Coping with dual citizenship

BENCHWARMER
Ramon Dacawi

Without my knowledge, officemates worked out the release of my senior citizen’s card which they handed early evening of my reaching 60. Used to letting it go by like any other day, as a way of coping with childhood poverty, I took a leave that day, so it would pass quietly. But they were waiting at home, tortured by the sight of food they brought but couldn’t touch until I arrived past six.

The card symbolizes what we all want to be but whose arrival we wish we could slow down. “Dual citizen kayon, uncle,” my niece Joann texted me that day. Her ribbing made me see it as a blessing, and texted back so “Correct!,” she replied.

Many never reached 60, including some of my closest colleagues and elders in community journalism. They passed on in their 50s – Peppot Ilagan, Steve Hamada, Bagnos Cudiamat and Freddie Mayo. Along this journey to the grave called life, set in motion by birth, I’ve seen others go in their 20s, teens, childhood or even younger.

On a Sunday evening a few months before he kicked the bucket Sept. 24 last year, country folksinger Mike Santos was sure glad to tell me how happy he was reading the Baguio Midland Courier.

“Talagang happy ako, pare. Binuklat ko yong Midland at hindi ko nakita ang larawan at pangalan ko do’n,” he noted, obviously referring to the obituary page.

“Kung gusto mo, bilhan kita ng subscription hanggang makita mo,” I offered, impressed by his irrepressible sense of humor that mocked the intimations of his younger friends of their own mortality.

Mike’s passing on age was placed at 70, which March, Bubut Olarte and the rest of the senior folksingers hereabouts doubt as he already looked that age 10 years ago. Mike used to proclaim he would always be younger than his mother-in-law, who has out-lived him.

Juliet, Mike’ young widow, was less than half his age when they married. After the exchange of vows, he always relished telling and re-telling how his mother-in-law almost passed out when he came calling to ask for her hand.

“Saan ho ang anak n’yo na gusting ikasal ang anak ko,” Mike quoted Juliet’s mother as asking him. “Noong sabi ko, ‘ako ho ‘yon’, kamuntik nawalan ng malay ang magiging biyenan ko.”

Juliet had wanted to mark Mike’s first death anniversary with a memorial card in the weekly to mark his first death anniversary but was prohibited by the cost. Instead, she used an amount sent by expatriate Baguio boy Joel Aliping for the insurance premium of Mica, her 16-year old daughter with Mike. Mike must be smiling from up there, as he opened Mica’s insurance five years ago.

Personally, I regret never having opened an insurance policy offered by then under-writer and folksinger Conrad Marzan. I wrongly subscribed then to the notion that the concept of insurance is so you’ll live poor and die rich. At 60 and diagnosed as oozing with sugar without a hacienda, I’d be lucky to find an insurance firm stupid enough to give me a policy.

So was I glad when my officemates handed me that senior citizen’s card that, entitles me to benefits and privileges under Rep. Act. 9994, including discounts in the purchase of medicines to control my blood sugar, cholesterol and pressure.

Or so I thought, until a pharmacy salesgirl refused to hand me my order. She claimed the prescription should have indicated the brand I wanted, not on the treatment protocol my doctor prepared for my guidance.

So I went to a consultant at the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center, who told me government doctors like him are not allowed to indicate the brands, only the generic names of medicines, which, in my case, was metformin.

“Welcome to the travails of a senior citizen, uncle,” Joann, a young doctor with a Baguio upbringing and heart, told me when I narrated my encounter with the salesgirl.

Chances are the owner of the drugstore is not aware of the employee’s tactic to deprive me of my discount. The pharmacy proprietor has been reaching out to the destitute, as per testimony of a subdivision utility worker who told me his wife survived breast cancer with support from the drugstore owner.

I learned of the drugstore owner’s heart in the course of my delivery of support from expatriates the likes of Freddie de Guzman in Canada and Guy Aliping in Australia for the chemotherapy the patient.

To escape frustration and the indignity of having to beg or be angry for being treated as a sixty-cent senior, I line up at Mercury’s which honors my card and the discounts and benefits due me as dual citizen. (e-mail:mondaxbench@yahoo.com for comments).