Tatay
Four years and ten months later, the boy will receive his hard-earned college diploma and fall into a subtle state of recollection as he remembers that faraway day in Manila when a certain plumber gave him batteries for his Jollibee radio and bought him a T-square. He was only ten years old at that moment. The Jollibee radio was a portable AM/FM receiver inside a casing shaped and made to look like the beloved fast-food chain mascot. The T-square was a 90-cm Staedtler with a plastic handle and a wooden blade. The plumber was Tatay, his father.
Earlier that day, back in their house in the province, he woke up to the noisy rumbles of a vehicle that took a stop beside their yard. Nanay, his mother, told him it was Auntie Precy and her son Kuya Dexter’s car. Turned out they came to pick him up and let him join them on their trip to Manila. They were going to oversee the construction of the apartment houses they were building in Quezon City. Tatay, a plumber by trade, was asked about a month before to do some work there, and as a gesture of consideration, Auntie Precy offered to take the boy along so that he may pay his father a visit. He was a little reluctant at first, what with thoughts of missing a day of watching his favorite cartoons and playing with his snotty-nosed neighborhood friends egging him on not to go. But Nanay was very eager to send him off. In the future, just before his graduation march, he will be thanking his mother for that.
So the boy jumped in the back seat and, with Kuya Dexter behind the wheel, they started on their six-hour journey. Sure enough, throughout the first few legs he would get so bored by the interminable panoramas of houses, farms, and trees moving past that he would fall asleep and wake up a few minutes later. At one point, he woke up to the noisy rumbles not of the car (which was perfectly quiet at that time) but of his hungry stomach. Imagine the excited look in his face when he realized that they had parked outside the Filipino child’s favorite place in the world: Jollibee!
They hit the road once more after eating their midday meal and purchasing a promotional limited-edition Jollibee radio for the kid. Scrutinizing the radio, while listening to it, was what the boy did for the rest of the journey. No longer jaded by the passing landscapes, he was wide awake with Jollibee cradled in his youthful hands. Indeed, he was so amazed by it that he made a note-to-self that as soon as they arrived at their destination he would have his father tell him what could possibly be inside Jollibee’s round torso that made all those sounds of music, public announcements and whatnot.
The time came and he did just that. Unfortunately, his father did not know much about radios and had no clear-cut answer to offer him. Oh, the boy thought, it’s okay. I’ll play with it anyway. In what he was to realize years later as the hands of fate at work, far more than his father’s act of self-redemption, the plumber took him to the local bookstore apparently just to buy some replacement batteries for his Jollibee radio. As was expected, upon entering the shop, Tatay approached a counter and asked for a couple of AA batteries. But he also requested for something else whose name the boy didn’t quite catch. It turned out to be something rather like the six-inch ruler he used in drawing straight lines for his fourth-grade schoolwork, only much longer, much bigger, and much more expensive. It had a curious thingamajig attached to one end so that it resembled a letter “T”. Tatay, the unassuming plumber, handed it to his son along with the pair of electric cells for Jollibee and said that it was a T-square.
Fast forward to the present and the boy is now an incoming college freshman filling out an enrolment form at a well known university in Baguio. He has finished writing on all blank spaces on the form except for one; he’s still in doubt as to what course he should take up, what career he should embark on. Just then he remembers that day with the plumber, Jollibee, and the T-square, and it comes to him as though in an epiphany what he should write on the space prompting him to specify his chosen course: BS ECE.
Many years later, he will sit in his office after another day of electronics and communications engineering work and look back to when he wrote those fateful five letters. He will smile surreptitiously as he relishes the prospect of giving his ten-year old child something inspired by what her grandfather gave him years ago. But instead of handing him something shaped like a letter T, he will give her an object resembling a Y. Someday in the not-so-distant future, amid an outburst of ovation, his daughter will be remembering the day her Tatay gave her a stethoscope.
