While Korina was touring around the Ateneo campus with Monique last weekend, I wandered around the chapel area and stumbled on a wake. I didn't know that my old Philosophy professor, Dr. Ramon C. Reyes, had passed away at a ripe old age of 79. He was kind man, steeped well in genteel tradition, quite learned and so generous with praise and encouragement. I remember to this day his most valued lesson for me, taught not in class, but during one of our private conversations. The lesson was about confidence. Apparently, while he was a young graduate student in Louvain, Belgium, he had a girlfriend taller than he. As graduation drew near (and thus his return to the Philippines), he realized that if he would continue his relationship with the lady, he would have to introduce her to his relatives in the Philippines, and the simple difference in height was a problem that he could not handle. The lesson was no longer an abstract lesson; it was a lesson in life--had he then the confidence he found later in life, the height difference would not have been a problem at all. There he was, the Dean of the Philosophy Department, teaching his young and ignorant student about the realities of life by the most effective teaching method--by baring his soul. I will miss him; go with God, Doc, go with God.
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