My friend Luz

I grew up in a barrio where your achievements are magnified because of people who are proud of your success. Because everybody in our small community has a story of humble beginnings, trust that one person’s big or small success is celebrated by well-meaning friends.

In Gulod, a coastal barangay in Cabuyao, Laguna, I had a childhood friend named Zosie Lustre who taught me how to ride the bicycle. One summer, we took her father’s BMX and she taught me how to pedal and balance on the narrow streets of Gulod. It was in the early ‘80s and the roadsides where populated by the unruly uray (thorny weeds that grew like hedgerows). I learned to bike, of course. And the deep scratches, courtesy of the uray weeds that caught my every fall, were the remembrances of my success in learning a new skill.

It helped that Zosie’s sister, Luz, cared enough not to allow me to go home without her treating my wounds with Merthiolate or “gamot na pula” (tincture iodine). The Merthiolate was scalding my wound but the pain was no match to my joy of learning how to bike.

Years went by. Gulod — sandwiched by Laguna Bay in the east and the vast rice fields in the west, and outlined from afar by surrounding mountains of Bundok ng Susong Dalaga, Mount Makiling and the ridge of Tagaytay — remained bucolic.  It became the backdrop for the beautiful friendship I shared with Sozie, then with her youngest brother Cezar. And when all of us became busy with our own work, I developed a beautiful and meaningful friendship with Luz, the lady who treated my wounds. Eventually, Luz’s whole family — from her parents, siblings, nephews and nieces down to her husband Jimmy and only child Jamile — became my friends, too. But always, always, it was Luz who would gel us all together.

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Luz was — with apologies to Frosty The Snowman — a jolly, happy soul. She never failed to make me feel loved with her unique antics. For example, she would send me a text message on a Friday night: “Please have breakfast in the house tomorrow. I will have your sinalab (grilled) na ayungin and tawilis prepared with sawsawang patis, kalamansi at siling labuyo.” She knew my weakness, so as early as 6 o’clock in the morning of Saturday, I was already singing my way to their compound in our neighborhood. The whole family would joyfully awake to my presence as one by one, we filled the dining table set up in the yard of their home. We were still eating breakfast and already Luz was giving orders to Delpha, her trusted kasambahay, to prepare lunch.

While eating sinalab na ayungin and tawilis, Luz loved to ruminate on the past. Her favorite story was how she and some of her brothers would wake up before dawn to go to the shore and go up a fisherman’s banca for a chance to get shrimps and biya for free from a mound of suso. Suso (small snails) were abundant in the lake. Fishermen from our barrio gathered them fresh early morning because the suso would be the staple food of the ducks raised by almost every household in the village in those days. Every duck raiser in our barrio knew that the livestock yielded the most number of eggs when the ducks were fed with suso. 

Luz loved to talk about that experience, in front of her nephews and nieces, to prove to them that when we were growing up, things were not presented to us in a silver platter. She aspired to help put more food on their table and she succeeded — by virtue of patiently courting her dreams and having sheer determination — to become the area manager of Jollibee for Southern Luzon. She never got tired talking about how hard life was before even if as she spoke she was planning a trip to this and that country with her family.

Just when we were all savoring the remembrances of a delectable breakfast, the table was being set again for lunch. Luz would not take no for an answer so she “barricaded” me not leave my spot in the dining table. Many times, we would be joined by Olet Lontoc, her funny best friend and makeup artist in our community. Soon, a lunch of piping hot sinigang, inihaw na bangus, crabs, prawns was served.

“Dito ka na mag-dinner,” Luz would tell me after lunch.

“Aba Luz, may bahay din ako. May magulang din akong naghihintay,” would be my reply. Luz would laugh heartily at my retort.

Every time I would eat in their house, she would not let me go without handing me bananas — not a piling but a buwig of bananas. One time, she saw me walking on the street, waved at me to come inside their compound because she wanted me to taste the sweetest jackfruit. I already ate half a kilo of jackfruit yet Luz still insisted that I take home — oh Lord — a whole big jackfruit that was half my size! Luz was very giving, she would not give you a kilo of mangoes or dalanghita. You would be forced to take home a kaing or two. My grateful heart was the repository of every kindness she accorded me.

Luz had a big heart. She loved to patronize the ambulant vendors peddling fruits, vegetables, meat, fish and other ware in our community. She didn’t haggle with them because “Konti lang naman ang tinutubo nila, tatawaran ko pa?” was her personal mantra. She never haggled with them.

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But early this year, her family, friends and colleagues wanted to haggle with God for Luz’s life. For quite a while, she was treated in the hospital for her diabetes and asthma and the complications that came with them. Last Jan. 16, her 55-year-old jolly, happy soul chose to be unleashed and have a date with God. Her passing broke many hearts. Including mine. Including Ruth Corugda’s heart. Ruth, from being a janitor in a Jollibee store, is now an assistant restaurant manager in a branch of Jollibee in Batangas. “I achieved this because Ma’am Luz helped me, taught me, guided me, trained me and molded me. I was like her daughter; she was my mother who did not give up on me, who was always behind me.” 

Jollibee Foods Corp. president Joseph Tan Buntiong, brother of Jollibee founder Tony Tan Caktiong, and other ranking executives of Jollibee came to pay their last respects for Luz and said a word or two on how Luz touched their hearts — and how she would be dearly missed and how much of a loss she was to the company she served for 20 years and six months. Until the day she died, according to Ruth, Luz, forever the light of her family and friends, was still thinking of Jollibee, the company she loved with her whole heart. And if the snaking, kilometers-long funeral cortege that brought her from the church in Cabuyao to her resting place in Gulod, the barrio she was always proud of, was any indication, Luz was loved until the end.

Jimmy, Luz’s husband who works in the Middle East, was profuse with gratitude to those who offered prayers for his beloved wife and bereaved with him and the Lustre-Villanueva family. His grown-up daughter Jamile, an entrepreneur, expressed it poignantly in her eulogy: “Thank you for loving my mom. I will miss her every day because I will always be in need of my mom’s love every day. Thank you to those who have promised to play the role of a mother to me. I will always find my Mommy in the love that you gave her.”

In her passing, one wound is left in me that Luz would never be able to heal with her Merthiolate again. But my heart will always remember her kindness and it is this kindness that will heal me — that will heal many of us whose lives she was able to touch.

Godspeed, Luz, my jolly, happy friend.

(For your new beginnings, please e-mail me at bumbaki@yahoo.com. I’m also on Twitter @bum_tenorio and Instagram @bumtenorio. Have a blessed Sunday!)