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Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Roperos: Enduring love
By Godofredo M. Roperos
Politics Also
Yesterday was as much a day of loving, as it was of discussing the faces of love. Love has evolved into many things today that our forbears would not have the moral courage or the social gumption to accept in their time. I know it, if I were to take my mother’s moral outlook and views on love as a yardstick. She was one person who had a very narrow view of love, and did not take being in love for granted, as I found out later to my dismay as a self-proclaimed liberal.
When I was a sophomore at the university in Diliman, and my younger brother, Boy, was a fresh high school graduate from the St. Francis Academy in our town, I pushed him to succumb to his first love. She was a classmate and pretty as pretty can be. I wrote his first love letter for her, and when I came home for the long vacation, I dragged him to visit her at their house that was just a block away from our own. Before long, she buckled under his protestation of love. In a word, my brother had his first girl friend.
I do not really know what happened afterwards. My brother was set to enter the seminary but somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. He later became director of the Bureau of Plant Industry.
But let’s go back to my brother’s first love. It was my mother who sort of told me what happened. She wrote me an angry letter telling me that she caught my brother writing a letter of separation to his first love.
She said she was mad, very mad indeed, because of what I did. I should not have pushed my brother to court the girl as he really did not love her.
She said it was an insult to the girl for the boy to initiate the break-up. After all, it was not the girl who initiated the relationship. Protocol demands that it should be the girl who makes the move. I know that my mother had a point there, but I thought then that times were changing.
When I started working as a newspaperman, and became associate editor of the Sunday Times Magazine of the old Manila Times, and still unmarried at almost 30 years old, I maintained a bachelor’s apartment on Blumentritt St. in Santa Cruz. It was a weekend haunt of many of my friends.
My mother, at one time, paid me a surprise visit. As I had to go to work, I left her and my younger sister, Lorna, in the apartment. When I came back late in the evening, I found my bachelor’s apartment in perfect order. But when I searched for some rather “compromising photos” of movie starlets, my mother told me she had burned them.
When I looked for the deck of playing cards we used to play poker with on weekends, I found that my mother had colored the nude bodies at the back of the cards with crayon!
But bless her poor soul, in the midst of the current deterioration of our moral values and how our teenage youth are reportedly indulging freely in premarital sex, we missed her kind.
Yes, there was a time when kissing was banned in the movies. But yesterday, kissing couples adorned the front pages of our dailies.
There was a time when a man and a woman lying beside each other on the same bed, was also a taboo in the movies. Today, sex is suggested clearly in the movies. And my grandsons understand what the couple was doing even at their early age. Indeed, the time has come when parents should never let their guards down about what their teen children do after school.
In the midst of this prevailing moral condition, love can be said as being beleaguered and besieged with so much anti-love denizens. It is a wonder if there is still enduring love under the present circumstance. Valentine’s Day should be made an occasion, instead, for us to salute enduring love.
(February 15, 2005 issue)
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