A Cloud Seeker’s Story

My illustrator, Russel Wayne, once asked me how I came up with the idea for the children’s picture book series called “The Cloud Seekers”. Since he’s done such a great job with the project, I thought I owed him the story behind the story.

I was born in Manila Philippines in 1966. My family lived in the heart of Manila, a town called Binondo, very near the Chinatown and walking distance to the Spanish Colonial “walled city” of Intramuros. My parents, brothers, sisters and I all lived in a bodega-style home. Bodega homes are what the English call “flats”, and what New Yorkers call “apartments”, mostly three floors or more, depending on the block. There are no backyards, no front yards, and no grass whatsoever. If one house burns, then the entire block burns down. It was a very metropolitan way of life.

Our house was owned by my grandmother, who lived solely on the third floor. Her bedroom had access to the corrugated metal roofs of these bodegas. My family, all eight of us, lived entirely in an L-shaped bedroom on the second floor. My aunt and her family, all nine of them, lived on the first floor. I never realized it at the time, but that’s how most Filipinos lived, even to this day. It’s a system called the “extended family”, where almost the entire clan lives under one roof. I’m pretty sure it’s something we took from the Spaniards, but I could be wrong.

The Philippines is a tropical group of islands in the far eastern part of Asia. The weather has two seasons, wet and dry. There is no winter, spring nor fall, just a hot and humid summer six months out of the year The other six is what’s termed the “rainy” season. Floods and typhoons are very common during the rainy season.

The rainy season was my favorite time of year growing up. I used to love taking showers in the rain. Yes, it rained hard enough where you can bring a soap and washcloth outside and take a shower like you would, well, in a shower. During the rains, streets would always flood like rivers. I loved racing boats on the streets, just below the sidewalks. Not real boats, but ones my childhood friends and I made, from old rubber flip-flop slippers. Once in a while, some very crafty kid would carve one out of wood, but only to lose it in the sewers! Then there’s cloud seeking.

I still remember that very early experience on the rooftop, just above my grandmother’s bedroom. It was circa 1971. I was about five years old. It was just another typical afternoon after the rains and for some reason the sky was full of “things”. I remember there was about a dozen of us on the roof. My brothers, sisters, parents and cousins were all on the roof staring at the clouds. I was only five but I still remember all the things we saw that afternoon. There was a heart, rabbit, a dog, a car, a couple of faces, an umbrella, and a really huge ship. Actually, it was a barge. Rectangular in shape, and it moved across the sky, like a real barge would on a river. I remember all of us were counting all the different things we saw, and for some crazy reason, the number fourteen is still very vivid. I was barely starting to learn to count, so I remember the number fourteen being the count that day. After that, we went cloud seeking many more times, but never ever got as high as finding fourteen things!

A couple of years later, in 1974, my mother migrated to America all by herself. She was our so-called “Lewis and Clark” of the family. It was her sole idea to find a better cloud in the sky. A year later, it was my father. Then another year later it was my eldest sister. Then in 1977, my older brother, my other older sister, and I arrived in Los Angeles. My two younger brothers followed suit in 1978.

I was eleven when I arrived in America. I always said that I was raised in Manila, and grew up in Los Angeles. The clouds aren’t quite as lively in Los Angeles, but the inspiration has never left me. I still consider myself a true cloud seeker. I am dedicating the first book of “The Cloud Seekers” to my mother, Mercedes Calixto. She was the dreamer and adventurer of the family. She always looked beyond the silver lining and always found real things in the clouds. In my book, she was the original cloud seeker.

Rober L. Calixto
October 22, 2009

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A Cloud Seeker's Stories

A Cloud Seeker’s Story