I had a chance last week to go back to where I received my journalism degree in 1989, the Arts and Letters Department of the University of Santo Tomas. It was a trip down memory lane that was 35 years in the making, as I never found a reason until now to visit my alma mater.

With a lean-and-mean DAILY TRIBUNE team, we reached an understanding with those manning the journalism program of UST, including coordinator Felipe Salvosa II, in line with our paper’s continuing efforts to train prospective media young guns from various schools.

So many buildings had sprouted on the campus that I could hardly connect the scene to what I recalled as a student. That aside, the parched brown grass at the UST field had me smiling as I remembered how I was collared by our ROTC officers many times for tomfoolery during basic military training.

I logged hundreds of pushups as penance during CMT 1 and 2, but that was nothing to a skinny 98-pounder who ran miles during physical education classes and darted away like a mountain goat from the view of approaching pretty classmates.

It was simply unacceptable, yes, to be seen jogging in those golden short shorts, skinny legs and all, lest those prim-and-proper AB girls, in their blue skirts, white blouses and lambda neckties have you for their breakfast of laughter. That sure did not change, the girls’ ArtLets uniform.

As a journalism student prepping to go to law school, I got relatively high marks in subjects that I thought would serve me well, like philosophy and political science. I simply coasted along in the others, with my Algebra professor passing me because I obliged her eagerness to discuss the hottest political issues of the day before our class started.

Then there was the James Bond-ish Manila Bulletin editor, Ramon “Kiko” Francisco, who would regale us with tales of how exciting a newshound’s life can be – of being a celebrity in your own right, hobnobbing with the powerful and the beautiful people, without being hounded yourself.

Kiko, with his flip-down shades, would talk of how the original chop-chop lady case, that of Lucila Lalu, remained one that an intrepid but still green reporter or new police investigator might want to reopen to give it closure and put behind bars her killer, while making a name for oneself.

Having landed a sportswriting job at Manila Times months before graduation, Kiko, my classmates would tell me, would just wave off our — my and Israel Carunungan’s of Star — absence. “Let them sleep,” he was supposed to have said one time.

As I write this, I realize sleep would always be a luxury for journos, especially since the stress of meeting deadlines (and now the cutthroat online me-first competition) could lead to drinking binges that eat up shut-eye moments.

I distinctly remember that as the UST Main Building awed me with its majesty and history — where my American great-grandfather was jailed with all the other World War 2 internees — I told myself as a freshman student that I may be shipping out the very next semester.

Still, journalism school proved to be not the dreaded meat grinder I imagined it would be, and immediately gone, too, was my initial trepidation that I may not be able to hack it with the other students of the Royal and Pontifical University.

Law school, because of economics, would elude me, but maybe that’s why I’m here churning out this piece. But even Journ school and this career may have been lost to me were it not for my mother. I told her I did not pass the UST entrance exam when I got home with the Voltes V puzzle, I had bought near the campus.

She did not believe me and, going to UST herself from Cainta, she told me I did pass. I did try to look at the list of entrance exam passers, but seeing the crowd in front of it was six layers deep, I turned my back and took the first passing Marikina Transit bus.

Kids, as I once was before, can sometimes be foolish, but then we would have our mothers always coming to our rescue.

Happy Mother’s Day to all who have nurtured and mothered us.