Still groovy after all these years

It must be the times we graduated because ours was not just a reunion for the sake of kissing each other’s cheeks and noting who has gained 100 pounds in the last so many years. Oh yes, we did that, too, noting as well how the girls in my batch were getting younger and the boys seemed to be getting older so much quickly. The girls were beginning to land in the society pages of the Sunday newspaper supplements, having married well, in the Jane Austen sense. And the boys, who used to be cute, were growing bellies and beginning to lose their hair.

But we also met to raise funds for our educational projects: to help upgrade the level of teaching in the country’s selected public schools. In effect, it meant teacher-training, book donating, and gathering together our unused computers and giving them to the public schools, for them to be wired in this age when information came at the speed of light.

They also asked me to write something for our souvenir program, revolving around the line, “Still Groovy After All These Years.” So I said that our lives had always been groovy, if not nervy. After all, we started our university studies in 1979, when the President was bullshitting the country through his decrees and the First Lady was buying Picassos and NY penthouses left and right. The elections for the National Assembly had just been rigged, with the fractious Opposition (the Opposition has always been fractious, in all countries, across the centuries) losing to the team of the First Lady and her obscure allies. But let us forget, in the meantime, the politicians. They would always stink, they would always be furry, they would always be there, like cockroaches. Only their faces would change, for son would take over the post of the father, and mother would warm the seat of the daughter, down the line of mongreldom.

Our History professor asked the most mind-boggling questions like, “What was the height of national hero Doctor Jose Rizal?” I was fortunate to remember Doctor Rizal’s height. When I was in high school, we went on a field trip to Fort Santiago where Doctor Rizal was imprisoned before he was shot by musketry at Bagumbayan on a calm morning. I noted that Doctor Rizal was as tall as my mother, so I wrote the answer in my exam paper: “Five feet, four inches tall.” Correct.

But then, the next question was, “What was the name of Doctor Rizal’s dog in Dapitan, where he was sent into exile by the Spanish authorities?” What the hell do I care? I thought to myself, at this volley of silly questions. But of course, I had to give an answer, and so I wrote, “Bantay.” I could almost hear the buzzer in the quiz show on television going “Ngeeeeee!” The correct answer was “Usman.”

We also had a Literature professor who was taught by Robert Penn Warren in the United States. When our professor was teaching us Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “The Eagle,” he stood on a chair, raised both hands as if they were wings, tucked his face out, and recited the whole poem from memory. I was surprised to see my professor looming in front of me, birdlike, his wide nostrils flaring such that I thought I could already see bits of his brain through his nose!

We also had a Creative Writing professor who, when he was teaching us Rainier Maria Rilke’s poem, “The Spanish Dancer,” turned on his cassette recorder to a tape of a Spanish flamenco music, picked up his castanets from his table, and began twirling and clacking the castanets round and round while reciting Rilke’s immortal lines. Then he ended his passionate performance with a stomp of the foot and a crisp, “Ole!”

I could never do that, not in ten lifetimes.

We also had a History professor named Father Lenny, SJ, who would bring an armful of books and dump them on his table before the start of every class. He would then talk about historian Barbara Tuchman’s books, The Guns of August and The Proud Tower, with such easy familiarity as if she just lived down the road. Then he added: “When I am dead, these are the books I want to see on my chest.”

Father Lenny made boring history come alive before our eyes. He said: “I was a young boy growing up in Maryland when I saw the footage of the Nazi occupation of Europe. Such cruelty you will never find elsewhere. That is why I cannot understand the biblical injunction about to turn the other cheek, or to give a piece of bread to someone who has just cast a stone at you. Why, if a Nazi soldier cast a stone at me,” the priest added, his blue eyes widening and the vein on his temples beginning to throb, “then, I would pick up a rock and throw it at him.”

Oh, we remember all of them, our professors cranky, weird, and memorable, some of them beloved even, as we now move on into our lives as doctors and gentlemen farmers, businessmen and non-profit organization workers, professors and jet-setters, stock brokers and real-estate brokers, politicians and socialites, homemakers and peacemakers.

Statistics from the Placement Office indicated that many of our alumni are doing social-development work, breaking out of the mold that was hip and fashionable in the 1970s. We were educated by brilliant Jesuits with whisky in their breath. Our husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, did not love us all the time. We wished we were taller, slimmer, sexier, richer. But at the back of our minds, we seemed to sense that, perhaps, this life is enough.

Our bones were not yet brittle and our teeth were not yet falling off. Our pores could still feel the coolness in the air. We could still sashay to Dancing Queen and jiggle to Rock Lobster. We could tell our children, both natural-born and adopted, our nephews and nieces, that our lives were not wasted after all.

You could even call us “groovy” again (Jesus, that word is so 1970s.) Yes, I guess we are still groovy after all these years.

* * *

Comments can be sent to [email protected]