By BEHN FER. HORTALEZA, JR.

CHUMI, my first apo, is entering kinder school this June. Her mama was telling me she’d been talking to her husband, Gilbert, who’s abroad in Florida and Gilbert had told her to just pay their little girl’s tuition fee at a local kinder school in cash.

“Wait till he hears it’s gonna cost P26,000 for a schoolyear,” my daughter said on arriving home from the school where she inquired about the tuition and miscellaneous fee for Chumi’s schooling.

I was myself floored. Not having kept abreast oof kinder and grade school tuition rates since my two daughters, Sheila (Chumi’s mom) and Venus May, graduated from that level at Edna’s School here a decade-and-a-half ago (when the wife and I had to really scrimp to be able to fork out about P5 thou to P8-thou every schoolyear for each of our two little girl’s and only boy’s fees) the current amount was staggering. P26, 000 bucks for a little pupil’s kinder school fee!

And, drilling it in further to educate me, my daughter added that the other “two schools” were charging much higher tuition fees. I didn’t miss the sly grin on her face at seeing my knitted eyebrows. She must have been silently saying: “C’mon pops, this is 2007. git?”

I must have been in some time warp or something, really, to not be able to believe that. Now I know why everyone’s jumping into the education business these days. And yes, I said “business.”

* * * *
I was shocked to hear over the radio Friday morning that my seldom seen good friend Jesus “Jess” Caneja, a silent, amiable character introduced to me a long time ago by our former editor-publisher Dom P. Navarro, was slain in broad daylight by hired guns along the De Venecia highway in the Dagupan City limits.

Our brief association gave me the impression that Jess, while he did look dark and burly enough to cast a menacing figure, is not the type who’d go looking for trouble or some such mean ways. Beneath his dark exterior he was a man not given to boasting or loud laughters, always preferring to just break into a smile when he likes something that’s said or done.

Word was that he was being eyed by the incoming city administration to help it run the old Pantranco Terminal on M.H. del Pilar which has since become a common terminal for buses, vans and jeepneys plying routes outside Dagupan. Jess, who hails from Sta. Barbara, I think, had actually been already helping run the terminal under the outgoing Lim administration, agreeing to play second fiddle however to someone else named by city hall powers to take overall supervision of the apparently “lucrative” terminal operations.

It used to be, our sources said, that proceeds from the rentals of the various vehicle associations using the area for their terminal were being remitted personally by Jess, as apparent caretaker, to the owners of the giant Gotesco group which had bought the area from the Development Bank. In later years though, Jess preferred to be just a paid helper of the one appointed by some power-brokers to take overall supervision of the terminal area, yielding control of the proceeds to the latter.

With the change in city leadership in the recent elections, the terminal “handling” was practically up for grabs by the new centurions – and Jess was said to be an emerging favorite to again be the lead caretaker.

Someone – or some parties – apparently found that not to their liking. And Jess’ crumpled, bloodied body there by the road fronting a car repair shop on De Venecia highway in the blazing noontime sun last Thursday, with two gunshot wounds in the head and one in the body, was as effective a message as any that he was first in the process of elimination for the right to be the city’s “Terminal King.”