His name means Joy; But he is more!

By Emmanuelle

TO talk to Dennis is not to talk.  It is to listen, and to listen well.

For someone so young, he makes so much sense, and after so many minutes of listening to him, you realize that you have spent all your past life senseless with nonsense, you had been insensitive most of the time, and that whatever you believe you know or feel is plainly nonsensical.  

And for someone so contemporary, he is strictly of the old world. He quotes freely and knowledgeably from the Bible. He values traditions – a father’s first, last and final word over major decisions; a mother’s intervening or mediating ways; a child’s unquestioning acceptance of discipline in preparation for the disordered order of the world out there.

Dennis is the eldest of the boys of Board Member Danny Uy and Binalonan Vice Mayor Myrna Bell. The younger ones are Daniel, Donald and Darwin. I cannot speak for the three younger ones, but Danny and Myrna Uy must have passed on the best of their genes to Dennis, must have loved and trained and taught him well and must have trusted fully Mother Goose and La Salle to have done the rest.

Whatever, Dennis appears to be the one of the most fluent, exact, clear-headed, impressive, expressive, sensitive, sensible, unself-conscious, self-adjusted, on-target. . . boy-man I’ve ever encountered.

And he leaves me blurry, muddled, and tongue-tied. Shamefully ungrammatical.

He claims events and situations conspired to push him into the political arena. The decision was not of his own choosing, but when he was called on to serve, he served. He ran for councilor of Pozorrubio.

Then surprise, surprise! He found he liked the arena he was pushed into! He enjoyed being a councilor! He thrived in and on it! To be able to influence the direction towards which this town must go, even how little – he felt more than a mild form of satisfaction! He felt joy! He felt right at home!

By this time his eyes would be glinting behind those nerdy bifocals.       

The interview would then swerve back to where we started; we were discussing what really is one’s specific purpose or function in this world. Dennis believes he would fit just rightly and snugly so into the world of legislation. Not the world of executing the law; but of thinking, formulating, drafting, defending, adapting proposals into laws.

When I stepped back into my world, I left him to his, the scene of his joys – the Sangguniang Bayan Hall.

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