THS CLASS 1963 45th HOMECOMING TABACO CITY APRIL, 2008

Myr and I want to share with you, members and mentors of THS Class ’63 , a memento of our fun-filled four-year educational odyssey-----THE VANGUARD, MARCH 1963 COMMENCEMENT ISSUE. We sincerely hope that this copy will bring back a lot of good memories.

BORBS & MYR

FROM BORBS,

                           AN OPEN LETTER WHEN YOU HAVE THE TIME

Classmates, if I described our THS stint as an odyssey ( it really was one) it is because I want to tell you about another odyssey, the one attributed to that ancient Greek poet, Homer (remember him), almost three thousand years ago.

In April, 2003, on our 40th class reunion, I was given the opportunity and the privilege to give a message to our classmates. In that brief message I included a passage (“how dull it is to pause, to make an end………”) from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, Ulysses, which we took up in high school. Tennyson’s hero, Ulysses, is the Roman or Latin equivalent of Odysseus, Homer’s hero in the epic poem, The Odyssey. Tennyson’s Ulysses is Homer’s Odysseus after Odysseus returned to his island home, Ithaca, after a twenty-year absence. Now, I know that for a fact because Miss Fe Llamas (all our teachers names will be as we knew them in 1963) said so, four and half decades ago. I believed her. I still do.

Let me digress a little more. Our class did not study Homer’s works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, in their entirety in high school, just took selected readings from them. Reading them would have been at the expense of the other beautiful poems and literary pieces which we did study. Both The Iliad and The Odyssey are each twenty four “books” long. We just didn’t have the time to read them especially if you have to walk from Malilipot or San Lorenzo to Panal and back on most school days. (Mrs. Cresenciana Canaya knew that walk. Peace Corps Volunteer, Mr. Martin Hurwitz took that walk many times). But reading both works was one of those “little things” that I put at the back of my mind, vowing that if ever I attended college, I would find time to read and study them. Well, college only lasted two staggered struggling semesters. Working the shifts in a textile mill and attending evening college classes weren’t a good mix for me. Homer had to wait. And I, like the rest of restless Class ’63, couldn’t wait “to seek, to find”, “to drink life to the lees”. I left my job of weaving plies for a job that plied the waves. Homer sat in limbo.

Then came our 40th class reunion. Asked in a flash upon arrival and barely a month after angioplasty, to reminisce about and write a message to our classmates, all I could come up with was to repeat Ulysses’ message. Of course, when Ulysses sprang to mind, the vow I made about reading Homer came right behind. But then I thought, if Homer could wait these many years, he could surely wait a little longer. The old manana habit, you see. Not until last year when I had to hurriedly come back and saw the remnants of typhoon Reming’s rage and ravage contrasted against Mayon’s majestic beauty and, later on, in the evening of the same day was joined by some of our ever thoughtful classmates to bid a final farewell to my eldest brother, did I go through some sort of, what our classmate, Fr. Manuel Bongayan, would call, an epiphany. The glass from which we “drink life to the lees” is as beautiful and full as it is fragile. I did some hasty recollections and decided that Homer should wait no more. I had to make good an old trivial vow. I had to go back to my high school days and ways.

I could vividly see Mrs. Dolores Marpuri handing me a copy of Homer’s The Odyssey and telling me to read quietly while in the library which was hard to do to a poem that was performed in the oral tradition, and passed on from bard to bard (to borbs?) for many, many generations, and then she reminded me that the book was due back in two weeks. At home, I tried to hasten reading but rushing to read Homer was akin to cramming for Miss Isabel Milanes’ Geometry or Mr. Florencio Pagaragan’s Physics or Mrs. Leticia Gonzales’ and Mrs. Cresenciana Canaya’s Trigonometry classes. Not that easy. I found Homer to be formidable reading and I felt like putting the book down for good a couple of times but each time, one motherly you-could-do-it,-son look from Mrs. Clementina Bongon was enough to let me go on and finish reading the poem.

Classmates, if you have read up to this point, thanks. But I’d like to ask you to bear with me a little longer. After all, as classmates, we stayed solidly together for four years, and a classmate has stayed beside me for the last thirty six years and promises to stick with me for the next fifty, so what are a few more minutes? I really like to share with you a couple of things about Homer’s The Odyssey which I think we would have missed had we read it in high school. We all look at and see things a little differently now, I’m definitely sure. Although, we all look pretty much the same as when we were in Mr. Gonzalo Bruces’ PMT and Miss Bernardita Bufete’s PE classes—slim and trim, fit and fast like Odysseus’ ships. And, of course, we listened to Miss Caridad Moran when she advised us to exercise, eat healthy and stay healthy. I promise I’ll stick with just The Odyssey. The Iliad can wait another day. 2013. Maybe?

