It is not often that I am this early for my column. This isn't scheduled for publication until the 22nd, next Thursday. But, I just had to write this after reading Raymund Fernandez's column that lately he now sends me. He has yet to set up something like this blog and I did not long ago subscribe to his RSS in CDN online. As I have said before, this is one of the advantages of being subscribed to this blog. You get my columns earlier than the published version, though, I would still encourage you, once again, to buy the paper. If you can. And then, as always, I won't mind hearing from you. Salamat.
Where heart takes you
Raymund Fernandez's latest column about Ed Alegre's passing on saddened me. But it also filled me with wonder and amazement at how circles or ripples of circumstance overlap or flow into each other connecting our often distant and disparate lives together forming bonds that loosen or tighten depending on our current situations and dispositions.
Last Saturday my wife and I were at a memorial service. We hardly knew the person being memorialized. We began to know him only when he was well on his way to succumbing to cancer. Even then, it was knowing only about the bare facts about him.
The barest of which is that he is the father of a friend. The senior to our friend, the junior, who we didn't know to be so until his father's name in the funerary directory led us to where the memorial service was to take place.
Here, as in most of North America, seniors and juniors are usually not part of the legal nor even common name. Especially with the juniors, unlike the way it is with us where Jun is a most common name or nickname which then gets confused with, mistaken for or mistakenly substituted for June or other similar sounding nomenclature.
Our friend's name, as it happens, is a perfect set-up for such confusion, if he were Filipino or a full-blooded one. Or when he is the Philippines.
Jean was my immediate boss when we worked together in Riyadh many years ago. We forged a friendship beyond work that was unusual if unremarkable were it not for the strict though not openly acknowledged work or professional hierarchies there that had the whites mostly at the top, the Filipinos somewhere in the middle, and the South Asians – Bangladeshis, mostly – at the bottom.
This, thanks to Jean who initiated the breaking down of this barrier which we, particularly in the art section, reciprocated by 'adopting' the Bangladeshi gopher – officially, tea boy -- assigned to us.
Even after deciding not to renew my contract our friendship continued especially with Jean paying me – or the Philippines – a visit soon after I returned home.
It was one ripple in that visit that interacted with a ripple mentioned in Raymund's column that in turn propagated other ripples that connect Ed Alegre, however peripherally, with Jean's father.
In that column Raymund mentions Tabo, this cultural project he worked directly, among others, with Ed's wife, Joycie. After the launch in Tacloban, the project moved to Iloilo, then Cebu.
In Cebu, it took place in a not quite dilapidated warehouse. A perfect venue for what was a mishmash of artistic expressions including a musical one that saw myself being dragged into playing the electric guitar with an impromptu band whose self-appointed leader – who owned the instruments and the warehouse – just gave me the barest idea of what to play while handing me the guitar.
Three chord reggae, he said then proceeded, on the keyboards, to play the wildest electronoize south of Kraftwerk or Krautrock.
I'm not sure the impression this made on Jean who I invited to this event thinking to give him a taste of the emerging Bisayan culture. I know though that he was thoroughly taken by this girl, a student of Raymund and by then my close friend as well, who was also present looking more bemused than confused at our attempts at music.
Jean and Renzi have since been inseparable, made even more so with, now, two boys, the eldest for whom during his baptism both Raymund and myself stood as godfathers.
Raymund ends his column with a lesson he learned from Ed: It is a wise man who travels only to where his heart takes him.
Surely, this applies to Jean. And if I might be so bold, myself as well. That's why I now live in the same country and province as Jean, just a few blocks away from where his father used to live and only ripples away from friends like Raymund in this ever expanding and inclusive circles of life. And, even, death.
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