Letter to a son off to college
Hi, hello, been a long time since we drove across town to be tardy for your class, even before the detour caused by the reconstruction work on South Superhighway near corner Quirino Ave., meant to fix a shaky bridge. July’s the month of your 18th birthday, when this paper turns 24, same month of the 35th multipurpose anniversary of your old man’s UP High Preparatory Class.
What gives numerology, 18, 24, 35, three numbers to bet on the lotto, in any order, the balance of three other numbers left to worry about, maybe from the pages of a book opened at random, the license plates of a passing vehicle as did one past lucky winner. We can all dream of millions, no harm in that, but then again be doubly careful what you wish for.
The year you spend away from home to study in your mom’s home province should be a significant event, likely even life changing. The kindness of barely known relatives, the comfort of newfound friends, these you will discover like a coin shining in the dark of your occasional homesickness for familiar surroundings, your makulit family asking if you’ve eaten, what time will you be home, don’t stay out too late, good luck.
Time for you to learn a new language, if not speak it then to at least understand it well enough so as not to be sold down the river. But kids, teenagers included, have a good ear for these things, are quick to pick up, and I’m sure you won’t have much trouble adjusting to the singsong Cebuano.
Make the effort to visit your lola once in a while, at her age she would treasure a grandson raised in Manila dropping in, and by spending time with her you might better understand where your mom is coming from, in more ways than one. When I was around your age I used to read the newspapers anchorman style to my mother’s mother because her eyesight was failing.
Breathe in the unpolluted air in the town in the southern tip of the island, take a dip early morning at the beach with your cousins or friends, it’s the best way to get the mucus out of your system and rid yourself of old troublesome phlegm. Learn to say grace for tender mercies that come your way.
There will be opportunities for vice I understand, what with the dizzying independence, freedom you have, but be careful not to overdo it. But what am I saying, we all know that adolescence is the age of excess, such that when I think back on the escapades I had in my own teenage wasteland, including a trip to Texas, I often wonder how many years later I’ve come out in a piece. Confidence a bit shaken sure, although still feeling a bit blessed and maybe gratefully tipsy. Never has the saying there will always be someone worse off than you rang truer. This too you will learn, as you never will find the chords of a Cat Stevens song too senti for your taste, unless it’s redone by, say, Sonic Youth, the eerie verse sang a beat or two slower, “It’s not time to make a change…”
Eat well, take your vitamins, read as much as you can in your spare time, don’t forget your studies and to strum the guitar in the odd days. In the year I was away from home as a teenager, in the other side of the world from our beloved ‘Pinas, I remember playing guitar possibly until the ears of my foster family began bleeding bell bottom blues and rock and roll hoochie coo.
It was also the year I started to write, longhand, a skill that might be soon lost to us in the age of computers, cellphones, Internet and Skype. It is another modern-day irony that despite these technological gadgets that have made the world smaller, they can really do little to bridge the distance between us, and I don’t mean just physical distance.
The library became a refuge, not just for the books but also to ogle the girls in their miniskirts and turtlenecks doing their homework, reading, writing down notes, little wonder then how I would later identify with Cesar Ruiz’s persona of a stalker among the stacks, making believe he was Robert Stack. I’ll try texting your spiritual ninong who resides like a herman’s hermit in Taclobo and is both genius and fool, to treat you to a Thai massage on your birthday, or even afterwards.
Come to think of it now, one place I failed to visit during the 35th multipurpose reunion was the library of UP Integrated School, my last year there forfeited for the scholarship in America, which we had all come to look for, but found it in another manner still there in a corner of Katipunan Avenue at nightfall, at the end of the fourth pavilion, down a slope towards the pilapil where a well’s surface was gleaming with the light of invisible moths.
At the end of the third pavilion where we gave a nameless girl some orchids in a near-drunken stupor, just as you yourself might do now for another girl of a different flower, a different name in another time and place known as Silliman in Dumaguete, where words never fail.
Or in the many-sided shed between the second and third pavilions where we posed for imaginary pictures way back when, the cameras were manual then and ants of many colors could invade them.
I met an old childhood friend, in whose mom’s garden the orchids were taken, belated apologies to Mrs. G., who himself graduated from the seaside university you’re in now, sent there in virtual exile by his folks after going through rehab, and he remembered the places in Dumaguete as if only yesterday, such that we could almost sing with our batchmates what are we living for, those who knew the lyrics could tell us that it’s all been done before.
It was weird, to say the least, going back 35 years, just as it was strange, too, returning fast forward to the present in the agony and an ex-taxi. In the old days we used to take the ship to and from Negros —the plane was a luxury —the better to appreciate the nuances of time, the shape shifting distance, and the slow fade into manhood of this your, our charmed life.
