VOLTAIRE, a faithful reader of this column, recently asked me to join him for lunch in a restaurant.
“Why not?” I joked a fact. “There’s no food at home.”
Much younger than the aging me, Voltaire asked why I still write for a living when I have a son who works abroad.
“He has his own life to live,” I answered. “I have mine, and it’s an exciting one.”
I told him about an incident concerning the late Teddy Sumaray and me when we spent a night at the Iloilo Rehabilitation Center over a libel case in 1991. He was then publisher and I was editor of the weekly Visayan Tribune.
“We intentionally postponed posting bail,” I told my lunch host, “to experience life in jail. Not everybody goes there. ”
I told Voltaire that, as planned, our first order of business was to befriend the warden and the jail guards who would “protect” us from our fellow prisoners.
One of those guards – whose nameplate showed the surname Antiquiera – revealed that he was working for the college education of his children, including Eldrid, who is now a lawyer.
After only one sleepless night in jail, we posted bail and earned the right to be free again. Totoo pala, we take freedom for granted until we lose it.
As much as we value freedom, we value fulfillment of our ambition. Deprived of the opportunity to fulfill it, man loses his zest for life.
My late father had wanted me to take up Veterinary Medicine so I could take care of our pigs and chickens. But I did not want to be a veterinarian; I wanted to be a newspaperman.
Since my dad was an avid newspaper reader, I thought it would be easy to convince him to let me take up Journalism. But he had made up his mind; his eldest son would be an animal doctor.
“Son,” he said, “there’s no money in writing.”
I knew he was right. And so I enrolled in Veterinary Medicine at UP-Iloilo. But I had to transfer to UP-Diliman for my second year.
To cut the long story short, however, my father eventually changed his mind and allowed me to shift to Journalism at the Manuel L. Quezon University in Manila.
In my third year in 1968, I was chosen news editor of the university paper, The Quezonian.
One of my professors happened to be Angel Anden, retired editor of the defunct This Week magazine.
To keep us interested in the course, Anden said, “I discovered Imelda Romualdez! Without me, she might not have become Imelda Romualdez-Marcos, the First Lady. ”
“I was walking on Aduana Street,” he told us students, recalling an event of the early 1950s, “when I met this pretty young lady. As editor of This Week magazine, I was so desperate for our next cover girl that I offered it to her. She waxed ecstatic, confessing that it had always been her desire to be famous. That cover story indeed brought her fame. She caught the attention of somebody who would be her husband and President of the Philippines.”
From that true story, I knew that like the late Angel Anden who “discovered” Imelda, I as journalist could shape not just my own life but other people’s lives.
Incidentally, a few years after finishing college, I found myself in the same boat with Anden, by then already a retired professor; we both wrote articles for Mod magazine. Till his death did we part. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
