Bohol On My Mind

It’s official. The McVies will be in Bohol from Dec. 18, 2006 until Jan. 4, 2007.

When I was a kid in the 70s I hated going home to Bohol. First of all I never grew up there anyway, so I never considered it “my home,” just “my parents’ home.” Back then there was no electricity in our town of Bilar. For a kid that was torture—no TV! At night they bring out gas lanterns, which in turn attracted flying cockroaches and beetles, especially the salagubang which I hated. And when it was going to rain, a swarm of gamu-gamos would flock to the lamps. Ugh. But because we were seven kids, our parents couldn’t afford to bring us to Bohol every year. They would go home without us, but for us that was okay. We were too busy with other stuff.

So I grew up distant from the island. I became very busy with school theater then with work. For me Bohol was just an island where we got our maids.

My romance with the island started at the same time I fell in love with my family all over again. When our maternal grandma died in 2000, she was the last of the grandparents to go. So my mom insisted that we all went home to bury her. My brothers, sisters and cousins were inseparable—we’d go around the island discovering new places. That was a great one-week vacation for us. After that I decided I want to visit Bohol at least once a year. So almost every Christmas and New Year we’d be there, away from the Manila holiday traffic and all that smoke come New Year’s Eve (except last year—Christmas was spent in Baguio, New Year in Bohol).

Lately I’ve been dreaming of spending several months in a year in Bohol. If I can figure out a way of being able to shuttle back and forth between Manila and Bohol, I will. I don’t know what I’ll be doing, but at least I’m sure I’ll still be airing The McVie Show. Well, one can dream for now.