People come to our lives for a reason, says the author of
“Eating Fire and Drinking Water,” a P99.00 pocketbook the blogger purchased recently at the
SM Baguio National Bookstore.
Marcelino Gaoiran was a classmate in the grades in Laoag. He
would come to my life again 10 years later in Manila, when he was an
engineering student at the National University. The blogger was a working
student at the state university in Diliman.
Marcelino’s auntie Julia and her husband Mike
Aguilar—probably in his late 60s at that time-- were maintaining a 2-door
apartment along Guidote street in Sampaloc. They had student boarders from
Laoag, some of whom were factory workers, a public school teacher, also from
Laoag, and a male relative (Mike’s) from Isabela.
It was a chance meeting with Marcelino in one of the streets of Manila. And the blogger
became a boarder at their apartment.
And so I met this fair-skinned plump girl—half Chinese, half Ilokana—who
boarded at the apartment. She was a commerce student of Far Eastern
University. It turned out her mother
Ittang was a relative of Mike Aguilar who was a retired US navy man.
Estelita who was younger than the blogger became
his wife and bore her eight children—all boys. She is a strong woman, literally
and physically. She was a working mother and she raised our kids well practically all by herself, with some help from her mother.
I said “she raised them practically all by herself ”,
in Oscariz, Ramon, Isabela, because I was an absentee father—the blogger was
always away as a journalist, a Bible translator, and government information
officer. In Baguio, San Fernando City, Abra, Bayombong, Tuguegarao, Ifugao, Pampanga, Ilocos Sur, Cavite, Bicol, Iloilo, Davao.
The blogger knows not where Marcelino is now. But I would
like to express my gratitude to him for coming into my life and meeting my
future wife. I would also like to thank his Auntie Julia and Uncle Mike who are now
in the bosom of the Almighty God—may they rest in peace. They did not talk much, and the blogger never had any long conversation with them. But they were nice persons.
Yes, people drift in and out of our lives for a reason, several
reasons. They teach us lessons, for example, in humility and love.
They also teach us how to hate. Like the three Ilokano writers the blogger associated with for at least five years.
Writers as truth-tellers are supposed to be honest, but there were several
situations that showed this was not the case on their part. It was a big
letdown.
The blogger had to walk away from them. Yet I am grateful
for the lessons they taught me. For one, I have become more honest, more
transparent, more discriminating in my relationship with people.
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| Frontage of the blogger's house where he and his wife hosted board meetings of the Ilokano writers' organization |
I thank them
even if they did not thank me for what I did for them, especially in the
Ilokano-English magazine that we and Errol Abrew, the most prolific Ilokano writer, had wanted to evolve into the best publication of its kind in
Amianan, if not the whole Philippines.
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| The Julian clan during the marriage of Christoffer, the youngest, to Christine Baui in a Tuguegarao church |
