I don’t recall how it all began but with 45 centavos in my pockets and only water for the kids, I found myself with a ticket for the ferry ride, milk for the kids and a bus ticket all the way to Leyte, for free.

Once parked curbside and preparing to drive the 32-odd kilometers from the office to where I live in Bulacan, someone knocked on the window and the sound made my head spin. While it was already quite late in the evening and I was certain I parked properly, I still thought it was those guys who go around Makati clamping down the wheels of recalcitrant motorists who insist on taking both the bangketa and the street for parking purposes. My goodness, the fines these guys make you pay cost an arm and a leg!

But it was only this woman with a feeding bottle and a piece of paper and this young man with a kid in his arm looking like they were lost and likely hungry, asking for a minute of my time. Long and short, I gave them my lunch money, which I earlier thought was saved that day because someone sent us a lot of food that everyone at the office partook off with gusto. When I told the missus about it later that night, she hit the roof. Between the two of us, she’s always been particular about spending one’s money. Especially when one gives it away. That, especially.

For the nth time, she reminded me about the tax on the stupid. Arraayy! I knew it was coming. Maybe I had another lotto ticket on my person? Did I buy a whole booklet of the Sweepstakes again? She often asks me for my wallet for proof that I did not recklessly spend on something as silly as a lotto or Sweepstakes ticket. And I showed it to her. She could tell I wasn’t and had not been a spendthrift, but there was a knot at that point between her eyebrows just the same.

I have been a recipient of the generosity of others. There have been many times in the past, some of them more recent, when I received far more than I expected or felt was appropriate. In each of those moments of generosity and compassion, I have nothing but gratefulness for those who are one with you even when you do not ask them for anything.

As a father of two kids at the time, I once needed to travel from Bicol to Leyte but had insufficient resources to finance the journey requiring crossing the Tablas Strait to Sorsogon on a small watercraft, another on a large passenger ferry and finally an overland journey by bus for an entire day. The small watercraft journey exhausted my severely frayed pockets and what was left was barely enough to pay for the jeepney ride to the ferry station. While I would eventually manage that, I was stuck with nothing at the ferry station and had to fend off a number of porter boys who wanted to carry what little baggage I have for a fee. Right off I told the boys I didn’t have the resources to pay for the service they were offering and we fell into conversation about traveling and money. I don’t recall how it all began but with 45 centavos in my pockets and only water for the kids, I found myself with a ticket for the ferry ride, milk for the kids and a bus ticket all the way to Leyte, for free, courtesy of a platoon of porter boys no more than 12 or 13 whom most people fear of snatching their valuables when one is not looking. These are boys used to hustling people for money and anything they could wangle from sleep-deprived but often rude road travelers wanting only to get from point A to point B at the fastest possible time also for free, if at all possible. I always wanted to go back to that part of the past when boys less fortunate than I was would hand me and my kids’ free passage on a journey that started bad from the get-go but ended quite well in the end. In my mind I could see them waving from the roll-on, roll-off pier, wishing me safe passage to where I was going, knowing that I wasn’t the first penniless traveling father of hungry kids they helped with the fruits of their youthful endeavor but one of many. Truly, like Melanie says, one can’t judge on the basis of a particular look of a set of books!

And so, I often mindlessly fish a few pesos from a well-worn wallet and hand some of its contents over to a complete stranger. The Department of Social Welfare and Development would likely and happily put me in jail but I must confess that I do heed its teaching about this fish for one day 99 percent of the time. As for the other one percent, I bought one lotto ticket once, maybe twice in a month, as a charitable act so that those who manage the PCSO can exploit my stupidity and buy local government units their fire trucks and ambulances and free dialysis of ailing Filipinos from all over. I haven’t hit the jackpot yet and do not really expect to. But once in a while the PCSO does a ferry station of its own and my goodness, I have this wallet wide enough to keep a few thousand pesos there. Pang-gas din, ’ika nga.