Foremost a father

He was town mayor pre social media age.

It was a time when a public servant’s influence was not gleaned from what was trumpeted but on how they modeled their life and how they dealt with constituents personally. He ascended as public school teacher to information officer of a government agency. He dabbled as radio commentator until he was hand picked as running mate for vice mayor, then ran a volunteers-operated campaign to serve as mayor of our then pristine town, Sorsogon.

For three years he was addressed by his position or with his nickname appended to it: “Mayor Jun.”  These days he is still addressed as such or “ex” by a handful of loyal followers. But for us, he is simply Dad or Daddy.

My siblings and I grew up in the presence and image of Dad reminiscent of what Khaled Hosseini wrote in one of my beloved novels, his first, “The Kite Runner.” Hosseini compellingly narrates how his father “saw the world in black and white. And he got to decide what was black and white. You can’t love a person who lives that way without fearing him too. Maybe even hating him a little.”

Yes, a semblance of fear would occasionally pervade our home when we were kids. Like when the boys modified a baseball game indoors using a teddy bear instead of a ball to hit. It was the bat not the toy that went flying, landing on the antique aparador, smashing its mirror into shards. The scene that followed was what children’s rights advocates would object against. The boys had a leather belt landing on their butts.

As witnesses, did my Ate and I hate Dad for that? Did our brothers? Perhaps a little, but maybe not for long because as far as I could remember, such summons were always followed by a lecture, a debriefing of sorts on why the punishment. When this happens, fear subsides and the physical pain is soothed with the concealed warmth behind Dad’s stern voice – that we are being disciplined because we are loved.

Love, for Dad, comes in many forms. Some of them we may have overlooked because oftentimes it’s his character as a disciplinarian, the strict father, that stands out.

In the movie “Freud’s Last Session,” a fictionalized encounter between Sigmund Freud and the Christian literary