On August 17, 2012, I met a friend from high school. She is a medical doctor practicing family medicine in Texas and she has come back home to the Philippines for a visit.  She hasn’t been home since 2006.  We met for lunch, Alma and I.  We were joined by her younger sister, Alexia.  We ate at Abe’s at Trinoma.

We have been friends for a year on Facebook.  We have exchanged a few messages and greetings but I don’t know why I am reluctant to meet friends from high school. I have been invited to join a group on Facebook which was formed by my batchmates from high school and I receive updates and invites from them whenever they get together.  I have never attended any of the dinner invites. So why did I meet Alma for lunch?

It’s probably because Alma was my classmate since Grade 1.  Ours was a small christian school in Nagtahan Street in San Miguel, Manila.  At its biggest, the student population probably numbered 350.  Christian Academy of Manila was that small.

The kids who go to our school usually came from Protestant and Evangelical denominations.  Alma had  two younger sisters who were classmates of my younger brother and sister.

So please believe me when I say that my classmate and I became close through the high school years.  It’s impossible not to because we spent seven or eight of our waking hours with each other in one classroom.  When we got to high school, aside from classes, we organized patintero games which became a ritual every afternoon.  When we were in second year high school, we took part in COCC training so we were in school until 5:30 pm.

All this changed when circumstances wrenched me from my high school friends and classmates.  I was enrolled for the school year 1982-1983.  I had gone to school from June until August 22, 2012.  This was the day I boarded a PAL flight from Manila to Honolulu and from Honolulu to San Francisco, from San Francisco to Minneapolis and from Minneapolis to Des Moines, Iowa.  I left everything familiar and went to live with strangers   in the United States for a whole school year.  I was an exchange student on my last year in high school and I didn’t graduate with them.  I graduated from Herbert Hoover High School in Des Moines, Iowa.

On the last and final year of school that was supposed to be meaningful for us as a group, I had been yanked out and I went for a personal adventure all by myself.  My year-long stay in the United States was a defining moment for me. I learned how to be truly independent and how to adjust to a different lifestyle and pace of living.  I was confronted with a different value system and a totally alien way of life. I  matured in those ten months that I was a stranger to all but myself when I came back home.

This is mainly the reason why I feel hesitant when I receive invites from my high school classmates.  I don’t really feel I belong because I left on the most important year of all, the last year of high school.

As I had lunch with Alma, she told me so many things that happened during fourth year that I missed. It made me feel worse, I think, because I could not relate.  It felt like a big chunk of my past was missing and in the hole where the high school memories should be, I had put in different memories filled with blond blue-eyed people where brown skinned black haired friends should be. I felt like traitor and a deserter.

But as we talked longer, it became more evident to me why we were friends.  I dismissed the notion that we became friends only because circumstances lumped us together in one class.  I actually should not be in that class.  My classmates were already in Prep II when I was just in Prep I.  I was accelerated because my reading level was advanced.  I was adopted into their class.  Again, I did not quite belong: in my class, I was always the youngest.   Alma was a whiz.  She was really smart and she got good grades.  I never really felt I had a brain inside my skull.  I had flashes of brilliance once in a while.  I could think my way out of most situations, but I was no brain.

Alma became my friend because we had memories in common.  We remember our teachers, we remember the difficulties we had with each teacher and the laughter and fun we had despite those teachers.

Alma and I became friends because we had one common interest: we loved to read. It began when she saw me reading a Nancy Drew Mystery.  I bought that book from allowance I had saved for weeks!  I was so disappointed because it took me so long to save up to buy one book that I finished reading in a few hours.  I was so frustrated because I had to save up again for weeks just to buy another one.

Alma said to me that she had the same book.  We started talking about it.  When she came home from lunch (she lived next door to our school and she had a special privilege of being allowed to walk home at lunch time to eat lunch at home), she had another Nancy Drew Book.  I promised to read it and finish it by dismissal time.  That meant I had to read it surreptitiously in class while the teacher was lecturing.

It became a ritual.  She lent me Nancy Drew Books and then we progressed to the Hardy Boys.  And then we went on to Silhouette Romances, Harlequin Romances and Mills and Boon.  Then she introduced me to the best sellers: books by Jacqueline Susann and Sidney Sheldon.  We became a book club of two. Then, I tried writing my own stories and she was my one audience and my one critic. I valued her input.  She was straightforward and honest.

We graduated and she went to UST;  I was quite unexpectedly accepted into UP as a foreign student (because I had a US high school diploma). We lost touch.  In all those years, we may have called each other on the phone twice.  They were long conversations but we were becoming different people with different priorities and goals.

Last Friday, I learned why she remains a friend.  We have the same work ethic: she told me that she had a problem with a nurse in her practice and she said that just because she was a doctor and the nurse was a nurse did not mean she was a better person than the nurse, they just had different roles to play.  That was something I would say.  I think that I am so lucky to have become  lawyer, but really, being a lawyer does not make me better than anyone (I just had more years of study and I have a unique perspective because of my study in the law).

She told me how her nephews and nieces were punished by their mothers (her sisters) with an electronics ban and no-TV or computer time.  She remarked that we never had a TV problem when we were growing up.  I said it was probably because it was Martial Law and there weren’t very many interesting shows to watch on TV anyway.  She said we were usually outside playing or inside reading. I heartily agreed.  It was the same at my house.

She told me how she didn’t mind using her older sister’s hand me downs and her cousins hand me downs and I agreed.  I remembered my Gregg shoes were so sturdy, I wore them for one year, maybe two and if it fit my other siblings, they wore the same shoes when their feet were large enough to fit my old shoes.

She recounted to me how she waits for a sale to buy whatever she wanted when she went to the US.  I told her that I did the same thing.  She said it didn’t mean we were poor, although we weren’t rich.  It meant we knew how hard our parents worked for the money so we were judicious in spending the money.  I totally agreed with her. It never occurred to us to be frustrated with the confines of our economic status because we did not have a sense of entitlement to better things.  If life became better for us financially, it became better by God’s grace and through hard work. I totally agreed with her.

She remembered how we only got toys on two occasions: Christmas and our birthdays.  We rode the jeep and the bus.  We went to the market with our mothers. And we only ate ice cream on special occasions.  We went to church every Sunday except when we were sick.

Most of all, she related to me how when she finally became a doctor, she couldn’t find it in her to be happy.  She was overwhelmed with the responsibility of being a doctor: the responsibility for the life of another.  I felt the same way I said, when I became a lawyer.  I was overwhelmed with the responsibility of upholding the law in the face of corruption.

No wonder Alma and I were friends. We share values in common and our lives ran along parallel lines.  What I loved most about our lunch was when the food was served, we all sat there and we all wondered: who was going to pray for the food? It was the same question we had whenever we ate together in school.  I prayed for the food. I was happy that even if years and miles separated our lives, we still prayed to the same God.  We still read the same Bible and we hoped in the same promises in Scriptures.   We didn’t just have lunch, Alma, Alexia and I; we had fellowship.  We were still classmates, after all, in the school of life.