Our heartfelt wish to all of you:

A Christmas full of joy, peace and love and a new year filled with God's blessings.

Erwin is now with Johnson & Johnson as a Senior Demand Planner. He had been part of this company right before when Cadbury had started downsizing its staff. Gigette is still in Aisling Discoveries Child and Family Centre. She is a Behaviour Therapist to 10 students. Tobey, who is now 14 years old, is in grade 9 in Mary Ward Secondary School. He has great talent in writing and still loves to read a lot. Regina, now 11 years old, is in grade 6 at St. Maximillian Kolbe. Rebekah, who just turned 10 years old last October and is in grade 5, is studying in the same school as Regina. Regina plays the saxophone and Rebekah plays the flute in the school’s band. My mother, Chenita, is still very much active in ballroom dancing and cares for an elderly woman as her profession.

We thank God for being where we are now and we are grateful for where we were before. He had been touching our lives in different ways, especially now that the children are growing up fast. Our time with you all had prepared us to face the challenges of having pre-teen and teen-age children, an aging parent and also growing old ourselves. But these are challenges so great not to be accepted. We thank you all for remembering us in your thoughts and in your prayers.

‘Till we meet again!

Aragones-Barona family

(This is the speech that my son submitted to his teacher for their graduation. As Erwin had shared in the other blog, Tobey was given the chance to read this on their class dinner instead.)

Staff, students, and fellow graduates, for quite a long while, we’ve all been traveling on the same road, stumbling on a bump every once in a while, but these bumps are already something that we’re accustomed to. Despite this though, we gradually begin to realize that the road starts become narrower as we go along, every bump gets bigger, and eventually we come upon a fork in the road. Unfortunately, it is hardly ever guaranteed that every one of us is going in the same direction. I can’t really give accurate advice on what is supposed to be done on such an occasion, one that is always bound to happen to every single person from all walks of life, but I’d definitely like to share my opinion based on my own experience.

As of this writing, I find this a trifle bit strange, since in the first months in the two years I spent here in Max, I was in a rather—let’s say, a very awkward position, and in those days, I was certainly not expecting to see myself where I am now. But in those two years, I came to realize how Max has had a lasting effect on both my personal and my school life, and although in some cases my perception of the school was threatened almost to the point of affecting my overall judgment of society, I’d say it was a wise decision to restrain myself on such occasions, because to whine and pout would be a mistake, because no matter how numerous the bad times may be, every bad moment always leads to a good one, and although one can’t exist without the other, there are always the good ones to remember.

Although some details remain rather vague, I still remember my first days at Max as an emotionally hysterical experience.

During that time, my family and I had recently migrated to Canada, and the days spent attempting to settle in the new environment went by smoothly, and without any signs of trouble. By August, we had moved from our temporary home from Eglinton to Scarborough, and I was having so much fun settling in, that I had overlooked the fact that I was starting a new school the following month.

As usual with these types of events, you don’t really see the impending disaster until it’s flying towards you at point-blank range. I barely remember what happened the day before that school year started, but one thing I remember was that I was dead nervous. Even now, as I write about it, the feeling literally echoes, and every time I recall that day, the same haunting feeling occurs again, as if that same day was going to happen once more. For several years, I grew up on the good old bandwagon, and then the bandwagon didn’t turn out to be that good after all, and so I had to hop off and try to look for another bandwagon, one that led to a brighter future.

So the next day, I eventually found a better bandwagon, but I wasn’t all that confident about getting in. It was rather tight, and didn’t look like it had the capacity for new passengers. But then, I thought, it is a new bandwagon, and I’m sure there are lots of other people out there who have been through the same situation. For a while, it didn’t seem so, since I found my situation worse than other worst-case-scenarios that I’ve been through in the past. At a glance, I had nothing in common with anyone, and while it can be attributed to shyness, I didn’t say a word to anyone basically because of fear of alienating people or being alienated myself. No road is ever without any bumps. There were definitely a lot of them on that particular day, but thankfully I was able to pull through. Imagine all the things I could’ve missed if I just bailed out. As I’ve said before, bad moments always lead to good ones.

