The ‘teacher’ returns

ILIGAN City ― They say that “experience is a good teacher.” Of which many agree. Yet my good friend Fely says “True, but it is a slow teacher.”

I agree too. And that experience doesn’t necessarily be your own. Take that experience then of my boss when I was working in a realty firm years ago in Cebu City. Adolfo, one of my bosses then there of that company who had lived in Tudela, Mis. Occ. was traveling towards another town then in that province in a motor vehicle with his wife Agnes, back riding. She had with her a pack of clothes which she was holding on. By and by, when they were traveling along a highway, the pack of clothes slipped from her grasp. A reflex action made her hand try to catch the pack before it fell to the ground.

The result? The bundle fell to the ground along with her. And into her untimely death.

When Adolfo told us employees about such a sad happening, it impacted me and yeah, even the other employees too.

Such a sad episode involving some riding in a motor vehicle made me avoid riding on it. But sometimes you can’t just can’t avoid it, forced by circumstances. With the report of a grade 2 pupil riding in a motor vehicle more than a week ago, which also sent a grader into her untimely demise, I again remembered that story of that wife riding in a motor vehicle with hubby.

Did I say sometimes, you can’t help doing it because of the circumstances? Yeah. And so years later, I was working now in a government office in Cagayan de Oro City, where my family had relocated. There were lots of fieldwork that I had to do. So, one time, me and a colleague went to Malimono, a 5th-class municipality of Surigao del Norte. Lina and I rode on a public utility jeep to go there, When we had finished our fieldwork, Lina and I were ready to go back to Surigao City.

To our dismay though, there were no public utility jeepneys from M to the city. But the folks there at Malimono said we could use some motor vehicles for hire.

What? Some chord in me had struck, remembering that fatal experience of the wife of one of my bosses in a company in Cebu City then. So, well, did I say, forced by circumstances?

Lina and I had to throw some beautiful stones which we had gathered from some seashore. Because, aside from remembering that experience of a boss in Cebu some years back, the driver of the motor vehicle was not too happy seeing them. Maybe, they would just add to the volume that he had to carry, along with his backrider?

And so, I rode in that vehicle, clinging to the driver’s body as if my life depended on it.

It was more than an hour’s ride from Malimono to the city and fortunately, it went on without a hitch and silently, I thanked God for it.

But you know what? When we reached Surigao City, the driver was telling everybody of course when I wasn’t within hearing distance, that with the way I held on to him, he got “hot all over.” I could imagine the listeners laughing upon hearing that remark.

And then in a meeting of us officers in a press club late last year, I told them of that “experience” and that “remark” of the driver.

But Neri, another officer had hers to tell of an experience regarding her riding in that vehicle.

With the way she had held on to the driver of that two-wheeled vehicle, the t-shirt of the driver got torn all over! Ha, ha, ha, we all laughed. It was good to tell those experiences laughing. Yet during those riding experiences, it was no laughing matter.

As I now remember the “hotness” that the driver said he felt because of my holding on to him, for dear life, that’s why this mode of riding is called “habalhabal”?

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