MEDIUM RARE

Two of the nicest people I’ve known have left us, they say for a better place. With them gone, how easy would it be to find two nicer persons to take their place?

Portia Leuterio was the little pink lady who lived in a little pink house that I called her teacup cottage. She lived alone on the second floor of a house without a ground floor, but her niece was just two steps away from the stairs leading to Portia’s. All her life Portia lived to make pretty things and tie them up with pretty silk ribbons, but it was her vocation to teach her students, whether debutantes or grandmothers-to-be, how to put a professional touch to making or choosing a gift, up to the final step of wrapping it up with a personalized bow.

Everything in her teacup house, beginning with herself dressed in pink and her hair tied in a pink bow, was attired in her one and only favorite color. The tiles and toilet paper in her bathroom. The kitchen with its pink ref and oven, the dining room with its tablecloth and serviettes, the plates and bowls and drinking glasses. Did she ever try concocting pink ice cubes? She said, “Too much trouble, ice melts.”

This Christmas, I will recall Portia’s pink Christmas tree, the one that ruled her kitchen starting Dec. 1 every year with its fairy lights and whimsical ornaments.

If Portia’s was a very private world, Rogelio Salazar was well-known in the corporate world. He was with a company whose plantations produced ramie (Philippine linen), then moved to Manila Standard, which he would head as president until he retired in 2016.

I remember Roger with fondness because, on my first day there as editor in chief, someone complained to him that I had decreed “no democracy here, if you want democracy go elsewhere.” He told the complainant he saw nothing wrong with my opening salvo. A few years later, when he saw me arguing with the publisher and another editor over the use of a word – one word – to be used in the banner headline for the next day’s paper, he quickly, gently solved the problem by siding with me.

Roger, is there democracy in heaven?