A Consequential Postcard

Madrid, Spain: This evening, while going through stacks of boxes at the basement of her home, my sister Heidi stumbled upon an old postcard from the early 1920s. She excitedly emailed it to me here in Madrid, on the eve of my flight back to the United States after having returned to Spain only last week. The yellowing postcard on one side bears an unsigned and undated handwritten note to a U.S. naval officer in Maryland. On the flip side is a picture of an infant, lying on his side near his milk bottle.

The postcard carries a brief note: “To the Commanding Officer U.S.S. Reina Mercedes Annapolis Maryland,” it begins. “Please look at the son E. G. Ramos. This was taken at his age of 4 months and 6 days.” A left marginal note, hardly legible, ends with the word “baptized.” I think the full phrase used by the postcard sender is “Just baptized.”

Why is this postcard so important to me, to my sister and to my whole clan? Well, quite simply, this little piece of paper was responsible for our being born into this world. The postcard writer happens to be my grandmother, and the baby in the picture is my uncle, Eliodoro Ramos Jr., who who died at the prime of his life after being wounded by a Japanese sniper he was trying to smoke out of a foxhole in one of the fiercest battles in the liberation of Negros Island in the Philippines in 1945.

The postcard was written and mailed in the early 1920s to the commanding officer of my grandfather who was serving in the U.S. Navy. His mother had coerced him to leave the Philippines and to go to the United States to prevent him from marrying Francesca, my maternal grandmother, whom he had gotten pregnant and had secretly married. Desperate, my grandmother sent the postcard to my grandfather’s commanding officer, hoping at least to tug at his heartstrings so that he could show the picture of their newborn child to her elusive husband Eliodoro. My great grandmother was opposed to the relationship between her son Eliodoro and Francesca for, like any mother of her generation, she nurtured big dreams for her only son. She saw Francesca, a schoolteacher who learned English from the Thomasites, as a stumbling block to her dreams.

But beyond Francesca’s wildest expectations, the naval officer immediately discharged my grandfather from service, advising him to go back to the Philippines to take care of his young family. By then, my grandfather had served in the Panama Canal while pursuing a law degree through correspondence school. At sea, he also pursued his first love as an artist: sketching silhouettes using charcoal as a medium.

Upon his return to the Philippines, he settled into a life of domesticity and managed the vast landholdings of his family, including sugarcane farms owned by a brother of his mother, one of which is now a nature preserve in Central Negros, named after Rafael Salas, a cousin who became the first director of the U.N. Population Fund in 1969. Eliodoro Jr. was followed by a daughter, Eva (my mother), who was born in 1925, and six other siblings. At the start of the Second World War, my uncle Eliodoro joined the United States Army Forces Far East under General Douglas MacArthur. It was in the Army where he had a fateful meeting with my father, who became his commanding officer in the intelligence and counter-intelligence service of the USAFFE, Negros Island Sector. They became fast friends, and it was through him that my father met and fell in love with my mother. But all that would not have been possible if not for this lowly and yellowing postcard.

On my way back to the U.S., my thoughts and prayers are with my dear mother as she hangs on to life, greatly weakened by complications from Parkinson’s disease. This is one postcard I am sure will still bring a smile to her face.

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