General Admission
A blast from New York
By Al S. Mendoza
RENATO E.O. VALDEZ, my classmate from Grade 1 to Fourth Year high school whom we fondly call Rene, e-mailed me last week to say he reads the Sunday PUNCH through the internet.
“I now read your General Admission regularly through the internet,” he wrote.
Was I flattered?
Like me, the Sunday PUNCH family should feel flattered, too.
Anyone based overseas reading our paper makes the heart skip a beat.
Any addition to the list of PUNCH readers from overseas firms up the paper’s burgeoning reputation as the global read for all Pangasinenses abroad.
Rene now lives in New York with his wife, Muriel, and family.
By any yardstick of standard, he’s made.
A swanky house in the suburbs. Kids settled down. Living happily as “grampa” to his grandkids.
Rene learned about my joining the Sunday PUNCH only in January, during our class reunion in Mangatarem.
Oh, that reunion. As memorable as one’s first kiss.
That get-together saw Rene and other U.S.-based classmates of mine like Cherry Mislang (Las Vegas), Elizabeth Quitania and Evelyn Ramones (New Jersey), Dolly Gurion and Sonny Ungson (San Francisco), Dan E. Nino, Eloy Kawile and Fe Agustin (L.A.) and Nadie Villanueva (Canada) bring home goodies for our less fortunate batch mates, besides raffling off their ever Almighty dollar during the party at Dolly’s mansion in the poblacion.
That bash proved to be the last for our classmate Jesus “Aseng” Barrozo, who joined our Creator on Sept. 10.
Aseng was our sacristan, who inherited his father’s job as the church’s sacristan for practically the entirety of his life.
I had been an altar boy, too, learning the trade basically from Aseng.
At times during that glorious era, almost after every Mass, the unassuming, most humble Aseng and I would spirit away a half-empty bottle of Mompo (Mass wine) and share it with friends in the juveniles of this lifetime.
He would soon graduate into a routine of one bottle of Tanduay lapad everyday. Aseng succumbed to cirrhosis of the liver.
Life is what you make of it.
“I’d known him as one with firm Christian beliefs,” said Rene of Aseng.
With Aseng’s assing, we are now, to paraphrase a song, one less lonely people from our batch.
We are all essentially lonely because we try our best always to make ourselves happy every minute of our waking hours.
Many times, Aseng had made the two of us happy in this imperfect world. But like the rest of those other times shared with others both not close and close to us, those times were simply meant to help stall the inevitable: death.
You know not when you breadth your last but, surely, you know when you last planned that last happy moment of your unplanned life.
Life, to paraphrase John Lennon, is what happens when you are busy making other plans.
(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/general-admission/)
Share your Comments or Reactions
Powered by Facebook Comments
