class reunion in a flash

I received a text message last September 1 that made me go, “wow!” It said that a class reunion was set at 2:00 PM that day in Maa, Davao City at the mansion of the recently retired classmate.

Suddenly it's 1992 in Davao City. It was a scorching afternoon and I was in a classroom at the 2nd floor of the University of Southeastern Philippines for an orientation of the first batch of the Local Scholarship Program (LSP) of the Civil Service Commission. LSP, which continues up to this day,is a graduate program limited to government employees who’d go on leave for a full year with pay. It aims to professionalize the government sector.

As iskolar ng serbisyo sibil, we were groomed to be the new breed of future executives, the bureaucracy’s crème de la crème kuno.

The qualifying test must be tough because I was the only passer among the 80++ examinees in my province. [Allow me this one, ahem, important digression: Region-wide I ranked 5th in the exam and 1st in the interview, a fact that doubled the frustrations of my big bosses when it took me nine-oh-so-long-years to finish my thesis.] Region XI, to which my province then belonged, had 32 scholars out of over 400 takers, ranking it second to NCR in terms of passers.

Ours was a motley group, cutting across generational, professional, and facial spectra.

I wanted to take up Master in Business Administration at Ateneo de Davao University, but CSC, for practical reasons, made us all enroll in Master in Public Administration at USEP.

Thirteen years. Then from out of the blue, a text message. “Wow!” indeed.

And so meet up they did. Without me! Oh well, it wasn’t my fault that my province happens to be 2,500 kilometers away from Davao and that the text invite came 3 hours, 49 minutes and 11 seconds before the appointed time. Even if Harry Potter lent me both his Nimbus 2000 and Firebolt, I still wouldn’t have made it.

As it turned out, only six showed up. But the good thing is: it sparked off a special kind of connectivity. And best of all, another reunion is set in December, and this time, it’s gonna be grand!

Meanwhile somebody has set up a yahoogroup, and emails keep coming in. Text messages too. I’m not sure though if this can go on forever, the yahoogroup. What I’m sure of is that I have to get rid of a few love handles before the big day.

Either that or I’ll do a no-show.