Feelings
Kimi’s homing
By Emmanuelle
THOSE who had fallen under its spell attest to the fact – love speaks a language and walks a path all its own. And the spell-giver need not always a person be.
Milagros Bustillos, daughter of a Spanish general, could speak only a few words of English, if at all; Frank Klar, American descendant of German Jews who had fled from their country’s early pogroms, couldn’t for the life of him roll out a word of Spanish.
They tied the knot just the same, and brought forth a daughter and a son into a world tottering at the brink of a colossal change. Milagros did most of the crossing-over; she learned one more foreign language in her usual patient and earnest way. The country itself was doing the same: crossing over from hundreds of years under the Spaniards to its first of two American Occupations.
Frank was employed by the American government as a provincial treasurer. And so it came to pass that from Iloilo, the couple relocated to what would be his next and last assignment, Pangasinan.
While still working as provincial treasurer, Frank was able to purchase a property on which he built the beginnings of the Pangasinan Transportation Company; Pantranco for short. But it was not this property and the transportation business that caused him to settle his family in Dagupan City past his retirement. It was because his daughter Christina fell in love with, and married Don Rafael Gonzalez.
The same Don Paeng of the son Ermin Garcia Jr.’s recollection as can be read in the archives of SundayPunch. Shortly after Ermin Garcia Sr. was shot dead in his office, Don Paeng, who was like a father to Ermin Sr., helped provide for his family until Ermin finished college in Ateneo.
Don Paeng and Christina’s only sibling Jose took over the management of Pantranco when it had only four buses for a fleet and made it the most successful bus company at the time. Significantly, the Gonzalez couple had four daughters: Mitos, Christina, Maria Luisa and Lourdes, whose earliest childhood memories were the summers and holidays spent at the third floor of Pantranco which was home to them all. And the beach house along Lingayen Beach.
When Don Paeng and Christina died one after the other, the three younger daughters overruled Mitos’ dissenting opinion, and the Pantranco property was ultimately sold. Dagupan City had seen the last of the beautiful Gonzalez sisters.
At this writing, Christina and Maria Lourdes have “gone ahead”. Lourdes married a Spaniard and lives with her family in Spain. Mitos, who is a fierce nationalist, presently resides in Makati.
KIMI COJUANGCO
Mayor Kimi, wife of Congressman Mark O. Cojuangco, is Mitos’ only daughter by her German husband, George Schultz. And rare is the daughter more treasured in love and pride and awe. I know for I heard those feelings in the sterling vibrato of Mitos’ youthful-sounding voice. Mitos being the eldest Gonzalez kid, Kimi and her two older brothers were, for a time, the only grandchildren around. They shared their mother’s same fond memories too. Of being waist-high and spending summer vacations in Pangasinan. Kimi’s most unforgettable was her almost drowning at Bonuan Tondaligan beach. She survived by going limply with the undercurrent. The tide would later deposit her splashing at the shoreline.
Feelings was the unwitting link between these two special people. Both are this writer’s sometime bosses and most-time friends, but never did the twain connected until almost midnight of October 28.
As Kimi dried her shampooed hair, she logged in to Sunday Punch to catch up on Feelings. She read SiSONGS! She smiled. She clicked on Archives for more of past Feelings. Then she cursored over to Boss Ermin’s Punchline. Impressed, she dug far back into his archives. She was saddened upon reading of his sister’s drowning at the beach where Kimi almost drowned too. Until she came to the mention of her grandfather in the book Ermin and Karina.
She sits up. She calls up Mitos to ask: Was Ermin Sr. the same friend whose death Grandpa was mulling over, and Ermin Jr. the same son Grandpa and his friends were discussing beyond my uncomprehending young head years and years ago? She could almost see and hear Mitos vigorous nodding as she says Yes! over the wire.
Kimi would brave the rain the wind and the snow (only that there is no snow and she is no postman) to meet the son of the father whom her grandfather had loved. Seeing this son is seeing once again grandfather, grandmother, her mother and her three aunties, and the place of her youth. Through the eyes of the child that she was. And still is, sometimes.
It is like so. It will be so! A homing.
(Readers may reach columnist at jingmil@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/feelings/
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