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The Great Equalizer
This isn’t about that Guns and Hoodlums type of ‘Equalizer’ as
most of us have probably seen on T.V. It’s all about that mental
process wherein we are trained to face and deal with Life and
Death and everything else IN BETWEEN! This is about that
developmental system which is better known as ‘EDYUKAYSHEN’— the
most important thing which most of us have been offered or
‘gifted’ by our parents at age seven and above, but which some of
us have refused or ignored because it was so tedious and got in
the way of all those happy-go-lucky days! I myself almost fell
into this hapless category were it not for the LOVE OF READING
which I acquired well ahead of my chronic ‘love affair’ with
booze!
Going to school for me was just something I had to do to keep my
parents happy. I woke up day in and day out, ate my breakfast,
brushed my scraggly teeth, dressed-up, and was driven to school
just to please my dad and mom who were so busy then they were glad
to get rid of me if only for several hours! School, to me then,
was just someplace where I had to force myself to get along with
kids my age but who acted like they were in some human zoo where a
teacher was the self-designated ‘lion tamer’. And she did act like
one, with a bamboo stick which she used to wave several times
before whacking our behinds with a not so disguised fervor! High
School, as I previously wrote about, was THE most unforgettable
stage of my sociological growth! Not content with the classroom, I
still had to take to the streets to learn first-hand how the
majority of our out-of-school youth wasted their time strumming
guitars making out like John Lennon, and downing bottles of San
Miguel Gin, a.k.a. ‘marka demonyo’! Through the almost daily
bacchanalian practice I was able to master Drinking I and 2, where
I learned how to drink gin without getting drunk!
College, and subsequently, Post Graduate studies were
comparatively a bit subdued, owing perhaps to the fact that I was
already married at the time and the Peter Pan in me had finally
aged and left me for good! I realized, though a bit a late, that
without a Diploma I really couldn’t get to where I wanted to go,
or do what I really wanted to do! Besides, most of my booze
buddies had either gotten sick, died early, or got themselves some
respectable work, leaving me to realize that I really wasn’t
getting any younger, and my College allowance wasn’t enough to
even cover our first baby’s needs!
When I FINALLY finished College I was able to work as a Route
Salesman with Coke (Naga)! I earned a DECENT salary, even if I had
to contend with having to drive a 6-wheeler truck everyday! After
a year, and 2 kids later, typhoon Sening marooned me somewhere in
Tamban, and ‘conspired’ with my dad to force me to enter a totally
different world, Medicine Proper! Long, arduous, frustrating, and
often desperate years followed, culminating in my RECORD BREAKING
Post Graduate Medical Internship which took me almost 8 years or
double my Medicine Proper to finish! Madre Mia! While my
classmates were already Medical Consultants I was still plodding
through the gloomy effluvia of the wards and alleys of the Bicol
Regional Training Hospital, mea culpa! When at last I was allowed
to FINALLY take the Board and pass it by the skin of my teeth, my
Mom and Dad, and my wife, gushed out tears of relief and joy after
my very long journey back from virtual ‘hell’!
Now looking back at all that, I really hope that my children, and
all others who are really so lucky now to be IN SCHOOL, will
realize the Golden Opportunity within their grasp, and really do
their best to make the most of the Education that is being offered
to them now by their parents, ‘gratis et amore’. An opportunity to
not only LEARN, but, most of all, an opportunity to change their
lives FOR THE BETTER! A very good friend of mine who used to live
ALONG THE RILES when we were in high school has been to Saudi
Arabia and all over Europe several times and he now has several
sons who graduated with honors from the Ateneo de Manila
University; a Rhodes Scholar who we befriended at the ADEMU used
to eat only two meals a day and survived on big cans of assorted
crackers while he burned the midnight candle in Cervini Hall, just
across Eliazo Hall from where I could see him bent over his books
up to the wee hours of the morning, is now a C.E.O. of a huge
international land development corp., his name, by the way is
Ricky Pascua; I myself, were it not for the perseverance,
determination to finish my studies, and the humility to accept
myself, faults and all, would, in all probability, not be here now
but six feet under, boozing it up with all the worms and maggots…
and my father’s dream for me would’ve remained just that, a dream!
