Three readers

While still writing a daily opinion column for Saipan Tribune last week, I ran into the PSS commissioner coming down the stairs of the PSS office near to Marianas High School. I said, “Hi, I had not seen you for a while.” She replied, “Oh, I see you everyday in the newspaper.”

That she knew I was writing daily, even if she did not read the articles, was already a marvel. I told her that I might be joining the ranks of teachers at PSS again, and I might quit writing the end of April, and she exclaimed: “No, keep writing even when you are teaching. Our teachers read your articles.” That turned marvel into wonder.

At last year’s Taste of the Marianas on the AMP grounds, a guy from Finasisu named Lino who did not mind missing the molars on both sides up-and-down his dental chops, was seated with me. After I introduced myself, he beamed and said that I looked older than the paper photo but that he was familiar with what I wrote since he followed it closely. I saw him again a year later with a group of folks; he extended a pointing arm: “My writer.”

Last weekend, I helped a colleague secure a round-trip ticket from SPN to D.C. and back. He comes from Maryland, retired from teaching in Rota and the community college. He lives in my neighborhood and he has a tendency to despair over losing control over his brain cells, often waking up in deep despair, even when he takes his depression pills. A highly regarded person within the teaching profession, a trained linguist out of the U in Oahu, he often just rests his head on the table, frustrated at the growing inability “to make simple decisions,” let alone, being conscious about crucial decisions he needed to make on a day-to-day basis.

He often informs me of alternative Pinyin spellings, remembering a few from my four-year stint teaching in northeast China, but he studied both the spoken and written hanzi (characters). Most recently in March, he pointed my misspelling of the name of former Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval as “Brain.” The governor probably is, but the spelling mistake was on the Word Processing Program I use, deciding to correct without asking permission. “Brain” after all would be more common than Brian!

Now at least, I know that my erudite neighbor glances at my stuff. But it was while securing a plane ticket from a travel office he patronizes that the young man on the other side of the counter revealed he followed my articles in the papers. I thought he was just feeding me a line since he was an agent who daily has to satisfy the whims of customers, so after I found out he had come from Sichuan on the foothills of the Himalayas, I named several cities around Chengdu including places he evidently had not been to.

He smiled, pulled out the day’s issue of the ST, flipped the pages to the Opinion Page, and said he was reading it on his break; asked me to hold it while he came out of his side of the counter to have our picture taken. He told me of items he read from previous articles I wrote, and I left the place thinking, I found me one ardent reader!

For a while now, my editor and I have this ongoing joke that we could at least count on three readers of my column. The editor reads it for the appropriateness of style and the relevance of content, so that makes two of us. My mother in Honolulu says she reads them because they must be “important since she could not understand them,” a line she often used to compare me to the other siblings, and as a cover for her not finishing high school education. That’s three, for sure.

Since coming back to Saipan from China a year ago, I discovered that the picture with my articles has gotten me known on island, or at least, salespersons know how to call me by name when I needed anything from the store. I am usually embarrassed when someone recognizes me by name since they could either be former short-term learners at the language class I taught for the Philippine Consulate, or former SVES students who have grown out of their short pants. A Filipina saleslady on island once blurted out how proud she was that a Pinoy wrote for the papers.

A colleague at BOE Board once told members when I attended their meeting for a cause that I wrote for the newspaper, and I pushed members of the Board to learn how to use their dictionaries. He was kind and a bit sarcastic but he made his point. Grammatical finesse is not our intent; engagement in dialogue is. I do “converse” with readers more than just at a passing glance.

I had been dubbed as someone who is addicted to writing. That may just be so. I do keep an eye not just on style but also on content. I tell my editor that if my subject is not relevant to the island audience, or understandable to individuals, he need not print it. Frequency is not the issue; relevance is.

OK, commissioner, I will continue writing, though come April, while teaching, not with the frequency of previous months. And three steady readers are good enough!