BUSINESS top gun Levy P. Laus will miss someone special when he breaks bread with fellow mediamen – his own words – as he always does during this time of the year.
It's the old fogey, Ram Mercado, who wrote "30" last week. It happened so fast LPL didn't even had the chance to say goodbye to a journalist whom he highly respected.
Before he breathed his last, Ram wrote his last column in this paper, a commitment he dutifully fulfilled in the last 18 years of his life. He also wrote his own obituary.
Ram seemed careful enough not to bother anyone, except his loving daughter, about his last physical presence on earth. His death was no big deal to him. That is so eloquently expressed in his self-obituary.
All that those who fondly remembered him could do was say a little prayer.
For me, this simply means that I will no longer fetch someone somewhere between the two cities of Angeles and San Fernando, to make it to the annual fellowship of kindred souls.
Ram wasn't just a keen journalist; he was a gifted writer. Sometimes, he sallied forth in a different genre --- literary journalism, which only the brave do so well. He was supposed to come out with another book for which he earlier asked me to write an introduction. I declined politely for reason only he and I knew. Part of it is, somebody could do a better job.
I always read his pieces with gusto, always anticipating each one like anticipating a good meal, not just to satisfy oneself but have a new experience, a new insight and mayhaps, a validation of sort.
Max Sangil's little sketch that described him as reclusive somehow resonated. Using a familiar saying in the vernacular, he was not near nor far, just around the corner when you needed him.
He was a man of ideas, a man of his world, a good family man, a good friend. I don't know if he had enemies. I never heard someone in any group speak the smallest ill or with perceptible uneasiness about him.
In his last days, the better angels of his nature turned to the Bible and reflected on how flimsy and fleeting is man's existence. Like grass, it's glory is here today and gone tomorrow.
Ram's life was co-terminus, perhaps, with his unspoken vision of a better Pampanga in so many ways. He was, I thought, the quintessential probinsyano. Like LPL, he embraced the identity with a lot of pride and gumption. That's what made him special to LPL, I guess.
He's grass, but he's a yerba buena.