Dear Mayor Macario B. Asistio,
To you I owe a lot. You were my hero. You heard of my extra curricular achievements from my teachers, principal, and from the superintendent. I was shameless, I was talkative, and I was emerging from being an ugly duckling. Whenever you’d hear that I would be representing our city high school for any out-of-town competitions or student activities, you would ask your assistant to take money from “the mayor’s discretionary fund” and give me “pocket money.” I would be called to your office where you would present me to all these adults, and I would be handed an envelope and I would sing “The Impossible Dream.” I remember singing the song at the behest of Mrs. Boquiren, the superintendent. She corrected me “Strove!” as I sang “…still strive with his last ounce…” I thought strove was past tense of strive… You would have this huge smile on your bespectacled face I liked that you never made any of those boring speeches.
When you heard that I wanted to play tennis, you had the city hall sports and recreation head teach me how to play. I gave up on that one, I am sure the instructor was relieved after my hitting the statue’s head across the city hall promenade so many times, the statue must have needed daily ice packs on its head.
Upon graduation from high school, you had me work with Sonny Galindo in the Youth Wing of the City Hall. I hated Sonny for no reason at all. I just could not stand his “niceness.” I think because he looked like a dork, pomade on his hair and all. As a result, you had me transferred to the City Court and in no time, I grew to understand how the adult world lived. My role models Sonia Henson and Lucy Ongpauco were so cool, they taught me how to smoke Marlboros! Oh, how I longed to be sophisticated and “rich” as they were. They went swimming at the YWCA with me. Sonia wanted me to become a flight attendant for Air Manila, telling her husband, an Air Manila executive, to just go “get her a flight stewardess job.” My mother told me I would die in a plane crash and if I survived that, I would become a pilot’s mistress. That pretty much killed it.
Mayor, I have one question for you- why in heaven’s name did you have my bosses enter my name in that Miss Caloocan pageant. That was very embarrassing. I felt and looked stupid with three kilos of make-up. Then you had them hang my portrait City Hall like some neighborhood watch poster girl. What were you thinking? But thanks for your vote of confidence. I was sure I was the dorkiest, ugliest, in that competition. Now I have that huge painting hanging somewhere in my late Inay’s home in Nueva Ecija. I hope it has kept the mice away all these years…
Sir, you passed away before I became an adult. Your high-school protégé did not turn out to be a beauty queen through and through. She did not marry a rich Filipino heir nor did she become a starlet. Instead, she became a student activist at UP, college theater performer, an immigrant to the US, a single mom, wife to a White Anglo Saxon Protestant from Massachusetts, an American-educated Filipino woman, an awesome practitioner of Mama Sita’s seasoning recipes, and a sarcastic self-deprecator. You would have loved to sit at my dining table, Mayor. I have not shut up, I am still smiling at the world. I would have made you proud; as a true Filipino would say, “I am good. I promise.”
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