What made the road worth traveling though, were the people who I had the pleasure of traveling with. One thing I’ve learned in those two years, is that try as you might, you can’t travel a bumpy road all by your lonesome. In that same year, I was introduced to a wonderful cast of characters who I couldn’t have had a wonderful experience without. Our teacher, Mr. David Tunzi, has a knack for making school more fun than it’s supposed to be; our French teacher Mr. O’Hara is a man of great taste, a rather interesting history, and a wealth of valuable knowledge; Mrs. Pat Schultz, a very jubilant character; Ms. Di Pede, a very talented music teacher; Mrs. Lampers-Wallner is a teacher who’s very devoted to both her job and her students; Mr. Allen is a responsible principal and is equally responsible when addressing students, and of course, my fellow graduates in Class of 2007, who we have all had the pleasure of traveling over every conceivable bump in the road with.

From my point of view, there are three types of people. We have our minor characters (this being the newspaper boy, the mailman, or the old lady that you always pass by on the way to school), and we have the guest characters (people who you’ve only met for a while but have impacted you in some way or another…or people like your family doctor), and then we have our main characters (your family, your best friends, basically people who you know and have spent your life with). The beauty about every society and community is that although each member is different from the other, our thoughts, actions, and decisions affect each other either directly or through a series of changes, making us one body. In a way, we are all main characters. We’re all different characters, but we are all part of the same novel, and the progression of the plot depends on our actions.

In what may sometimes be a very material and capitalistic society, this is always overlooked, as most of the time our focus is always fixated on the smallest trifles disguised as matters of the utmost importance. This fixation, if not caused by various third parties, then sometimes by our own ignorance. Thankfully, it’s still present, although nowadays it’s almost an everyday event to see it misused. But it’s better to be more optimistic. Throughout the years, most of my fellow graduates and our classmates have been found to make good use of this ability. Some of you may think this may sound a bit odd, but we all have each other’s fates right in our hands. It is possible that the smallest action can produce big changes. This is possible even through things that may commonly go unnoticed: the various charities the school has annually, some of the volunteer work our older students participate in, and even through looking after our friends in kindergarten, even for a brief fraction of the day.

Sometimes things get old too fast and we gradually start sensing how futile everything can turn out to be, but every once in a while, we come across a larger bump in the road, just as we’re getting used to driving over all these bumps and are about to give up.

This has always been the fundamental driving force behind all of the good times that we had in those two short years. Some of us have come to terms with it during our time in Mansfield and Ottawa, which is why those two events are the best remembered ones. This driving force is what we refer to as “change”.

There always has to be a catch though. The other driving force behind all those times we spent together was a fear of loss. It can’t be denied nor avoided. In every moment of happiness, we all wish the happiness would last, although deep inside we know that it won’t. In our own ways we try to prevent any kind of loss from happening, but unfortunately it is very mandatory, who knows why. It’s a part of change. In layman’s terms, it has to happen…for something to happen. This is the same reason why every one of us has to encounter a fork in the road. Usually, before finally making up our minds on which direction to take, some sort of loss has to occur. But, depending on which direction we decide to take, that loss eventually leads to accomplishments, and other types of positive changes. In most cases, the void that the loss leaves on a person can’t ever be filled, but as we move on down the road, every reason for our accomplishments and losses in the past become increasingly evident. But of course, these changes become significant depending on which road you decide to take.

All this is part of why leaving a place like St. Maximilian Kolbe can be such a burden sometimes. The joy of youth comes from knowing that hardly anything you do has any weight on the outside world; you create your own world, you follow your own politics and beliefs, and basically nothing from the outside affect what’s on the inside. You’re in your own personal heaven. But as you move on further down the road, you grow out of this personal heaven, along with everybody else. And instead of every individual living in their own worlds, we all live in the same world, and the various, mostly material conditions surrounding us these days demand that we make what modern society considers “the right decisions”, or basically we try to turn in the right direction when facing a fork in the road.

Another way of saying it is that when we were younger we have always stayed in the passenger seat, but as we grow older, we move from seat to seat until we ourselves are at the wheel.

Some of us may be looking forward to high school, but there’s always something that has to hold you back somehow. The other part of it is that you’ll eventually have to go through something similar to what I did during my first year at Max. Entering new territory and hopping on a new bandwagon different from the one you’re used to can be as big as a burden as leaving beloved territory. Sometimes, you can choose not to be a passenger on the bandwagon at all, but either way, you’re never on your own. And of course, based on my own personal experiences, there are times when certain bumps in the road may become unbearable, but in the end, it’s all about learning to pull through.