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Go, girl!
It is always a pleasure to hear or read someone’s thoughts when they resonate in yours, more so when they stylistically do it so well.
It is not because my youngest daughter is named Maria Andrea, and my eldest sister is Fe, and, of course, Lazaro is Lazarus in the biblical story of the one who was called to walk out of the tomb (a rich metaphor indeed), that I got mesmerized by the AG speech competition’s winning piece of Maria Fe Andrea M. Lazaro, for it is definitely worth the keepsake.
Reared in the Reformation tradition of Christendom after Luther, and arrogantly convinced that truth was last heard in biblical history with the Apocalyptic John, and was Dark Ages until the rotund Dominican nailed his thesis in Wittenberg, I nevertheless sometimes throw in a Latin or two in my column, knowing that my editor would appreciate Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. He, being the sole sure reader by default of my pieces now that mother is bedridden in Honolulu and can no longer access the online edition, I think a word or phrase from one of the three “A”s tickles my editor’s fancy.
But to reach back to more than a century BCE for the Phoenician dramatist Terence’s quote (yup, I Wiki’d this one) Humani nil a me ali-enum puto was nothing short of inspired. Which leads me to suspect that Maria Fe Andrea has been called to the principal’s office once-too-many times and has been duly subjected to the principal’s erudition.
She spoke of the truth, and did it so well!
We are babbling, with a patina of gloat covertly thrown in, ‘cause I just welcomed Maria Fe Andrea to the universal Homo Hominis Globalis Club of the world-wise street-smart Pinoy, whose diaspora from their former archipelago is one serendipitous gracious act of providence.
Maria Fe Andrea, I am glad you are still of the age when I do not have to apologize to tell you: Go, girl!
Jaime R. Vergara
Shenyang, China
