Chapter 1 - Remembering My Grandfather
My grandfather never celebrated
a birthday, for nobody knew when he was born---not even himself. All of those
who had knowledge about his birth have already died and did not pass on that
valuable information to the living. His baptismal name was Hilario and we
called him Lolo Ayong. But neither did anybody know when he was baptized. As
far as I know, there were only three people in the world who had no birth
records and one of them was my grandfather. The other was a character in the
Bible named Melchizedek and the third was a certain monarch in Central Africa
during the last century---sorry, I forgot his name.
When Lolo Ayong died in
1986, my father and I who were overseeing the burial preparation had a problem.
We did not know what to put on the gravestone as his birth year. But my father
came up with a very ingenious solution. My father recalled Lolo’s story that
during the super typhoon of 1912, he almost died because the typhoon caught him
alone in his fishing boat in the middle of the sea. My father reasoned that my
lolo must be, at least, a teenager at the time of the typhoon, otherwise he
would not be allowed to go fishing alone. Then my father picked the magic
number 16 as lolo’s age in 1912. Retracing back brought us to the year 1896.
Thus, we were able to write the following in his tombstone: Hilario Hagnaya
Herbolingo, 1896-1986. Only at that time did we know that Lolo Ayong died at
the ripe old age of 90.
But we are going ahead of
the story for my purpose of this writing is to tell you about his life. My lolo
was born to Benito Gelbolingo and Francisca Hagnaya of Argao, Cebu. How the
name ‘Gelbolingo’ evolved into ‘Herbolingo’ is a story in its own right worthy
of a forensic investigation. His love of adventure as a young man, brought him
to the island of Mindanao aboard a sailboat. How big was that sailboat---I have
no idea. But, anyway, Lolo told me that it took them one week to sail from Cebu
to Mindanao. (These days, it only takes 4 hours to travel that same route by
fast ferry boats.) My lolo settled in Northern Mindanao particularly in the
town of Cabadbaran.
There were only very few
people in Cabadbaran at the time and most of the lands were owned by the
natives of the place called “Manobos.” The manobos were selling their lands to
the new settlers right and left at a barter price of a few canned sardines. Lolo Ayong suddenly became the owner of a
4-hectare flatland (approximately, 10 acres) in the vicinity of barrio Calamba.
The manobos still had lots of lands to sell and Lolo could have produced more
canned sardines to barter with them but lolo reasoned out: why should he buy more lands when he could
only cultivate 4 hectares? And so, Lolo Ayong stopped buying. Today, my lolo’s
contemporaries in Cabadbaran are big landholders and more prosperous.
My lolo’s love life is
nebulous to me but it is safe to assume that it was in Cabadbaran where he met
his future wife, the former Feliciana Bolotaulo Rollorata of Dawis, Bohol. They
were blessed with 14 children but only ten survived to adulthood. One of Lolo’s
pastime was gambling and his favorite was cockfighting. During his time he
maintained a cockhouse full of fighting cocks. As a consequence, all of Lolo’s
sons, except my father, became gamblers themselves. Today, if you see a picture
of a Herbolingo in Facebook, whether young or old, holding a rooster, most
likely he is a descendant of Lolo Ayong.
But Lolo’s passion for
gambling was equaled, if not exceeded, with his love for work and labor. He
developed his 4-hectare land and planted all of them with coconuts. He cleared
about half-acre in the middle of his land and there he built his two-storey
house made of hardwood (yakal, narra and kamagong) which was relatively
abundant at that time. His daughters planted bermuda grass around the house and
populated his spacious veranda on the second floor with potted flowering
plants: bougainvillea, santan, different varieties of cactus and others. When we were kids, visiting our lolo’s home
after school and during weekends was exciting and always looked forward to.
My lolo could not read
and write for he had never been to school. Probably, life was so hard in Argao
that he had to work early to help the family thus he had no time for school. As
a consequence, education was given very little importance among his own
children so that only one of them finished college. Another is college level.
My father was only up to second year high school when he got married. The rest
just finished elementary, some barely.
But if Lolo did not learn
his letters, he mastered his numbers. We do not know how he did it but he has
his own way of doing arithmetic. He could identify the values of different
monetary denominations, he knew how to count his money, and he knew how much
change to expect when making a purchase. He must have learned it by necessity,
otherwise, how could he place his bet in the gambling den?
This brought to my
remembrance one funny incident. Anyway, it was funny to me but for Lolo, it was
a matter of getting most out of his money’s worth. After watching a cockfight
in the cockpit arena, he took a tricycle to go to my aunt’s store in the market.
To the uninitiated, a tricycle is a bicycle with a makeshift side car with a
third wheel, powered by the driver’s strong legs. It is a common mode of
transport in Cabadbaran. When he arrived at the store, he gave the skinny,
perspiring driver his fare of 10 centavos. The driver politely told Lolo that
the fare for that distance was 15 centavos. “Fifteen centavos!” my lolo blurted
out. “Ayaw ko ilara, Dong, dugay na kong sakay-sakay dinhi. Nakahibalo ko nga
diyes ray pamilite.” (Don’t rob me, boy, I’m an old-timer here. I know that the
fare is only 10 centavos.) Well, at least, Lolo deserved a senior’s discount.
In his simple uneducated
ways, Lolo’s legacy was his fulfilled vision. When he was cultivating his land---that
was before the Second World War, his land was in the middle of nowhere and the surrounding
areas were still forested. There were so few motorized vehicles and they could
be found only in big towns and cities. He told my father, “Someday, trucks will
come here to haul our coconuts. True enough, when his coconuts started bearing
fruits, hauling trucks of the Chinese merchants in Cabadbaran would make their
way, traversing a footpath that was only wide enough for a carabao-sledge, up
to my Lolo’s front yard to haul the harvested coconuts.
Lolo
Ayong lived and died a contented man. His 4-hectare coconut plantation enabled
him to support his big family not lavishly but moderately comfortable until his
children were able to stand and have families of their own.
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