COOKING UP SOMETHING FOR JACK

COOKING UP SOMETHING FOR JACK

I do not know Joaquin Manipol from Adam. One day he was ushered   to my  cubbyhole of an office. He directly introduced  himself without preliminaries.

“Hi, I’m Joaquin Manipol,” he said.  

The sudden intrusion surprised him more than me. I was sure I flashed an irritable glare. He broke the ice and said that he and my old man had gone a long way, during the days of President Diosdado Macapagal. He looked fiftyish while my old man was in his seventies. I figured he cut quite a decent figure as a young man.

My faint recollection of President Diosdado Macapagal was his picture  hanging on the classroom wall of the public elementary school known as the E.T.C.S. which I attended back in ’65.

I really had no idea why the school sported letters for its name. Anyway, our teacher said that the handsome man in the picture with  straight, shiny, sticky hair, in an elegant suit, was the President, so I thought he was somebody important for he wouldn’t be staring at us little children as we try to read, write and count. Sometimes the teacher would point her long stick at his picture calling us to pay attention because the President was observing.

Now what have I got to do with a stranger who simply came around from nowhere to tell me he knew my father way back during the time of a forgotten President?

“Just call me Jack,” he said.

He went straight to the point. He and his associates, he said, were planning to run a magazine. Well, actually he said, publishing had always been his cup of tea. He opened his old fashioned leather case, and showed some of his stuff. I was surprised he still kept old copies, of out of print magazines of a by gone era and they rang a bell. These were exactly some of the old reading stuff my old man used to bring home. The write ups and the writers were familiar. Probably my old man was one of his avid subscribers.

I asked Jack what’s on his mind. I anticipated he wanted to solicit some support or convince me to invest in his new enterprise. I was wrong. He said if I would be interested to write, he could spare some space. I told him, I’m a lousy  burned out lawyer not a writer. He said, lawyers write all the time. I said they do, but they only write for the one paying the fee and they couldn’t care less if they  muddle, or obscure, plain and simple things so they would sound great and intelligent . But Jack was unfazed. He said his good friend, who was also my friend, spoke highly of me. I asked him who might this common friend be. He said his old pal Ompong, the witty attorney.

So I got the picture. Ompong the mountain climbing goat of lawyer was the source of all this trouble.

“And what piece would you expect from me?” I asked Jack.

“Just cook up something,” he said.

For days I found myself looking at this blank space trying to cook up something for Jack. The blank space was still as empty and vast and blank as my mind, I was beginning to feel like a jackass.

So here’s the deal.

I might as well write about Jack  who one day showed up in my dreary life refreshing my memory of the days gone by, when life was too simple, for an innocent boy to grasp why the solemn picture of the President kept staring at him as he struggled to read, write, count, and recite in class.