"Dy, I want to be a priest."
Driving home with my son James Ryan from the airport early in the day, the scenery of the tree-lined highway through our car windshield was as pretty as a picture of the rosy future I envisioned for him earlier in our conversation. After I heard the breaking news he had carried, for sure, as excess baggage in his flight, the scenery before me turned into what really it was – a highway made of concrete – hard, cold, and gray.
My wife and I have high expectation of James' future. Though he didn't graduate at the top of his class in the early years of his education, I found a letter, while cleaning our basement, untangled it. Written by their class valedictorian, one phrase fascinated me: "James, if not for the Dota ..." A winner can spot another winner outside the race track.
Right before James started college, I had talked with him man-to-man. I stressed that college would be the "main event" that could make or break his future. I told him my "secret system" in high school: "I studied each subject at day's end as if I'd take an exam tomorrow." To whet his appetite, I called my system approach "shock and awe," smacked of the Iraq war and his Dota's "rampage".
I dropped my "secret system" in college and replaced it with "secret crushes". Though it was not evident if James had drawn on my "secret system" as his driving force in topping his graduating nursing class, besides having a girlfriend, I thought I was able to instill in his mind my high expectation of him. Persuaded by his sister-nurse Jan Kristy, he went ahead to medical school as a full scholar. He graduated with a top-five distinction – a strenuous feat from the strictly-for-brainy-only doorway to the back-breaking climb to the top of the ladder of success in one of the premier schools in the country -- St Luke's Medical Center College of Medicine.
James' feat was not uncommon. There are parents today who can narrate the same or a whole lot better achievement by their own kids. The one thing though that James exhibited so strikingly that I thought he could do anything anywhere, occurred when he told me that he was taking Math 17 -- college algebra and trigonometry – the chopping block at the gateway to the Engineering world. I was glad to hear that, and being an engineer myself, told him in a prideful way, "The subject will show whether you possess an engineer's mind or not." My older brother-engineer Toto initiated me and it was blunt: "x plus x = 2x, x times x = x squared; believe it, accept it, with no question." At the end of the semester, he broke this news, "Dy, I got a flat 1.0 and broke my professor's never-to-give-1.0 code." I was tight-lipped -- shame on my 2.0 grade.
When he broke the priesthood news, he was on his way
to the second year of his residency in St. Luke that could pave the way for his
bright medical career. Her sister offered her condo at the heart of Makati as
his home. His oncology specialization is a boundless and challenging field for
his brain to explore
Like a delightful picture of "goodies" being delivered on a silver platter, all of that, James dropped like a hot potato. Varied reactions were much the same: like his Auntie Nasie's "What's going on, James?"; or Auntie Marina's advice for him to be a doctor first for the first few years then be a priest later to let Dad and Mom taste the fruit of their labor; or his peer's tongue-in-cheek proposition, "James, let's swap places." His dilemma was reflected in Robert Frost's first two lines of
"Two roads diverged in
And sorry
There were signs though pointing toward one particular road. His nun patient with cancer told him that he could put his special gift into service much better by being a priest.
Searching for a boarding house around the school before his very first day of class was a telling incident. Looking around and asking people for any available living space, one person pointed to him a hole-in-a-high-wall door. James knocked. A man, looking like a missionary, opened the door while checking around, as if making sure James had come alone, and wondering how he had found the place. Once inside, he asked James lots of questions: name, address, parents, purpose, like interrogating a "person of interest" in a crime movie.
James learned later he set foot on a seminary house hosting a prominent Timorese student, hence, the reason for the missionary's demeanor. He also learned that the student had wanted a roommate he preferred – James hit the spot -- as the right person, at the right place, and at the right time.
After James graduated, he dropped by the seminary house to pay for the 5-month balance of his almost "giveaway" lodging charges, and to bid farewell. The missionary handed the money back to James as a gift for his graduation.
Two weeks ago, our family chatted with James through Skype for an hour and a half – a small window the Jesuits had spared for family bonding every two months. He said, if Covid-19 protocols would allow, they would walk some long journey in Luzon on foot, with no provision, and would only depend on alms and begging for their sustenance. As he narrated more details, my family hanged on his every word, while I reached for the Bartlett's "Familiar Quotations" and read for the nth time Robert Frost's classic. The finale, in the context of James' crossroads,
"I
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged
I took
And that has made all the difference."
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