AMANDA

(I just like to share with you one of the finest works of my past favorite writers in the Inquirer, the late Supreme Court Associate Justice Isagani A. Cruz, a man of law and reverence who did speak like a common man mostly in his writings, but with full of poetry in his heart, through his column “Separate Opinion.” I just took the liberty to edit the syntax errors.

This was written around Valentine’s Day of 2008 and I’m glad I found this today in the net (thank you, Google). I remember I cut this out then right after I read but also subsequently misplaced.

He wrote this while he was already in his eighties. Read on, this is from the heart of the romantic.)

"Separate Opinion

Amanda

By Isagani Cruz

Philippine Daily Inquirer

First Posted 19:50:00 02/16/2008

THIS ONE’S FOR THE LADIES WHO WERE young some 60 years ago but still regard love as the Great Adventure that tested and tempted their pure and innocent lives. I write this with wry humor in recollection of how girls were during that less daring time, when the chaperone sat between sweethearts in the movies and the boy paid for all expenses of their date instead of “kkb” or “kanya-kanyang bayad” as at the practical present.

So I leave politics out in the meantime and, for the benefit of the fair sex, write about the more engaging topic of Romance that many of them may still enjoy but only vicariously. I suppose some of them are still secretly recovering from recollections of their own Valentine’s Day that was so different (or maybe not?) from the one celebrated last Thursday by their less inhibited granddaughters. Their reveries are like sniffing the faded fragrance of a wilted rose between the pages of a forgotten book.

I recall that time when I remarked to the late Sen. Ambrosio Padilla that he must have been a quite popular young man, being tall and handsome, a brilliant law student, a star Olympic athlete, and immensely rich to boot (although I did not mention that last attribute). He demurred humbly and said, “No, because I was so skinny then and was very shy with the girls.” I half-believed him because he later won as his bride one of the loveliest ladies in the land, the regal Lily de las Alas.

Mrs. Padilla’s singular grace accentuated the radiance of the Filipino women at the time, along with Aurora Recto and Nelly Lovina, both elegant matrons. Among the younger set were Guia Balmori, Telly Albert, for whom I had a boyhood crush that did not diminish when I first met her personally at the Inquirer when she was already a grandmother, and, of course, the exquisite Susan Magalona. The nation remembers her with pride and affection although she left long ago for other shores where many people might have doubted that she had come from the boondocks of the Philippines.

I was like the modest senator, but only because I was also skinny and shy, that’s all. But I did have a number of girl, i.e., female, friends who probably considered me harmless. Among them were Ester, who later married a hoodlum; Cely, whom I walked daily to her dorm after our classes in UP; Elisa, who researched at the USIS library while I waited for her and smoked outside; Myke, who said to a mutual friend that I have been in love with her for the past 50 years; Cora, who was my phone pal until I sent her a picture of some pug and said it was me; and Mary who never went out except with a suspicious eagle-eyed aunt. And there was Ursula.

Ursula was special because she was exceptionally lovely. Her family moved to a house near ours during the war and we could see each other while she washed the dishes in her kitchen and I read in the afternoons in our porch. One day she wrote me and said, “Hi! Would you like us to be friends?” And then she asked if I had a copy of “Magnificent Obsession” that I might want to lend her. I did and immediately took it to her, and that started our beautiful friendship.

We began exchanging letters every day (remember we were teeners then) until one day the answer I got was not from Ursula but from her sister, who explained that her “ate” was indisposed. It was from Amanda, whom I had hardly noticed before, and the next day it was Ursula who was writing back again. After the war, her family moved back to the province and we lost track of each other until I read the sad news many years later that she had passed away.

Looking back, it is not the enchanting Ursula I mostly remember but her younger sister Amanda. In my mind’s eye, I see her again, a wisp of a girl with long black hair, light brown eyes, a smooth and fair complexion, a cute nose, full red lips and white even teeth. Also, she was two years younger than I, not two years older like Ursula as I discovered from her obituary. Amanda was lovely too, not as extravagantly as Ursula, but in a way I liked and wanted my future wife to be.

I am married now to my caring and beautiful wife Sally, who has given me a happy life. I thank God for making her my eternal and beloved soul-mate.

But every once in a while I think of Amanda and where she might be now if she is still alive after these many vanished years. Why had she written me when her sister could not and why did I not answer her instead of her sister? Could there have been the spark of a mutual fascination that would have changed our separate and distant lives? If I had wooed Amanda and succeeded, could that have brought us together to live happily ever after in some approachable fantasy land?

Old people like us luxuriate only in memories because the future no longer beckons us with promises of excitement and fulfillment. Reminiscences are better for they can be retroactively erased, amended or embellished as the wistful heart dictates. Dreams do for us what reality cannot. So on a lazy afternoon in my quiet garden, or at night when the stars are bright in the lonely skies, I become 17 again and dream, vainly, it is true, like all dreams, of the ephemeral vision of Amanda."