Ambition... And Lack of It

33 years of my life, most of them wasted. When I turned 16, I told my mother I wanted to become a priest.

A priest? Did you say priest? You? A priest? Did someone hit you on the head with a dos-por-dos? Know your place, boy, we don’t have money for that kind of ambition. Hear that Tatay your son says he wants to become a kora paroko.

Hhhmmm. He looked up a bit from reading an old newspaper and got back to it. Tatay doesn’t say much, and seemed to have little or no opinion about anything, except when drunk.

And they say I’m lacking ambition, which is true, if you really think about it. A few weeks before the graduation in high school. The priest in our parish took me to the city to take the entrance exam for pre-college seminary admission. When mother learned about it, she was besides herself, what would other people think and all that. We don’t have money and there are four of us siblings, my ate on her second year in college, my sister in high school, a two-year-old boy crying for milk in the crib, bless him, and  now me, not listening to reason, mother’s reasoning. Where do we get the money to pay for you?

Don’t bother about it mother. You’ve never missed going to church every Sundays and pray the rosary. If you really believe in God, don’t bother about it then. God will provide.

She looked at me as if she saw a stranger.