Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

Elpidio Quirino succeeded Manuel Roxas as president upon the latter’s death on April of 1948. My aunt tells me of flowers dropping from an airplane during the president’s funeral and I am not sure if it was a child’s imagination playing on me, but such a scenario persists in my memory as if I actually saw it. I guess every kid has a kaleidoscope of one’s earliest insights. This must have started my awareness of nation building and curiosity about politics.


I recall the day when my mother took me for a walk some two corners away from the quonset hut. She showed me a house that was being built. I suppose she had to explain what it was as that was the first time I ever saw something being built. I recall seeing the wooden structures and the carpenters working on the trusses of the roofing. Mother said we were building a new house. “We” turned out to be just her, my father and me. I never gave it a thought why my grandmother and aunts did not move would us then.

When playing with the alphabet blocks Herman sent me from the U.S. I would see the workmen working on the trusses. Much later, when I came across J.D. Salinger’s story which was first published in The New Yorker on November 1955“ the same backdrop of my early childhood flashed back in my mind. To this time and age, “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” still does.


And so we moved to our new home, me and my parents, even if some of the finishing work remains to be done. One of the windows did not have shutters and for a while, we covered it with a canvass to keep the rain out. We had no door locks so my father improvised using a metal oar, one of those the military used to paddle inflated rafts, to bar the door. A very humble house indeed, but it was our own and my parents were proud of it.