Gwammy

My mom was a young girl at the onset of World War II, and she experienced the harsh hard life first-hand, having been caught in the stampede at the Ateneo de Manila Campus in Padre Faura, while running around the Ermita and PGH area during the Battle for the Liberation of Manila.  After the war, she worked for the Philippine Art Gallery and thereafter worked with the Chevrolet division of Yutivo, where she met Kong Kong.  She is the original twinkletoe in the family, and it is because of this genetic trait that we find ourselves hard to stay put in one place.  While we traveled on short trips as a family around Asia, she twice found herself traipsing around the United States for several months all by herself (in the seventies and in the nineties), and that was really her thing as she got to visit friends and family on her own itinerary (we simply cannot rush her to follow our schedules).  She can take the extreme positions in any discussion, either right of left wing, and this really depends on how things were brought to her attention--she is hard as steel on the outside, and soft as mushy marshmallow on this inside.  She is sucker for sale items--any bargain is her happiness!  I love her cooking and learned a lot from culinary expertise, which is sometimes defined by my sisters as the "throw-it-in" style.  Her witty sense of shallow humor propels her creativeness in inventing new concepts, like the all-purpose words "liray" and "liray-lay" which, frankly, I don't understand myself.  Sometimes I can still hear her parting words of advice dispensed daily (as I would bid my morning farewell to school)--"Stop, Look and Listen!" or "Look before you leap!" or the more direct-to-the-point "Huwag Kang Tatanga-tanga!"

Hahaha.... That's Gwammy for you!