An obit, a wish

The most that the rest of us mortals could do upon learning about Bro. Andrew Gonzalez’s death was say a prayer or two for the repose of his immortal soul, and reminisce a bit about the time he was our teacher more than 10 years ago at La Salle graduate school, Saturdays for three hours 8 to 11 a.m.

There never was a dull moment in Bro. Andrew’s class, in fact I would have recommended that anyone who had the slightest inclination toward the teaching profession should enroll in his class, because never in my whole life have I encountered a teacher having as much fun as his students. He really took seriously the vocation of the original St. La Salle teacher and Christian brother, whose duty it was to spread the word through the gospel of secular teaching.

Now where did that come from? Let it be known at the outset that the good brother had his faults, but I am not really privy to these because I only saw him every Saturday morning for three months in the year 1995. It was the same year I left DLSU after working at the university press for three years. But after enrolling in the good brother’s class, I realized that not a minute of my stay there at Taft editing proofs for various textbooks and tradebooks was wasted.

The class he taught had something to do with linguistics, but I wouldn’t go so far to say that he was, as Austin Powers would put it, a cunning linguist. More likely, he was a linguist who liked linguini, a true gourmet or is it gourmand or whatever you call it. Among my classmates was Nikki Palanca Quirino, whose married name is now Abalos, no relation to the Mandaluyong posse. Also a girl named Shalimar, whose last name I forget, but Brother once remarked how her name derived from a Hebrew or is it Jewish holiday, whatever.

Class always began with a prayer led by Brother, so that our mostly atheistic souls would be somehow enlightened and pulled over a bit to the light side. He would close his eyes and clasp his hands in prayer, and we would follow suit standing up and bowing our heads, sometimes taking a peek if he too would inadvertently open his eyes before prayer was ended.

The guy simply never ran out of stories. He may have already been connected with the Manila Bulletin at the time because he kept harping on the poor basic grammar of most broadsheets. "What newspapers need are good proofreaders!" he would expound on the elevated front portion of the classroom, dominated by the huge desk that was a teacher’s fortress. He would proceed to give examples of usual newspaper boners, like neglecting to put an article before the word majority or minority, or the pronoun’s gender mistakenly adopting that of the direct object, which for one reason or another still manage to slip through in this day and age.

He would also express befuddlement with the seeming obsession with sports on campus, notably the special treatment given athletes. While he did not say it outright, we got the impression that a university’s mettle is not measured by how well it performed in the UAAP. I can’t help but wonder what his take would have been about the recent controversy La Salle was involved in concerning ineligible players in his basketball team, but we suspect that he would merely dismiss it with a smirk as if to say, "Didn’t I tell you?"

My term paper – the course’s main requirement and which we had to do a kind of oral report on beforehand as a kind of appetizer – had to do with the linguistics of child talk, since the two youngest members of the household at the time were learning the rudiments of speaking, mainly Tagalog and English, some Cebuano. We would walk the elder child to the pre-school at the end of the street in Singalong, with the younger tot tagging along learning his steps too still clad in disposable diapers. I had a lot of fun detailing and observing the development of word structures of the two kids, the interchanged letters that would make for instant puns, the missing diphthongs, the guttural response of the regurgitated baby milk.

Never had I more fun putting together a more or less formal term paper, the nightmare of English II class in college finally set aside. I doubt though if Brother Andrew had as much fun, because sometimes you had to hear the words to believe them, and much is lost in translating what your toddler kids say into the black and white of a university term paper complete with footnotes and references both obtuse and abstruse, including French philosophers and the whole postmodern gang. He gave me a 3.5.

On the afternoon of his death, I received a missed call from another former teacher at La Salle, Dr. Isagani Cruz, to advise the news-desk that Bro. Andrew was about to pass on to the great beyond. It was Isagani who took me into DLSU Press, which enabled me to enroll in graduate school under Bro. Andrew’s class.

Bro. Andrew’s birthday fell on Feb. 29, so that it was just a month short of his 66th birthday when he passed on. But in his lifetime he celebrated his actual birthday only 15 times, the last in 2004, year of the Athens Olympics. I know of only one other person who has the same birth-date, the Greek poet and Nobel prizewinner George Seferis. There is a line Seferis wrote: "Give me your hands, give me your hands, give me your hands."

Maybe he was referring to Brother Andrew, who gave more than his hands to the life of teaching, and whose wish may be nothing more than to continue teaching in the afterlife.