bottomless mais con yelo
& a bottomless amount of maybes
Until I turned three, I lived in the apartment my parents lived in when they studied in Sampaloc, Manila.
My parents both studied at UST, where after completing their undergraduate degrees in the same university, my mom pursued law and my dad studied medicine. I was born years after my parents both finished their graduate/post-baccalaureate studies as the second child. We didn’t have that much money at the time since my parents were both fresh out of their studies.
During this time, my dad was only one year into practicing as a urologic surgeon, and my dad’s work was all the way in San Pedro, Laguna, where we live now. My mom was working in a law firm near our apartment. At home, taking care of infant me and my 4-year-old brother was our yaya whom we lovingly called our Ate Mayeth. Ate Mayeth didn’t cook very well, she was quite young when she lived with us. She’d cook hotdog and rice, fried egg, or make us my brother and I’s favorite, pancit canton with rice. I was not allowed nor brought outside often, so the food I usually had were packaged and processed food, including my favorite snacks: Inipit bars, Stik-O, and Clover chips.
It was on Sundays that my parents were both available. From being in front of the TV all day or answering Kumon homework on weekdays, we spent Sundays playing with my older brother’s toy guns, reading books together, and eating my mom’s mais con yelo. I remember sitting at the table as a toddler looking at my mom fill a huge plastic pitcher with a chunk of ice, crushing it with a giant white plastic mixing spoon. She’d spend long minutes crushing the ice since we did not have an ice crusher, but also because she preferred it that way so the ice chunks were bigger. After, she pours Alaska condensed milk and canned corn into the pitcher and crushes it again. Et voila, a sweet white and yellow drink with unevenly crushed ice and mushed corn that excites me each time.
Sundays were hot then, and not so gloomy as they are today. The air felt a lot lighter on Sundays and our home looked a lot brighter, and there we were, sitting around the dinner table, listening to the radio, having what seemed like unlimited rounds of mais con yelo that mom prepared. As the days and months went by, I got older and more capable of doing different things. With that, every Sunday, as my mom goes down to the kitchen to crush ice again, I run to her and take the mixing spoon from her to help her out while she cooks and prepares the rest of our merienda: sometimes lumpia, sometimes flower-cut hotdog and marshmallows, sometimes ulam, but always mais con yelo.
To be honest, mais con yelo was not the best food from my childhood. I’ve had my share of Tropical Hut burgers, Jollibee fries, and the bananacue from the ihawan across the street, but there was something about mom’s mais con yelo that made me look forward to it all the time. Maybe it was the company that came with the corn drink, the feeling of security that came with it since each time we had it, the family was all together. Maybe it was because of the labor that came with it — crushing the ice was a tough job! I always found myself with sore hands after helping out my mom as the spoon we had would always slip from the ice. Maybe it was because it felt nice to have mom hold my hands while I held the spoon and crushed the ice and that my dad would tell me “Good job!” afterward (I was a clingy child, and I would often hug my mom’s arm too tight whenever we’d go out because I was too afraid to get lost). Maybe it was because my parents both came from a yellow school and I felt more connected to them that way, having a yellow drink at an apartment near that yellow school. Maybe I just liked mais con yelo.
Things are a lot different now. We’re three now among my siblings, but my little brother was too young to experience our weekly mais con yelo-making. Sundays look a lot darker and gloomier. My parents are even busier now and so are my siblings and I, our free time—even Sundays—spent with our heads faced down at our devices instead of at each other. I feel a lot more disconnected from my parents, especially since I chose to pursue a different path and university from what they wanted for me. Maybe this is what comes with coming older, maybe this is because of the digital age or new generation. Maybe we were meant to grow apart.
Maybe we just need to make mais con yelo again.