I was invited to speak at my old high school!

The last time I was asked to give a career talk to the kids was over thirty years ago when I was a young lawyer whose courtroom experience consisted mostly of begging judges for postponements. (“Your Honor, in the spirit of Christmas . . .”) Come to think of it, maybe my descriptions of lawyering weren’t very impressive. That’s why I wasn’t invited back. In fairness to me, however, U.P. Rural High is a pretty good school, and it must have graduated a sizeable number of people over the years who went on to finish and practice law and who were invited to give the orientations for no other reason than they are younger than me.

            Earlier this month, the Guidance and Counseling Office sent a formal letter requesting me to speak to the Grade 10 to 12 students to help them “configure a career map” for their futures. It’s possible they noticed how many different jobs I’ve had in different fields in my long lifetime and figured they were getting a nice combo meal—many careers from one speaker like several viands on one plate. More probable: they were simply responding to the fact that I told them that I was available. Sometimes you have to help things along. Regardless of how it came to be, I was deeply honored by the invitation.

            If our high school had offered career counseling back in 1970s, maybe somebody would have told me then that I couldn’t be president of the Philippines, and I could have studied creative writing instead of economics and law. At the very least, someone could have opened my eyes to the fact that the actual practice of law is very different from what we see on television, and moreover, that working in television is very different from what we see on television. My life might have been very different. Better! The grass always being greener and so on.

            In other words, I took the task of orienting these young people very seriously. I read up, researched, and scoured my memory for inspiring anecdotes of which I found dismayingly few from my own life. Rather than tell the Ruralites about me, therefore, I decided to recount the key story from the life of my late father—how he grew up in beautiful but poor, isolated Basco, Batanes where he graduated valedictorian from a high school that had no math teacher; how he went to college at U.P. Diliman where he taught himself algebra at the same time that he was learning calculus in class; how when his father, my grandfather, passed away suddenly, he did not attend the funeral because he had classes; and how he finished Engineering in the allotted four years and went on to build roads in Iligan and water towers in Quezon City, eventually ending up as a dean of engineering at U.P. Los Baños where his name now graces the façade of an engineering building.

            How did he do it? I vowed to ask my audience. Dante, from whom I got my shortened first name as well as my last, always walked with purpose. I remember walking home with him (I must have been six or seven) up the hill towards the main library, “Dig your heels, roll your feet forward and push off with each stride. Keep your shoulders back, your head up, and your eyes on the destination.” Memories from that age are notoriously tricky, but that’s what I remember. He never sashayed or skipped or hopped or jumped. He walked with purpose.

            And so, on the appointed Saturday morning of the career orientation program, I forced myself to get up at an ungodly hour to account for the two-hour drive to make it for my early speaking slot. It’s a rural high school after all, and its new location is naturally in a somewhat remote area way off the university campus. Kate, the British voice who gives me instructions on Waze, couldn’t properly pronounce Maahas Road. Fortunately, I knew it from my youth as the narrow, snaking path that we were told never to use.

            I arrived at the school gate, and no one was there. No students waiting for wisdom. No teachers fawning in gratitude. Not a soul. I wondered whether I had gotten the date wrong. Or the venue. Had I actually been invited? Had I imagined it? Did I have dementia? Until a nearly toothless security guard appeared, zipping up his pants, who said the orientation program had been cancelled.

            It’s just that no one told me.

🙁 😂 😴

UPDATE: The principal emailed her apologies, adding that a message informing me of the postponement was "mistakenly sent to the wrong email address."

By the way, the photo is of the high school building I went to in the 70s, not the current building.