As my new blog reaches a thousand hits, I don’t know but I came to think of my friend Tino. It has been a while since I last saw him, and it had been years since I last remembered him.
When I was still in the Philippines, he sure was my best friend. With all the differences we two have, we somehow managed to still end up as the best of friends. He was more than ten years older than me. We don’t like each others music. We have different tastes. We have different background and somehow different political inclination.
But despite all those, we have magnified the things, however small, that we have in common. We were both pretending to quit smoking, we both love to write, and in our own way, we both love our family.
The first time I met him was at an NGO office where he was already an established media man and I was a new kid in town. I thought of him as a snob and I tried to get out of his way as possibly as I can. Back then our worlds were in close proximity but entirely different. He was a reporter and I was a community organizer. He was a watcher of things and I, a doer of things. He had his own circle and I had mine. What we have back then was a civil and what you might call a cordial business relationship.
Our friendship started when I eventually ventured into writing. My thanks to Dolly Mose, my boss of the then Media Relations Office of the SBMA, who gave me my first writing break, as well as Ate Carrie and her hubby Manong Henry for the encouragements. I guess they saw something in me and decided to help me out with my newly-acquired skill. If you can call it a skill.
But Tino was my constant editor and critique. Everyday, every article that I wrote, he showed me different ways to do it, and proved rather nicely, how lame some of my work were. Though he might not know it, he became my mentor. We have entirely different writing styles but I do admire his own.
What we eventually had was a sort of a Mutt and Jeff friendship because of our entirely different personality. Maybe because of his age and experiences, he had the wisdom to become a little bit of a pacifist, but he was also a good statesman and a peacemaker. I was young and was always not afraid to pick a fight. I guess in that sense, we had known each others strengths and vulnerabilities that we instinctively act for and behalf of the other.
When I know he’s in trouble but can’t fight, I do the fighting for him. When I had created too much of my own sinkhole, he acts as my ambassador. We had not arranged it, but it ended up that way anyway. I was his champion and he was mine.
It did pretty much helped us both in our own professional ways. After a year his network became mine and mine became his. Our worlds became intertwined. We became brothers.
We shared dreams, future plans and future works, which unfortunately, were put on hold after I decidedly left for LA.
We still get in touch after that. We actually planned to set up our own human rights website. I’ll do the tech details, he’ll do the layouts and post production stuff. He’ll do the groundwork, I’ll do the networking. Even if we were on the other side of the globe, we still thought we could make it. That somehow made me think of him upon reaching this “high” in my new blogging hobby. And this, I can only share with him.
What we had was what one might probably call a very symbiotic relationship. For me it really is more than that. He was more than a friend. He was a mentor, a brother, a father, and a loyal comrade.
I remember that day, I heard him call my name from somewhere inside the house. Thinking "What the..! He can’t be here in LA and certainly not in our house,", when the phone rang. It was Emmy from the Philippines, conveying me the sad news.
It’s been years since he passed away. And when I think of him, I still feel happy and sad at the same time, every time. That seems like a contradiction in itself, but that was what we had. And that, we were.
Tins... this one’s for you.
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