SUNDAY STORIES

Booms and busts in the har-vest cycle used to be the markers of life in a farming community.

Before the intrusion of overseas jobs, before Overseas Filipino worker money built up all those concrete bungalows and dotted the farming areas with TV antennas, before remittances decoupled the economy from agricultural proceeds, there was one dominant economic lifeblood in the rural areas, farming—rice primarily. Every facet of life revolved around farming.

Even the struggling agricultural workers with no rice plots of their own pegged their own milestones on the bounty of the seasons. Three brothers who long ago fished with me in the irrigation ditches of our farming area were not formally entered as newborn citizens at the munisipyo. But the father, an industrious, awesome man barely five feet tall named Monching de Guzman, clearly remembered the season of every birth.

Ing pangane, nyang sinapa la reng tugak. Ing pangadwa, nyang tinud ing pupul. Ing pangatlu, nyang alus mamakbung la ring kamute keng dagul . . . (The eldest was born when frogs almost overran the paddies. The second was born in the midst of a bumper rice harvest. The third one was born during the harvest season for oversized sweet potatoes.) One good reaping season, one human life birthed into the world.

Our simple lives did not require formal entry into the official records. The full accounting of the glorious harvest seasons was enough.

My own “ milestones “ were the following :

*I was allowed to pasture my own carabao at five, proudly bedecked with the gear of a real farmer: cheap chambray, sheathed sickle, buntal hut.

*At the age of 12, with enough lean muscles to maneuver a plow, I had my first taste of farming manhood—plowing the field, the sharp, pointed metal of the plow slicing into the soft brown earth to form plowed-over columns. The symmetry of the plowed -over brown earth made my late father truly proud.

*Farming full time before reaching 20—and on Day One after the declaration of martial law.

There were intervening years, the years spent typing to make a living. But these were the blur years, the years that inconspicuously passed by as I plotted my return to the farm, this time not on a marginal, hand-to-mouth existence.

When I turned 60 last month, there was not much reflection and recollection on the years spent typing. You typed to make a living. You typed to do something that was not about tilling the soil and raising animals. You typed to experience life in the city. You typed to savor the occasional mischief that came with the territory. You typed so your next of kin can read your small name in the newspapers.

After a while, you get tired of the document chase. Then you go back to the soil, and- if you were industrious enough—its bounty.

The second phase of my farming life, I attacked with full ferocity.

Once, I fashioned a rope that was 15 meters long (a bad move), then furiously dug holes that were 15 meters apart in the vacant space of my small farm.. I dropped grafted mango planting materials unto each hole, repeating the process a hundred times.

In one day and a half of intense digging and shoveling, I managed to plant a hundred mango grafts, something, which only a crazed man with no help whatsoever would do. And it was for nothing. The gap between each graft, so every tree would fully fruit, should be more than 20 meters. The fully matured mangoes, underwhelming in their yield, were soon massacred by a chain saw.
Wiser from that mango-planting experience, I aimed for another record. In two days (this time the work was backed by science) I planted more than 600 grafted calamansi planting materials in between the poultry houses. More than 600, yes, and with no help.

You can’t forget such things because you have been trained to peg the milestones of your unimportant life to the farming seasons. What crop is in vogue? What is the demand of the market? There is no such thing as stasis in farming. And the periods of great intensity that you bring into the business of nurturing the soil are duly recorded.

As you turn 60 all you are capable of is reminiscing the old days when you were an able-bodied and strong farmer who did “ improve “ as deftly as the stand-up comics of New York City. How you can swing a 50-kilo palay into your shoulders with ease. A 50-kilo starter feed can likewise be shoulder-borne in seconds. At 60, and a diabetic that had undergone two angioplasties, I am now limited to going back to a garden of farming memories.

But in some ways, turning 60 has its many upsides—thanks to the legislated social safety nets.

Medicine purchases will be 32 per cent lower, 20 per cent discount and VAT-less, after you get your OSCA card. You can get ample cholesterol at the fast-food chains at discounted prices. Any ride, from buses to trikes, will also be at a discount.

And, when doing something, you have a special line to avoid the queues.

Indeed, while tying your shoe laces is now a torture, while the days when you tossed a hoe like it were a plastic toy are long gone, reaching senior citizenship is still an occasion to shout “ Hep Hep, Hooray.”

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