Septuagenarian Notes: WEIRD RIDES

 By Ba Ipe

BOYING Abasola's private message to my FB account sounded somewhat urgent. It was Friday late morning and Boying, who is currently the president of the National Press Club (NPC), asked me if I would grace the NPC day for NPC lifetime members, of which I am one. I am an ID-carrying NPC lifetime member, which simply means I'm one of the "very senior" journalists in its roster of members. I obliged to Boying's persuasive power and dutifully told him that I would arrive at the NPC building in Intramuros at around 3 pm. 

Earlier in the week, I talked to my friend Dante Zamora about this NPC special event and we agreed to grace the occasion. Dante is not yet a lifetime NPC member, but he wanted to have a taste of an NPC gathering. Dante used to be a public servant in his entire professional career, but when he retired I convinced him to write opinion pieces for a tabloid newspaper, which gives wider and more liberal latitude to its opinion writers to express their views. Dante writes in a deep, classical Tagalog, which has become uncommon nowadays.

Dante, a UP Diliman social work graduate, has easily transitioned to his new role as an opinion writer. His prose is a little dense and sticky, but the message is always profound. Over the years, we have developed friendship and we have often go together in media events like press conferences and media forums. We met more than a decade ago when the GOCC which employed got embroiled in a major scandal taht saw the imprisonment of three senators. He opted to retire after the GOCC was collapsed in the wake of the scandal.

But the story is not just our friendship or the NPC event.alone. We truly enjoyed our day at the NPC gathering for lifetime members, as we hobnobbed with fellow lifetime members like Satur Ocampo, who used to be a newspaperman before he went underground to become a ranking official of the outlawed Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and wife Bobbie Malay-Ocampo, also an activist, Al Pedroche, a tabloid columnist, lawyer Ric Valmonte, a radio commentator, Andy Sevilla, Joel Paredes, anong others.

The story is mainly about the weird taxi rides I and Dante had, when we went to the NPC and returned home. In hindsight, which is always 20/20, they were a little fearful but funny by all standards.