Accents
Doing the write thing
Call this ACCENTS IN HISTORY or, think what you will, I call this an ACCENTS classic I wrote two years ago. I feel that the shreds of memory I’ve exhumed are timely as All Souls Day approaches, add the significant fact that today, Oct. 25, is the death anniversary of my father. Those who went ahead to the “undiscovered country where no traveler ever returns,” live only in moments fondly remembered, and thus this column:
Something gets planted in the garden of a young mind, tenderly nurtured in the growing up years in the hope that it may blossom in the ensuing years. That’s how this writer got into the business (and hobby) of writing. My father, the late Simplicio C. Carreon, Sr., would tell me after reading the fine (!) pieces I wrote in grade school, You’re going to be a journalist. Well, it does inspire the spirit when your father believes in you. However, I considered his remarks compensatory because I was not blessed with my parents’ knack for figures that my sisters and brothers had inherited. Father was a terrrific Math major while my mother, Cristeta Rivera, was a whiz at getting perfect scores. Titang, the neighbors knew, was the wife with a distaste for political life. She would have preferred her husband to continue being high school principal rather than run for public office.
In fact, I’m going to write mostly about father who wished for me to throw in a nugget of wisdom in things I write. What father meant was to abide by the dictates of conscience in putting words into print. Henceforth, in my own small way, make a difference through writing—onward a one-way street without detours and always for the better.
Simplicio Sr. was mayor of our town, Oton, for twelve years. Yes, twice he was re-elected. Newly elected government officials may go for his daring in making a lot of enemies on his first term of office. He uprooted the houses squatting at the back of the Oton Municipal Building, a wide area where now sit the Multi-purpose Gymnasium, the Puericulture Center, the Senior Citizens Bldg. and a parking lot for trisikads, tricycles, jeeps, etc. It was a to-hell-with-all-comers attitude for as long as one has the public good in mind.
I’m here in the heartland of the U.S. of A. where topics to be passionate about just pop up. For instance, there’s the magnificent sunset over South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island where my daughter Randy Raissa practices as an internist. The fabled sunset over Manila Bay has been immortalized on the wings of poesy, but as I’ve always contended, the setting sun is ever magical whether it is viewed from the Boracay shoreline or from the seafront of SEAFDEC in Tigbauan where I retired from earning a living. Wherever we are, the beauty of the sunset is for everyone to behold. And around us are more of nature’s beauty, all ours for the taking, lest the world will become too much for us, the poet William Wordsworth thus reminds.
It was the Fourth of July and the Hilton Head sky was ablaze with fireworks. As the Americans sang their national anthem, I could feel that here are a people who love their country as much as I love my own. And when they burst into “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain…” Randy and I said, they’re playing our song, too. For indeed, lyrics and melody were completely aped by us, changing only “America, America” to “Philippines, my Philippines” and, you guessed the ending right, “God shed His grace on thee and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” Love of the motherland so universal, so ennobling and enlivening throbbed in our hearts as our thoughts dwelt on our own lupang hinirang.
A day earlier in New York was a demonstration almost in the magnitude of the famous Seattle demo against the World Trade Organization (WTO), embodiment of the overwhelming rule of business corporations in the world, of the awesome power of Big Business over our lives. In the NY rally was a group of Lawyers for Activists, on the ready to protect their compatriots once their rights to speak up were infringed. Brings to mind our dear Rudy who appeared as counsel for the student activists who were haled to court for defying the Marcos dictatorship.
To be assertive, to cry against injustice, to protest where there are “deviations from the norm”—these beliefs we have imbibed from the old folks. That’s why this writer was a pillar of support to the hubby when Marcos’ minions placed him in the stockade. Injustice, prejudice, deviations from the norm. It seems all of printer’s ink is never mighty enough to go battle these plagues of society. But there is passion enough to write about these things, and RIGHT about them, too. I think I could hear my old man prodding from across the Great Divide, You’re going to be a journalist. Try to make a difference no matter how little.
So more of our two-cents’ worth in the days ahead. But only “as time permits” to this grandmother because a lovable tyke named Danika is a potent weapon of my distraction. My very own WMD.
(Comments to lagoc@hargray.com)