Bread of Salt and Summer Solstice

Bread of salt basically gives us the story of a young boy who has feelings for a rich classmate. The story emphasizes how the boy really wanted to tell the girl, Aida how he feels. Unfortunately, he was not able to go through his little tactics. The boy excelled in music and one night, their band was going to play for the family gathering of Aida. The boy finally thought that this was going to be his chance to finally let out his feelings. During the break, he went over to the table filled with a lot of food. He decided to take some of the egg yolk dessert and hide it under his shirt then suddenly, a voice from behind him said “if you wait a bit after the party, I can have them give you the leftovers.” This remark really affected the boy. After the party, even if he just ate he decided to buy pandesal. Pandesal was also emphasizes in the story as something he and his family usually ate. He was also assigned the job to buy and he really took it seriously. We can infer that that the pandesal acted as a symbol to the young boy, it woke him up from his dream of wanting things above and greater then him. In the end, despite being full from the feast he had he knew that nothing tastes better then pandesal.

Summer Solstice gives us a view of the “tadtarin” or St. John’s feast. It explains to the readers how the feast usually takes place and how the people usually react. The major character, Dona Lupeng is shown as a woman who looks down on other people, she believes she is higher then most people as we saw in the first scene in the feast. She also believes that she should act a certain way. In the end, she realized through the remark of her husbands nephew the she should be adored and not just respected. She wanted the feeling of being wanted by her husband.

Both stories show how at the end the major characters went back to what they truly feel. Dona Lupeng wanted to act how she thought is supposed to be distinguished yet she voiced out her concerns about how she believes her husband should look at her and the boy who wanted to act differently for Aida but he went back to the pandesal he truly loves and gives him a sense of similarity.