When I was in college I majored in Information Design, the closest course to design you could get in Ateneo. There we learned the basic crumbs of branding, print and publication, website design, and art history, to name a few of the many things I’ve since forgotten. Our curriculum also included four classes that we could take from other majors, specifically two from Fine Arts courses and two from any course of your choosing. I then discovered that I could achieve a minor in Creative Writing if I used all four slots for CW classes.
Now, I loved writing fiction just as much as I liked making art. I think I liked it even more than making art, but graphic design was the more strategic career choice. So this was my chance to slot my passion for writing into my strategy.
I consulted with our chair, Sir Conrad, and he approved me for taking a CW minor.
I actually had a lot of classes under Sir Conrad, who was also a Creative Writing professor. He was the youngest chair in the Fine Arts Department’s history, and despite his youth he was ornery, to-the-point, and aloof. He was handsome in a brooding, classic Filipino way. For reasons unknown to the general populace, he walked with a limp and a cane. It just added to his mysterious, intimidating air, making him popular figure amongst a large group of coeds.
As a professor he was known to have some favoritism, but I didn’t see it. He would have us send him our homework and then we would give feedback on another classmates’ work, so at the end of the day we would have feedback from both him and our classmates. Then we would discuss each other’s stories during class time. My most memorable shining moment was when we were discussing a story I wrote about a man going mad after enduring the Marshmallow Test for an excruciatingly long period of time.
Read: The Marshmallow
“I don’t even know where to begin talking about this one,” he said, “Because it’s far beyond the scope of what we’re discussing now. I’m supposed to be teaching the basics of constructing a story.” Then he asked, “What kinds of stories do you read?”
“Lord of the Rings, Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes…”
He picked his laptop up and shook it upside down. “Where is the Lord of the Rings here??”
It was my proudest moment. Mainly because it was one of the only proud moments. I remained largely unspectacular for the rest of the course.
I remember towards the end of my senior year, I went in for consultation and asked if he had any feedback for one of my stories. In the past years, he would always receive our stories and then send them back to us for some unknown reason, and I always assumed it was so he knew which ones he had reviewed already. And then he would give feedback in class. But for this particular one, we weren’t going to meet in class for feedback so I went to ask for mine.
“Didn’t I send it to you already?” he asked.
“You sent me back my story,” I said.
“Can I see?”
I showed him the email.
“Did you download it?” he asked.
I downloaded it. And for the first time I saw that he had actually put comments on the document, only visible when you opened it on Microsoft Word. My mind was completely and utterly blown and I stared at it for quite a while.
“Wait, sir,” I stuttered, “You mean to say every time you sent us back our stories, you had comments written on the margins?”
“Yeah, of cour–.” He stopped abruptly and looked at me in horror. “You mean to say you haven’t seen a word of my feedback until NOW?” I could see him thinking back to how long I had been taking classes with him – almost three years. “Until NOW?”
I felt my face turn red with embarrassment as I apologized profusely as he questioned his life choices as a professor. He mournfully relayed this to my thesis professor as she was passing through, and she gave me a look of sad resignation.
That aside, we had an okay relationship, although he is the type of person I would keep at arm’s length.
Many stories later, we finally came to the end of our years at Ateneo and we were graduating students. They held graduation ceremonies for minors about a week before the big Commencement. On the day of the graduation for CW minors, Sir Conrad sent a message to our email thread saying that he had wine and cheese in one of the classrooms for us to come and hang out before the ceremony.
I wasn’t going to go, but I bumped into a couple of classmates who were on their way there. One of them was Ranch, a psychology major, and Tyler, a theater major. Ranch had coerced Tyler into accompanying him to the wine & cheese invite and he begged me to go until I agreed.
“Good, if it was just the two of us it would be weird, but with three of us it’ll be fine!” he crowed triumphantly.
We filed into the classroom where Sir Conrad was sitting at the table with another professor, a Dutchman called Sir Vanderberg. I had never taken him, but we knew of him. I specifically knew him because he was friends with my history professor.
As excited as he was to be there, the moment we sat down Ranch became a human popsicle, frozen to his seat with a stupid smile plastered on his face. Tyler and I, natural introverts especially in unfamiliar company, exchanged looks and then with inward sighs, took it upon ourselves to make conversation.
“I heard you liked to bike,” I told Sir Vanderberg.
He looked at me bemusedly. “I do. How did you know?”
“Sir Heron is my history professor! He likes to talk about biking with you.”
“I didn’t know he talked about me in his class,” Vanderberg laughed.
“Yeah, he talks about his girlfriend a lot too.”
“Ahh,” he said slowly, his eyes glinting with humor. Then he, a gay man, turned to Conrad and mused, “I never talk about my girlfriend in class.”
Then Sir Conrad said something redacted and they cracked up as the three of us shyly looked at the table, the ceiling, anywhere but at each other.
We made some more small talk until we came to the topic of graduating and turning onto the next chapter. Sir Vanderberg began talking about his first job working as a delivery boy at a baker back in Amsterdam.
“Was it the kind of bakery where you can customize your bread?” Tyler asked.
“Yes, you could ask for a certain kind of flour or something and they would bake it on the spot.”
Ranch finally spoke. Bear in mind that for the half an hour we had been there he hadn’t yet spoken a word except to numbly nod or smile awkwardly. This was finally his moment, his time to get a word in.
“Did you ever-,” Ranch started, and then cleared his throat as Sirs Conrad and Vanderberg looked at him. “Did you ever get a request… for bread-free bread?”
A pin-drop silence fell across the table.
Slowly, Vanderberg exchanged looks with Conrad, who shrugged.
As is usual in times like these, a wave of mirth hit me and I stared in concentration at the paper cup of wine in front of me as my lips trembled and I tried not to laugh.
“Bread-free bread?” Vanderberg finally repeated.
I snapped and broke into laughter as Ranch tried to save himself.
“No, I mean! I mean! Like you know how some people ask for gluten-free bread? And I was thinking, maybe there was a special something, like for people with allergies, like bread-free bread…”
Vanderberg stopped him from digging the hole any deeper. “No, there was no–” He paused for a small chuckle. “–bread-free bread.”
I barely remember the rest of the time we spent there, I was too busy trying not to burst into laughter. I don’t know what it is about being nervous and laughter and why they seem to come hand-in-hand.
We thanked them for the wine and cheese, and then headed to the auditorium. A few words of impartation, and then it was finally over. With a strange sense of completion and accomplishment, I walked across the stage and accepted my minor’s diploma. It was held on a work day so none of my family could make it, and the only one there for me was Angelo, my person. I sent him a picture of my diploma, saying, “And they spelled my name right too!” in jest to all the times in my life my name had been spelled wrong.
He sent back: Debarah :(
I paused.
Did a double-take.
They spelled my name wrong.
DEBARAH.
End.