The last workshop of E. Superal Yee

How were we to know it was to be the last writers workshop of the poet and pianist, attorney Ernesto Superal Yee, the summer of 2009, when most mornings in the city of gentle people seemed as gentle as before, the sea a shining mirror from the boulevard at daybreak, from where we would take the brief walk to the sessions at Katipunan Hall on Silliman campus, underneath the acacias with their branches of a hundred years?

Though we were never close, our friendship renewed off and on through the workshop, he was an undeniable presence every summer, especially in the heat of discussions of a manuscript, or else during a special recital he would hold at the End House, the former abode of his mentor the late Albert Faurot, with its piano and formidable library now a national treasure.

Must have met him through the old workshop faces, maybe Butch Macansantos or Cesar Ruiz, even Bobby Villasis, perhaps at a drinking session in the early 1980s in the now-shuttered Oriental Panciteria, where the beer went well with the pancit and the conversation, as the eyes of nameless ancestors stared down at us from the antique cabinets all lighted up with incense sticks.

Not that he was a regular renaissance man, but it was such that Ernie Yee was able to wear different hats with equal ease, and which made proud his adoptive mom, Edith Tiempo, who during our visit to her Montemar residence had pointed out that here Ernie was poet, pianist, lawyer and businessman, indeed four different personas in one, almost as if she were discussing the four ways to enhance content in a poem.

Who knows what was his first love, literature or music, being equally adept at both? Or was it the law, having sometimes being referred to teasingly as “chief justice” by fellow panelists?

Among panelists of the second week of the 48th national summer writers workshop he was closest to Susan Lara, both of them being adopted kids of Ma’am Edith. They were with her when she celebrated her 90th birthday in April, along with the rest of the ribald writing gang, about half of them flying in from Manila.

Ernie himself is from Tanjay City, about an hour north from Dumaguete City. Indeed, when we set out late for La Libertad during a workshop excursion, Ernie waited for us at the curve of the road in Tanjay, and the unplanned delay had caused him to have a second breakfast.

Then at La Libertad he bought each member of the panel —Lara, Chari Lucero, Myrna Pena Reyes-Sweet and myself, although he said mine was for the better half —a yellow fan, part of the local handicrafts. He also threw in a coin purse for the missus.

After the session, a swim and a beer with some smokes, I asked Ernie if he wanted a beer himself, which he politely turned down saying that like Butch Macan, who had introduced him to the Tiempos, he found it hard to stop once he got going on those beers. He asked me if I wanted another but I declined because I didn’t want my bladder to suffer on the long ride back to Dumaguete. It seemed we were already light years away from the binges in Oriental Panciteria.

He had planned on bringing the fellows to the Sidlakan for souvenirs near the municipio, the joint venture of the Tourism department and the city government managed by Villasis, if we got back to the city early enough.

But because of the numerous road constructions going and the dust that made us feel like we were on the Mexican prairie, it was nightfall already and we weren’t halfway back. The attorney opted to get off at his beloved Tanjay, thus sparing himself another hour or so ordeal on the road.

As panelist, Ernie most reminded me of the late Doc Ed, complete with the mannerism of nibbling the end of his reading glasses, such that I could almost hear him address me, “What is it, Juaneo...?”

How then was the budding young poet Anna Lee of Antulang, whose folks’ resort in Siaton had hosted the fellows for their first Saturday night full moon on the island, to know it was the last she was to see of the critic Yee bawling out a fellow for the use of indigenous terms in a poem without benefit of italics or translation, such that he felt “insulted enough,” or the poet pianist rhapsodizing over a story not because it was gay literature, but because it was brave literature?

Before one session, while perusing a copy of Dark Blue Southern Seas which editor Jordan Carnice had distributed around, Yee asked me for a spot critique of a poem of his included in the anthology said to be the replacement for the defunct Sands & Coral literary journal of Silliman.

The poem was entitled “Old Church” and has the persona genuflecting inside a church, which on the other hand could be any place of worship from Baclayon to Bacong, the mossy stones and belfry having stories of their own. Towards the end of the poem the speaker encounters his old folks as if they had never changed, a freeze frame as it were, and the poet is a boy again learning the alphabet of faith.

Of course I did not tell him this, only that the reader could relate to the poem by associating it with any old church of childhood. Years ago he had sent us a book of poems of his, About My Garden, that has the poet botanist venturing in the world of the metaphysicals and structuralists.

The cover has a man playing a piano in the middle of a garden, his back to the reader and audience. How were we, his fellow panelists, to know that a week after we sat with him discussing literature before young writers, he would pass on thus making us feel like unwitting angels of death?

The text messages came fast and furious on a hot Saturday afternoon, 23 May, that Ernie Yee was found dead in his room that morning, possibly of a heart attack. Thirteen years ago when Doc Tiempo died it was Ernie who shined his shoes. When they informed Ma’am Tiempo of the sad news, all she could say was, “Si Ernie pa gud.” The first thing that entered my mind was who would shine Ernie’s now, and the reality of his death at age 55 won’t really hit until next summer when we visit Dumaguete again and find our adopted city has one less poet.