The Odyssey is a long, long beautiful, beautiful poem. By the way, The Odyssey is not about Helen of Troy, or the Trojan War, or the Trojan Horse, or Mentor or Nestor (no, not our classmate, youthful Nestor Biron, it’s the ancient Nestor), although all of them are mentioned somewhere in the poem. Its poetic language is as beautiful as its simple memorable message. The Odyssey’s main theme is NOSTOS. If that word sounds Greek, it is because it is. It is the same Greek word from which a common feeling, which I know all of us, Class ’63 members, have felt or suffered from at least once—NOSTALGIA—was coined.  In the language that Miss Aida Bongon, Miss Josefa Cabredo and Mrs. Leticia Cruel so expertly taught, NOSTOS is return, reunion, homecoming, going back to one’s own native land, all rolled into one. In Miss Aurora Bigay’s class, NOSTOS means “paglingon sa pinanggalingan, pagbabalik, balikbayan, baliktahanan pinagsamasama sa isang palayok at isinalang”. For NOSTOS’ Bicol equivalent, I will have to ask our classmate, Emiliano Ortiz, because, like me, he has a classmate close by whom he can ask for help and, additionally, I heard that he, together with our classmates, Augusto Pagtakhan and Chito Dyangko, had deciphered the ancient and secret (bu)language of derby roosters and gamecocks. That’s quite an advantage if you ever read Homer. How I wished now that Miss Lourdes Berango taught not only Spanish but Greek and Latin as well.

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

Driven time and again off course once he had plundered

The hallowed heights of Troy.”

Those are The Odyssey’s opening lines. Although The Odyssey relates Odysseus’ “great wanderings” on his ten-year journey from Troy to his island home, Ithaca, (what happened to the other ten years is homework assignment, classmates) Homer did not name his hero right off the start. Why? Almost thirty centuries ago, wise Homer knew that he would be addressing and talking about all of us. For who among us hasn’t had his/her share of twists and turns, not been driven off course? Human nature hasn’t changed that much in thousands of years.

Not that we had plundered any particular place but pundits now say that the cause of the coming global warming and climate change is that we not only “had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy” but had plundered and continue to plunder hallowed Planet Earth as a whole. Long, long ago in a humid crowded classroom, Miss Gloria Brondial brought to our attention the eventual inevitable ill effects on the environment of “kaingin” and wholesale deforestation, Miss Salvacion Aranaz showed us the beauty of all life and explained to us in great detail nature’s delicate balancing act, and Mr. Eleuterio Rebancos taught us the merits of organic gardening instead of the use of pesticides and fertilizers. They had vision. So did Homer.

The Odyssey’s next lines:

“Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,

Many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,

Fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.”

To Homer, a great part of life is NOSTOS, a return home, a reunion. To Homer, life is not like drawing a straight line. It’s more like drawing a closed loop, an imperfect circle with corrugated arcs (those of us who drew circles exactly like that in Geometry class got front row seats and those leg-endary pinches). Wonder why I still remember?

Homer, as well as Mr. Teodulo Paglinauan and his successors (most were our teachers, by the way), understood that there would be barriers and obstacles to one’s return and homecoming which, of course, are what The Odyssey is mostly about. Here are two of them. The rest like the sirens’ songs, Circe, Cyclops, Charybdis and Scylla, clashing rocks, etc. must all be included in our home reading report due in two days. They’re all life’s parallel troubles and parables. Homer knew us well.

There is the land of the Lotus-eaters. This land is inhabited by a friendly, fun-loving, progressive and peaceful people. A visitor, a stranger or anybody else who comes to this land is offered to eat the flowers of the lotus plant and once that person does, that person is overcome with pleasure, forgets everything including home and decides to stay in that place forever without ever looking back. Miss Aurora Bigay once asked us in her Pilipino class, “Paano nakalimot si Nadia?” I don’t remember that anybody answered that it was because of the lotus flowers. Incidentally, Tennyson also wrote a poem titled “Song of the Lotus-Eaters”.

There is the paradise-like island of the beautiful and seductive goddess, Calypso, who held Odysseus captive and offered him marriage and immortality, but all he did was to sit by the shore looking at the horizon, “straining for no more than a glimpse of hearth-smoke drifting from his own land”. If Odysseus was stranded in Catanduanes Island instead of Calypso’s Island, he didn’t have to stretch his neck to glimpse at the smoke and steam drifting from a beautiful eight-thousand-foot high cone-shaped natural hearth. To Odysseus, returning home had no substitute.

