometimes. If you asked me at sixteen how I imagined being 32 would be, I would have told you all my plans of having children, buying a big house, or having my nth degree. Well, I found out that it’s not that easy.
We are now at a point of our lives where we know we have grown a lot, but we are still trying to figure things out in this scarier world that we live in. We know for sure what kind of people we are, what we believe in, and what we stand for. We do our best, but it gets scary when we are faced with bigger and bigger decisions with seemingly lesser and lesser time.
I guess that is why whenever there is an opportunity to sing together again, it feels a lot like coming back home. Singing with old friends is like having a hand patting my back telling me that I can take a rest. And I guess that is what treasured memories also do. They remind us of the challenges we have overcome, the friends we’ve made, and the lessons we’ve learned. Although the same memories bring some bittersweet yearning for the simpler life behind us, they are proof of the passing of time and the assurance of better things ahead.
When our Cherubim batch first got together as an alumni group for a reunion concert, we named ourselves In Transit. We eventually regrouped as Matag Lakang—Cebuano for ‘step-by-step’, which I think removed pressure from the name but kept the idea of moving. It feels like you can breathe on your way to wherever life leads you. Because how does a successful life even look like? Maybe that is really up to each one of us, in each step we take.
Tita Joni said the same, through these lyrics:
So the years spin by and now the boy is twenty
Though his dreams have lost some grandeur coming true
There’ll be new dreams, maybe better dreams, and plenty
Before the last revolving year is through
Cheers to new dreams, maybe better dreams, and plenty. To the hope of singing more in the future, too.
