Precious Moments with a Great Friend...Eboy Jovida
Posted on Friday, 12 February 2016
Precious
Moments
with
a Great Friend…Eboy Jovida (†)
By Apolinario Villalobos
The night of February 11, I had a vivid
dream….Eboy was holding my book, “Beyond the Horizon”, opened to the page of
the poem with the same title. He told me that we could convert it into a
haunting song because of its message. As it was a poem, I told him that some
lines need to be to be redone to jive with the melody that he was humming.
While I was bringing out the laptop from my backpack, he was gone. As I was
used to having dreams, I disregarded it, until I opened my emails at 3AM,
February 12. What immediately caught my eyes was a message from Ate Mai with a
subject that spelled the real name of Eboy with a cross in parenthesis. Even
without reading what the message was all about, I had a strong premonition that
it was not just good….he’s gone.
Eboy was a great guy. Despite his being
bedridden, he always had a time spent in reading my blogs and he saw to it that
he could at least let me know that he was following me by typing, “great, Bot”.
Twice, he typed rumbled letters which I tried to decipher with difficulty. In
our PMs, he told me that he was alright. If he could not send comments, he
would indicate the “like”, and that was a good sign for me that everything was
indeed, alright.
Moments with him a little more than a year
before he and his family relocated to
the States were serious and hilarious. As I was yet able to indulge in rounds
of alcoholic drinks during the time, we would enjoy bottles of beer in their
home in a subdivision in Habay, Bacoor while singing American folk songs to our
hearts content. If he got tired of plucking the guitar, I would take over with
my strumming. Being musician by heart, he would provide the “second voice”. Our
favorite was, “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel. If we became melancholic, he
would bring out his flute for which I provided plucked notes in the guitar as a
background. Sometimes, I would bring my harmonica on which I would play “Wooden
Heart”, and he would distort the lyrics, while singing them, to make the song
funny.
One time, while enjoying our rounds of
beer, there was a heavy downpour. We looked at each other and almost
simultaneously said, “ligo tayo sa ulan”. He lent me one of his shorts and we
dashed outside to enjoy the rain. During
my visits, Aileen, his pretty wife, would be in the office and the kids would
be in school. But I was lucky one day, when Aileen was at home during which she
cooked my favorite “laswa”, a Visayan veggie dish. Those visits were what Eboy
recalled when he sent me a long message, several days before his operation.
I usually do not join exchanges of thumb
ups and messages via the PAL pools that Ate Mai organized, though I would
monitor them as I preferred to send personal/private messages to Eboy. The last
reply I got from him was a thumb up. From then on, he stopped sending me such
reply. I had a feeling something went awry when I read a message that he was
brought back to the ICU….
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