Remembering the past
In the 93rd anniversary celebration of this paper, I was asked to look back. Here was how I remembered a distant event.
While the parents of my lovely lady Carmen were Tagalogs, I myself have not become a great lover of the Tagalog tongue. Just the same, from my Pilipino high school teacher in UV Mrs. Elisa Manalo, I remember a Tagalog proverb. Today, however, I only happen to recall its rough English translation. “He who looks back deep into the past, looks further beyond into the future.”
This morning, I speak using the American language and not the Tagalog because I have become a dual citizen. For more than fifty years I have held unto being a proud Filipino citizen but since September 2010, when my muscles began to sag and cling to my brittle and aging bones, I have become a citizen of the world of the senior. It is a testament to my old age that I remember what happened many years ago clearer than those that took place fairly recently.
People call it senility for me to keep on recalling, over and over again, what happened on November 1982. I have become senile, the kind of ailment that old men like me are sick with.
You see, there was then an early morning English newscast over Radio Station DYRC. The newscaster was Mr. Jun Kintanar. In his booming voice, he reported that the staff of the newspaper, The Freeman, packed their bags in the black canopy of the unsuspecting evening that just passed, jumped their ship of many years, and changed loyalties. In a move that was believed designed to ensure the increasing and unmistakable crescendo of The Freeman’s funeral dirge, those staffers hideously signed a compact to murder The Freeman, bury it in an unmarked grave and leave nothing, not even a stone, to identify its final resting place.
Of course, it was not the very way the news was written. As I replay the event to you, I have consciously added unto the story the pain that my young heart felt. Sadly, I know of no better way. The old man in me has added words that were not present in the text as it was read by renowned newscaster, on air, then but in all candidness the message, shorn of its emotional context and freed from its indignant character, was disturbingly similar. Ah yes, it was the very way I perceived the news was.
I was a struggling young lawyer craving to earn my remote place in the arena of great legal practitioners. Conscious of my own limitations, I hurriedly took my glass of milk which served as my breakfast that morning, and headed, not for the courtroom to do legal jousts, but to a very unusual direction, a very unfamiliar destination. I was going to the residence of owner of the school where I earned my legal spurs. I was unsure though if I would be allowed even just beyond the gates of the house that, in the 60s, was described as among the most beautiful in this side of the world. But, the pain that was somehow inflicted in my heart by the wicked news report, pushed me to dimensions of courage I never knew I ever had.
Luckily, the dominant silence that characterized the residence of Sir Dodong yielded to my impertinence. I was led inside a veritable palace. Oh my gosh what a lovely house it was! I have never seen anything like it before in my whole life. But, ladies and gentlemen, I was not there to marvel at its beauty. I went to his home for a mission I did not know yet what! When I finally met Sir Dodong, I mustered my courage to mumble words whose meaning I did not actually comprehend. I said, “Sir, I am reporting for duty. What is your marching order?” or words to that effect.
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