AGAIN bowing to the tyranny of deadline, I wrote this a day before yesterday’s barangay elections nationwide and also a day before yesterday’s Game 1 of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals between Cleveland and Boston in the TD Garden in Boston.
I’ve said this before and I beg for your forgiveness in saying it again: I vote in my beloved hometown of Mangtatarem in Pangasinan since I started to exercise my right of suffrage in 1986.
Since voting precincts promptly open at 7 a.m. on Monday (May 14), I had set to leave Quezon City yesterday at quarter to 6 a.m. On a leisurely drive, my birthplace can be reached in about 3-1/2 hours by car from my home in Q.C.
Easily, it should have been only three hours as from Luneta Park to Mangatarem is exactly only 177 kms. As you know, tricycle-caused traffic in Tarlac perennially makes my trip to Mangatarem a bit longer.
But still, that’s already a big comfort. Back when I was in high school, up to most of my college life, travel time by bus took almost from seven to eight hours via McArthur Highway. With the completion of the North Diversion Road (the old name of NLEx) in the early Seventies (or was it in the late Sixties?), negotiating the Mangatarem-Manila route either by car or bus had been drastically cut by almost two hours. And when the NLEx got “stretched” by SCTEx all the way to Tarlac, another two hours almost had been further chopped off to make today’s trip almost already a breeze.
Thus, I could now go home to my roots for a quick visit to our ancestral house where my two brothers live with their respective families, eat pinakbet and broiled Bonuan bangus for lunch, and then drive home afterward to be in my “second” home in time for dinner.
Now, did I miss watching Monday’s Game One of the Cleveland-Boston playoffs?
I guess not. The schedule said it would be aired live at 3:30 yesterday. In all probability, I might have caught the game it in its entirety before proceeding to my hometown and fulfilled my sworn duty to cast my ballot.
My Game One prediction?
With Boston’s Kyrie Irving possibly absent, and me being a diehard LeBron James fan, I picked Cleveland.
If Boston won, I lost one lunch.