I haven’t seen Kanor for a long time. No, not even now that he’s dead. I’m too weak and sad to see him lying in his coffin.
I first got to know Kanor as one of the good players of his basketball team, The Juggernauts. He was quite chubby then, but he moved fast and swift. He was a natural team player, without realizing then perhaps that winning a game depends so much on how it is played; on how each team member works together to win.
He did not know me then because as a teener of his age at that time, I was just at the sidelines, watching. But our paths would cross years later when both of us would be involved in a national campaign against the Marcos dictatorship. He was in Manila; I was in Baguio. We met in Villasis when at the height of the campaign, we organized the Villasis Youth Circle, together with other progressive young Villasinians.
In the years that followed our friendship grew stronger, bound by a common cause and ideology for the common good; for the people’s liberation from poverty and political repression.
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At the height of the stand off at the Marines headquarters in Fort Bonifacio last week, a good crowd gathered at the Leisure Coast Resort in Bonuan Binloc in Dagupan City not to support embattled Marine Col. Ariel Querubin but to watch a fashion show featuring Pangasinan’s important people, who are models in their own fields.
The fashion show, “06 Fashion Revolution,” was actually a fund-raising activity of the Pangasinan-Washington Sister State Association (Pawassa), a group organized in 1996 as a counterpart organization of the Seattle-based Washington-Pangasinan Sister State Association (Wapssa), for the benefit of its 32 Pangasinan State University scholars.
Pawassa is headed by Celia Lambino, wife of Vice Gov. Oscar Lambino, while the Wapssa president is Alma Quintans-Kern, a successful buisness person in Washington State . It was Ms. Kern who initiated the scholarship program about five years ago and so far, there have been several “poor but deserving” students who have finished their courses.
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