once upon a time ...part 3

Monyang and nana Talen never had any children. Nana Talen however had a few relatives who worked with her in the store. One of them was Esperanza or Esper for short. She was so pretty that she was crowned as Miss Asingan during one town fiesta.

She was the store cashier for a long time.She alternated shifts with nana Talen..Esper was nice and sweet to me but other times she would snap at me, ready to bite my head off. This is especially when I did not return the coke bottles on time. Those days, Coke was known as Coca Cola. Same with Pepsi Cola. The other popular pop drinks were Royal Tru Orange, Cosmos Sarsaparillia and some others. Each time you buy coke, you would pay only 10 centavos or 15, but you have to return the empties the next time you buy again. But sometimes I do not return them on time hoarding 5 or 8 bottles at home.And so Esper would get cross at me demanding the empties ASAP.. And  because of my addiction to chocolates, I keep coming back to the store.

I remember the time when there was a promotion for Coca Cola. There is a special crown which featured a drawing of a small coke bottle in the cap under the cork lining. We used to call it TANSAN . If you save 10 of these marked crowns, you can redeem them for a set of 24 miniature sized coca cola bottles set inside a miniature Coca Cola case. The marked crowns can be redeemed from the Coca Cola truck that comes every Tuesdays and Fridays. If you just buy at random, it takes forever to gather 10 marked crowns. But I discovered that the color of the marked crown is yellowish ( the inside of the crown which is unpainted) compared to the greenish hue of the unmarked ones. So each time I buy Coca Cola, I first raise the bottle and carefully peek the color of the tansan which you can see through the bottle. Several times, when I buy a coke, I would raise the bottle, take a look, then put it back when the tansan is greenish. "What the heck are you doing??" Esper would sometimes ask visibly annoyed.." Oh nothing, just checking something.." I never told her my secret otherwise she might keep all the marked bottles for herself. I remember I collected so many of those souvenier bottles and cases and I proudly displayed them in our living room. Those were pretty!

 

After I graduated from Grade 6 from Dupac Intermediate school, , I seldom go there anymore because I started to attend First year High Schooll at the Rizal Junior College. Two tragedies also befell Monyang: first is the attempted midnight robbery on the CONO which cost the life of one of his employees. The second one is the big fire that burned the whole CONO to the ground. I was at home when these events occured. However these will be treated in another entry..