Making a speech is like cooking: You taste it first and, whatever is the result, you wish people will eat it and like it. This was my problem for more than a month, after I was informed through e-mail that UMPIL (Unyon ng Mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas) would give me an award.
I like awards, but I am not good in accepting awards.
The awarding ceremonies were held in the Fauro Audio-Visual Room of the College of Humanities in Ateneo de Manila.
That afternoon, I thanked my editors and publishers in Today Independent Daily News. I never experienced what new writers usually go through rigid and controlling publishers and editors. In Today I had written articles that went from 8,000 to 10,000 characters and spaces on topics like migration, child abuse and food supplement. In BusinessMirror, my editor allowed me to review anything. In fact, and this I shared during the ceremonies, my column was moved from the Lifestyle section to Opinion page, where my essays on the histories of religions and sexualities shared spaces on talks about oil increases and dreamt policies on tax decreases.
I wanted to thank many individuals that afternoon. I wanted to say thank you to two mentors, Rudy F. Alano, who always cautioned me in discussing the meanings of my poems, and Socorro Federis-Tate, who always teased me about letting my modifiers to dangle once in a while, if I want to be a writer.
I wanted to thank my family, but I am, again, bad with emotions. When I left home, I had to hide my luggage from my 90-year-old mother, who, that night, stood up and stayed seated on her favorite chair. I prayed that she would not look for me while I was away. That night, the angels gave my mother the gift of sleep and forgetfulness. But I was missing my two siblings, my two best readers and staunchest
critics. Carlo, who is in London; later in a Viber message, he told me he would have surprised me with his appearance. I would have made a mess of myself. Lilibeth is in Tokyo and had just spent a month with our mother.
That afternoon, the old adage applied, which is that in success, it is always good to be with loved ones.
There is one other person I wanted to thank that afternoon. He was the better writer in the family. He was my Manong Pempe. He wrote things that people understood. He composed horoscopes and created astrological predictions in the local paper and even those who engaged in jueteng divined what he wrote. Even now, we wonder at the design of his fate, dying at the very young age of 46. I now believe he is his own essay, cutting the length of his destiny when he was at his peak, escaping the ruins of a future that is messed by bad politics, a person read and remembered.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com.