Penman (Butch Dalisay) for Monday, December 30, 2013
I’m an incorrigible pack rat; I keep restaurant receipts and bus
tickets from the 1970s, business cards from associates long
forgotten or even departed, and notes and memos from various
points of my engagement with one bureaucracy or other. These
odds and ends molder in a large wooden baul that sits in a
corner of my office, a chest Beng and I bought for our daughter’s
wedding but which somehow stayed with me (our unica hija
Demi will still get that baul, contents and all, on one of her visits
home from California). Other old letters I keep in a leather
briefcase, itself now an artifact, a souvenir from my first trip to
the US in 1980.
I was rummaging through the papers in that chest and that
briefcase a few weeks ago, looking for something I could
contribute to the benefit auction we were holding for Writers’
Night, when I stumbled on some letters I’d received (and some I
sent—I dutifully Xeroxed my outbound mail then) from writer friends.
The most interesting ones were those that opened a
window on my friends’ minds as writers and as persons—as
young men, really, on the road to emotional, intellectual, and
artistic maturity.
One of those friends I exchanged long letters with was the late
Bienvenido “Boy” Noriega Jr., very probably our finest
playwright, and something of a prodigy who headed the Policy
Coordination Staff at the National Economic and Development
Authority in his early 20s; Boy went to Harvard in 1978, when he
was 26, for his master’s in Public Administration, but cross enrolled
in theater courses at the same time. Another was poet
Fidelito Cortes, who beat me out to a Wallace Stegner fellowship
at Stanford in the mid-1980s (and who made up for it by greeting
me in San Francisco with the gift of a Stanford sweatshirt when it
was my turn to come in 1986). I also wrote letters to film director
Lino Brocka, who preferred to use the telephone to respond
(quite often forgetting, when I was in Milwaukee, that it was 2 am
when he was calling from Quezon City).
Boy always hand-wrote his letters in small, fine script; Lito, like
myself, used a typewriter; our letters went on for pages and
pages, reporting on what we were writing, seeing, and thinking
at that time, aware that we were standing on the doorstep of our
lives’ great labors.
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