attention around harvest time, you will be short a lot of grains of millet. They’re so hungry we call them ‘hungry ghosts’,” he said, meaning gluttonous.
“I never did like getting yelled at, so I learned me how to look hard, and I became very sensitive to the hungry ghost. Kids today are all lazy, not like in the past. Not like us kids who were true Paiwan. When my family started to plant millet, I had to go up the mountain every day to take care of it. I left before the sun had risen and I had to walk. At noon I cooked some rice that I had brought. And in the afternoon I had to wait until the sun had set before I could come home.
“Tending the millet used to be kids’ work. Going on harvest time, they used to take bamboo poles with iron cans and strips of fabric tied to them and go into the millet field and wave them around. To scare away the birds. You had to go wherever the birds flew to with your pole, to keep them flying, or better, keep them out. In the past birds were less afraid of people, but they were dumb, not like birds today who have all gone to school. Birds today’re keener. They’re afraid of traps in the millet and don’t dare to fly right in. They only fly down when they sure it’s safe.”
“Grandpa, why do you want to plant the millet?” I asked.
Grandpa said, “I’ll give you another reason. I’m planting the millet so I can return to when I was a boy. Now I’m old, but I can see the millet that I planted. I feel a sense of accomplishment. I remember the past. It makes me think of the friends I had when I was a boy, chasing away the birds and playing in the field.
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