By reputation, Edna Ledesma is characterized as a person beyond the least reproach – strict, no-nonsense, straight and thoroughly efficient. But those who know her well will say that behind the veneer, one will find a gentle, sensitive, sympathetic soul. The trick in solving this seeming contradiction is to know the winding and less traveled road that Edna chose.
Her first love was the academe – she successively moved up from mentoring high-schoolers in Iloilo and Antique, to college students in Los Banos and finally, to graduate students in UP Diliman. This was perhaps her way of sharing her hard-earned knowledge and God-given talents – in the process, giving back to the people what she experienced and enjoyed as an NSDB scholar in high school and college.
Her straitlaced academic background however, belies a side of Edna that’s likely to raise an eyebrow – she has an exceptional and quite uncharacteristic talent for card games. You heard me right – an unworldly aptitude for card games – something that her unwary and unfortunate opponents would, in utter dismay, find out too late. The grace and dexterity, as she handles her set of cards, sliding her hand over it and transforming the deck into an artful fan, would rival the skills of a Las Vegas or a Macau card dealer. What’s more, she would invariably win the game. Her skill was most probably acquired during her Math Club days in UP. She is a certifiable hustler at rummy and now she has somewhat raised the difficulty level, with the computer as her worthy opponent, playing patience, solitaire, sudoku and mahjong.
When not busy with her consulting job at Actuarial Advisers, she sometimes plays school bus driver to her 2 lovely grandkids Loreine and Maki, fetching them from school. If the girls are persuasive enough, and this would happen quite often, they would go straight to Jollibee before heading home. Another favorite grandma activity are the sleepovers – she and the girls would snuggle together in her bed and she would sometimes be the willing victim, spending the night on the floor!
Every other Tuesday, she meets with the Tuesday Club of Manila Bankers Life. After breakfast at McDonald’s, they spend the rest of the day living it up, taking full and unabashed advantage of their Senior Citizen’s ID! Sometimes, she hangs out with her UP Prep ’62 buddies, Del Lazaro and Dero Pedero, celebrating birthdays, meeting balikbayan classmates and reminiscing on the good but not-really-that-old days. She also meets up with her elementary and college friends.
Albert Einstein once said that one should not try to be a man of success but a man of value. He was probably thinking of an “Edna formula” when he said that. And the formula is: E, meaning Edna is equal to M, meaning “many-splendored-things” times C, meaning character, squared.
Edna Ledesma is indeed a woman of timeless value: a beloved teacher, an accomplished actuary, a loyal classmate, a reincarnated card hustler, a beloved friend, mother and grandmother, very much in touch with her past, very happy and fulfilled in the present and eagerly looking forward to mirth and mischief in the future!
(During her 30 years as fellow of the ASP, Edna has been an active member of various committees; namely, the Examination Committee, Employee Benefits Committee, and the Regulation & Taxation Committee. She was a member of the Board of Governors for many years. She served as a member of the PSRC for five years from 1996 to 2000. She also held the positions of Treasurer, Secretary, and Vice President, before becoming President of the ASP in 1994.
She is now semi-retired, working as part time consultant of Actuarial Advisers, Inc.)
