My grandfather never celebrated a birthday, for nobody knew the exact date of his birth---not even himself. All of those who had knowledge about his
birth have already died long ago and did not pass on that valuable piece of information to the
living. His baptismal name was Hilario and we called him Lolo Ayong. But neither
did anybody know the date of his baptism. 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 in
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 riding on 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 very 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 old or young, 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 hailed 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 supported by 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'g 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 in dark shirt posed with a friend.
He always looked confident, his body never bent.
He was ramrod straight until the end.
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.
