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By Albertini C. Candari, California USA
The White Board is a permanent fixture in my parent's bedroom. Living in a third world country, I remember when I was a young lad having great amazement with this latest technology. I could draw, scribble, smudge a marker pen on the white board and still be able to use a regular chalk board eraser and erase them. Amazing! It was like magic to me.
We were not materially fortunate when I was in my childhood. In fact, the white board that my father owned was actually not a real white board. With my father's ingenuity and my uncle's skilled hands, they put it together using excess construction materials. These materials were one of my father's trophies from an auction held by a closed down company. It was basically a slick white vinyl surface glued on a piece of thin plywood. Quite ingenious actually.
My scribbling privilege on the white board was taken off when my dad hanged it on his bedroom wall. The white board was hanged too high that I could not reach it. The scribbles were replaced with father's writings, which later I realized, after being educated on a public school system, that it was my father's written goals. From that time on, I became dad's "quiet critic".
I thought most of his goals were quite impossible to achieve. Sometimes I would look at the board and wondered when my father was going to replace the static writing on the board. As a child, it seemed to me that the writing had been there for eternity and none of his goals were achieved. Perhaps, my criticism with my father's goals was formulated by my short foresight as a child. I also thought that an enmity was developed between me and my father's written goals because my scribbling privileges had been stripped since the writings had occupied the white spaces on the board.
Years went by and I saw these goals one by one marked with a red check mark. Even goals that I thought impossible such as temple sealing and my older brother on a mission had been marked and later replaced with new goals. One goal that I thought was unrealistic was having my brother, sister and I go to a university abroad. I thought the chances were so slim that if it happened we would be like ditch-diggers hitting a gold mine while digging ditches. We simply did not have the material resources to go to a university in the west. My parents could barely afford buying our school bags, notebooks and pencils.
Seventeen years had passed since my father first touched the tip of the marker on his white board and my brother and I finished our degrees in a western university. My sister did not go to a university abroad, but went to a law school at home. She has not finished law school, but made a valiant choice to be a full-time mother to her children, a more promising career.
I have not seen my dad's white board since I left to go to school, but I am sure that there are new goals written on his white board. Goals that seem impossible, unrealistic, impracticable and imaginary as of this moment, but with time and the right attitude will become a reality. My father has turned me, his "quiet critic", into a believer. He has my full faith that when he lands the tip of the marker pen on his white board his goals will be reached in due time.
In quiet moments, I would gaze into the clear white-blue sky and imagine that I am gazing at my Father in Heaven's white board. It stretches throughout the eternities and has His goals written for His children --- great and unimaginable ones. Goals that seem impossible, unrealistic, imaginary and impracticable at our mortal existence, in due time will make a believer in each and everyone of us… even his "quiet critics".
(Albertini C. Candari is the youngest son of Atty. Benjamin S. Candari, Jr. of Pandan, Antique, Philippines who is now residing in Bacolod City with his family.) |
