He was baptized Jaime. Friends and classmates called him Jimmy. Later, when he converted to Islam, he changed his first name to Jamil.

But we still used his nickname when talking to him or about him.

The bad news is that Jamil/Jimmy Maidan Flores is no longer with us. News of his permanent departure was relayed some days ago by his Noreen to my nephew, with only one additional bit of information: No details.

As we found out from Jimmy himself during the first few days of university, he was an ex-seminarian. He was a faithful, practising Catholic, as far as we knew. “We” included Jake Macasaet, publisher and editor of Malaya, a business paper; Gus Villanueva, publisher and editor of another newspaper that eventually became Manila Standard; and police reporters Jose Burgos Jr. and Max Buan. (All these personalities are no longer around, having written “30” at different times some time ago. Except probably for Max, they were all students or graduates of UST, Philosophy and Letters.)

The last time Jimmy/Jamil Flores and I spoke – years ago — he asked me to join a small group of ex-classmates for a trip to Bali to celebrate his and Noreen’s wedding anniversary. But before you could spell Indonesia, I was dropped from the list of invitees to accommodate a late joiner (she was somebody’s wife). Jimmy was too embarrassed to offer an explanation, and I never demanded one.

In Jakarta, Jimmy’s professional life was spent between writing speeches for two presidents one after the other and conducting a regular column — he called them essays — in an English-language newspaper. Denmark would have been a dream destination for him, he confessed, but “work is work,” he said to me, and Jimmy was a workaholic, in his own way. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if his family has long relocated to Copenhagen or has plans to do so.

Jimmy was a poet, too, and teachers enjoyed asking him to interpret poems of the masters, the more difficult the better. He joined and won writing contests galore, including Palanca. But he was shy, especially with strangers. For the longest time, he had a crush on my seatmate, but he never let on. Until the day after he died, she never knew.