If Mayor Fred Lim were alive today, he would have been 92. It was his birthday yesterday, December 21.

It’s been two years since COVID-19 snatched him away from us and yet, it seems like only yesterday.

He is truly one of a kind. He is like the M&M’s— tough on the outside but soft on the inside.

When it came to criminals and the arrogant, he was the toughest I had seen. But when it came to the elderly, the physically-challenged and most specially the streetchildren, Lim’s heart automatically melted and not many knew this.

When his father died and his mother remarried, Lim was left to the care of an orphanage.

Lim would narrate that he and his fellow orphans never understood what a family was, except for what they see on television. For him, you cannot miss what you never had in the first place.

His beloved ‘lola’ more than made up for whatever he lacked in terms of parental love.

Before his lola took him from the orphanage, she would visit him every Sunday and buy him ice cream and balloon in Luneta.

Each time they parted, Lim said he held on tightly to his balloon and refused to leave the gate until his lola was out of sight. Those times, he said, were the loneliest in his childhood life. He would then count the days until the next Sunday, when his lola would pick him up again.

When his lola finally took him home with her, those were hard times. It was Japanese occupation so he had to help his lola, the best way he could, eke out a living. It was how he learned to make native cakes and delicacies.

Lim would boast that because of his ‘cuteness overload’ the native cakes that he and his lola labored on, they were always sold out.

Even if life was hard for both of them, Lim said he was happy with all the love that his lola had shown him. He said lola’s own children became jealous of him because of the special attention he received, being the youngest in their household.

Sadly, his lola passed on while he was in just in his early teens and it was her last words that served as Lim’s inspiration and guiding rule in life.

She made Lim promise that he would finish his education and earn a diploma. Lim said his lola was emphatic in telling him that he only has himself to rely on, once she is gone.

He thus became a shoe shine boy, warehouse man, aconductor and security guard, among others, before finally becoming a cop. He then took up law and since law books were expensive, he befriended the librarian who agreed to lend him the books he needed on one condition: he would return them before the library opened the following day so that during inventory, all books will be accounted for.

As early as 5 a.m., Lim said he would be at the foot of the library’s stairs with all the books he had borrowed the day before, sometimes even falling asleep while waiting for the library to open.

Lim passed the bar aftee 12 long years due to lack of enough money. He was a working student who had to take up his units in different schools, depending on where he was assigned as a policeman.

He nearly did not finish law when a superior picked on him and asked him to choose between his career as a cop and law school. The rest is history.

Lim has etched his mark as one of the greatest mayors Manila ever had. Mayor Isko Moreno mentions this in his speeches, even during his recent listening tours in the provinces.

Moreno continues to praise Lim for all the accomplishments that he did and which Moreno continued and improved further so that Manilans continue to enjoy them to this day.

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Jokjok (from Marilou Cordero of Merville, Paranaque)—PEDRO: Baril ka ba?/INDAY:Alam ko na yan! Dahil tinamaan ka sa ‘kin noh?/PEDRO: Hinde!/INDAY: Eh ano?/PEDRO: Ang lakas kasi ng putok mo!

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