According to Mr. Eliseo Lugo, Dr. Jose P. Rizal was a man of letters and an accomplished poet. So, there’s no doubt in my mind that Rizal had read Homer’s works and most likely he, being also a known linguist, read them in their original Greek and must have been greatly influenced by them especially by The Odyssey. After all, in spite of all the dire warnings he got, Rizal returned home. And the rest, as Mrs. Remedios de Jesus would say, is Philippine History.

Classmates, this is not a pitch to read Homer or The Odyssey. Homer was the most ancient among the ancient poets. His works are laced with beliefs, rituals and practices which might have been just Greek to others before but which are now totally unacceptable to us. If we read Homer, we must do so with our third eye unlike the Cyclops Polyphemos who only had one eye. Learning from Homer is right along the lines of us trying to figure out how we could use what we learned in Miss Minviluz Marquez’s or Miss Marina Sanin’s Economics class, until we were in a financial twist and in an economic downturn and then suddenly we realized their impact. It dawned on us then that we should have listened better.

Rather, this is a pitch to somehow take a glance at the universal concept and message of NOSTOS which Homer reminds us of in a turning twisting way in The Odyssey. If NOSTOS means a return home, HOME here means our very own TNHS and TNHS is our own ITHACA. And, as we can see, we don’t have to travel very far away from home to be away from home. We have a dedicated group of classmates who spends extra time and effort to try to gather us together every five years and to remind us that we share the same FOSTER MOTHER (ALMA MATER). They encourage us to attend our reunions. You see, visiting our foster mother, revisiting the home we left behind and meeting again with some experienced friends, classmates and teachers, is like rereading an old favorite poem. If we only read a little slower (nowadays, how else can we do it?), look a little closer and think a little deeper, we will find new meaning in each line every time. And that is about one of the best things that our Alma Mater taught us—the ability to find new meaning in and from an old line and then give new meaning to it. So, let’s help our classmates add new meaning to what it is being a member of THS CLASS 1963 and TNHS ALUMNI.

Book Eleven of The Odyssey contains this scene.____ Having been away from home and family for many, many years and having already encountered and survived a lot of dangers and perilous situations in his quest to return home, Odysseus had to pass through Hades, the kingdom of the dead, where the spirits or ghosts of the departed are held in some kind of limbo. He saw and talked to a lot of ghosts whom he expected and some whom he did not expect to be there but he was totally surprised and shocked to see the ghost of his mother, Antikleia, to be among them. Odysseus wept and tried to hug her but couldn’t so he just asked her as to what happened, what did she die of, and how his father (Laertes) was. Here’s how the ghost of Antikleia answered her only son, Odysseus, in Book Eleven, lines 221-232:

“he (Laertes) makes his bed, heaped high with fallen leaves,

And there he lies in anguish….. With his old age bearing upon him, too,

And his grief grows as he longs for your return.

And I with the same grief, I died and met my fate.

No sharp-eyed Huntress showering arrows through the halls

Approached and brought me down with painless shafts,

Nor did some hateful illness strike, that so often

Devastates the body, drains our limbs of power.

No, it was my longing for you, my shining Odysseus—

You and your quickness, you and your gentle ways—

That tore away my life that had been sweet.”

So come, classmates. Come to visit. Come to reunite. Come to stay if you wish. Come to honor a Mother. Come say hello to our Alma Mater. Like all mothers, she waits patiently and welcomes all her foster children back with no strings attached or in the words of our classmate, Dr. Alfredo Moran, “no matter where we are, or what we are.” SHE’S TNHS. SHE’S HOME. SHE’S BEAUTIFUL ALWAYS.

So that’s about it for Homer’s The Odyssey. Now, we want your own odyssey so we can compile them for our golden jubilee. Our classmate, Fred Palces already started a website for our class at www.multiply@multiply.com.

It is time now to return to where we started from—Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses”—

“Something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done.”

Let’s do it! 2013 or sooner.

MABALOS SA SAINDO GABOS!!!!!

BORBS, A CLASSMATE

P.S. I could not write a short letter about a twenty-four-book long epic poem and a relationship that is forty five years strong and counting and a great group of teachers who guided us through an enjoyable forty-eight-month educational odyssey and to whom we want to extend a million and one THANK YOU. Excerpts from the poem are from The Odyssey as translated by Robert Fagles, and explanations of Greek terms are from The Odyssey, a six-hour DVD course by Elizabeth Vandiver.