I’m always amused when I get introduced as a guest speaker: “Like many of you, I always read our guest speaker’s column ‘Pinoy Kasi,’” and mentioning one of the other daily newspapers instead of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
For the record, I did write Pinoy Kasi for more than 20 years and then requested our editor, Juliet Javellana, if I could change the column name to “Gray Matters,” explaining that I wanted to shift focus to matters affecting senior citizens, but without abandoning culture, medical anthropology, and the social sciences in general.
I will, however, make good on the promise to write more on senior citizen issues, especially as I feel the senior years’ needs more and more. After all, in the Philippines, we join the “Golden Years Club” at the age of 60 in private companies and 65 in government. I have continued working as a professor emeritus, an honorific from universities, for many years afterward.
