A YEAR of widows, 2019, as I’ve noted. Now I should add that two female colleagues didn’t make it to the feast of the Three Kings yesterday.
Sylvia Mayuga wrote “30” on the last day of 2019. Ninez Cacho Olivares’ last column in the Daily Tribune was dated Jan. 3, 2020, the same day she passed on. Few except her daughter Bambina and siblings know that there’s another column waiting to be published, postmortem.
Sylvia, 77, and Ninez, 78, were my contemporaries. Sylvia wrote for newspapers and magazines, she was an advocate for all kinds of causes, for which she was labeled an activist (though I imagined her as a romanticist in her quest for Utopia). Ninez was the “killer” of our Philets volleyball team in UST, but despite the size of her killing fist, our performance in the university intramurals was untainted by victory. When she wrote a column in this newspaper I was with the now defunct Times Journal; same with Sylvia, for when she was with the Manila Chronicle of the Lopezes I was with the Manila Times of the Roceses.
Sylvia spent a significant number of years in the company of cartoonist Nonoy Marcelo in New York, why we lost touch. Ninez was a working student (we envied her her job in the university’s radio station), but she dropped out in third year to work fulltime in the real world, PopCom and Coca-Cola. Before we knew it, she had produced a big family with Ed Olivares and was named chairman of IBC Channel 13.
The last times Ninez and I were together, her favorite President Erap was mayor of Manila and we held regularly irregular lunches in Pitoy Moreno’s house in Malate to swap gossip with another editor and former mayor Fred Lim. At the time, I had no clue that she could cook, only that she liked the food at Casa Armas (from the few times we lunched there with yet another ex-mayor, Lito Atienza) so much that she would drop hints for Pitoy’s cook to prepare callos for the next meeting. Now her daughter-in-law Tweety tells me Ninez cooked a big dinner for the family the night before she fell ill. Ninez, you behave now, don’t offer to cook upstairs.
