BENCHWARMER

Manong Paul Dampac
RAMON S. DACAWI

BAGUIO CITY -- In this season of wakes and funerals, our lawyers counted theirs, and then saw the wisdom to petition the Supreme Judge for a restraining order, this time through the indigenous process.

The media here also find solace in the native ritual whenever a member writes “30” or goes off the air for good. They plant a memorial tree, adding it to a secluded, growing patch of older ones for those who had gone earlier. Planting a living memorial tree approximates what Canadian writer May Sarton described as a “sacrament of the ordinary,” a simple, manual act that turns sacred for it helps us cope with loss.

Humor also helps fill the gnawing void and emptiness that hit whenever the news is found on the obituary page of the Baguio Midland Courier. Humor, morbid it may seem, has been making the rounds among lawyers trying to equate the letters of the alphabet to the names of peers who have just rested their cases on this mortal plane.

Former Gold Ore editor Peppot Ilagan had that gift of wit – and the tact and timing in dishing it out. Friends who came by his hospital bed to lighten him up ended up needing a stitch on the seams. He made them forget he was about to kick the bucket. The late Peppot also conceptualized the “living tree memorial”. The tradition lives on, even if some of the younger journalists now who hardly knew him seem not to see its substance

“Peppot was not late, he was early,”said retired assistant provincial fiscal Paul Dampac, correcting what I wrote. He knew Peppot and it was difficult to argue with Manong Paul. For quite sometime, he’ll remind those whose lives he touched of a truism novelist Richard Paul Evans observed: “Those with softest hearts sometimes build the hardest shells.”

I thank Manong Paul, not really for the word usage, but the compliment subtly delivered. Despite my spotty grammar and syntax, sentences and ideas that ricochet and leap-frog aimlessly from one point to another, he tried to read this corner.

“Maka-konpyus nga talaga ti Inglis,” I admitted. We were taught that “leap” is a verb and “frog” is a noun, but why is it “leap-frogging,” not “frog-leaping”? “Please do something for me,” Manong Paul said, brushing aside my analogy. We were then waiting for the Guisad boys to cook kapitan Ferdy Bayasen’s pig at the Dap-ay Pucay at the side of Guisad Central’s barangay hall.

That was sometime last year, when the barangay decided to celebrate its winning top honors in the city’s search for the best vegetable salad garden. Like leap-frogging, it was a misnomer, an event in irony. It was all meat and no salad.

“Can you write my obituary?,” Manong Paul, the retired prosecutor, asked. He saw me almost cringe and followed it up with dispatch. “Why should an obituary be written only after the subject is no longer around to read or hear it?,” he wondered. “I want to read mine and correct your errors.”

Questions crept up my brain marinated by alcohol: And what would you do if you’ve corrected it? Drop into the bucket and leave the Guisad, Pinsao, Sagada and other boys – and girls – in the cold, with no one to turn to about their problems? You want Apo Padi (Francis) Daoey , Apo Padi Marion Solang and Lakay Nelson (Batnag) to preside over this dap-ay without you?

I turned quiet and then turned to the boys of the dap-ay. Told them that time a typhoon cut-off Middle East-bound driver-mechanic John Linmayog from his plane schedule. When Manong Paul learned, he whipped out a $50 bill and told me to find John. It’s for his failure-to-board fine, he said.

I was told Manong Paul was in Sagada one time during an alumni reunion at St. Mary’s Like their professor William Henry Scott, he saw them coming up in their expensive cars. “Everybody’s showing up,” Scott was overheard as saying. Piskal Paul saw them coming from a distance, in a sari-sari store, in the company of alumni who failed to acquire materially. They, too, were celebrating their homecoming with gin and two dogs he had offered.

He learned I was bound for an environmental conference and called. Find a bottle and come after Sunday mass at Easter School, he said. We repaired to kapitan Ferdy’s where they emptied my whisky bottle and feasted on the host’s poultry and salted pork. The fiscal shoved $240 into my pocket and told me board of directors of the Benguet Electric Cooperative, of which he was then the president, had approved my request for fare support.

I learned more about Piskal from couple Edwin and Mia Abeya while they were guiding me to Virginia for a glimpse at John Denver’s Shenandoah River and the Blue Ridge mountains. “So you know him, too,” Mia said, recalling how Piskal Paul took pains to be in Bontoc for the wake of her mother.

Paul Dampac would say his piece about the kindness of others but seldom or never talked of his own. Again, he fits into what Evans said: The greatest acts are done without plaque, audience or ceremony.

To many, he was right. He, too, left early, at 68, last Sunday morning, while he ready to go to mass at Easter School. I hardly knew him, except perhaps to understand why he shared me that quote he attributed to Gen. Douglas McArthur: “For the deepening shadows of life cast doubt on my ability to say again, I shall return.” (e-mail: rdacawi@yahoo.com for comments).