“They Grow Old When They Stop Falling In Love” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Me, I Have Many Loves!

 I am now 80, but I will not grow old because I keep falling in love! The difference between Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Frank A Hilario is that he loved himself too much – and I have gotten over that! Today, I keep falling in love with humanity.

I fell in love with writing for myself when I was senior high at the sleepy town of Asingan, Pangasinan in 1957. I won for my Tagalog essay against a bonafide Tagalog – despite Ilocano-ak, I’m Ilocano!

I fell in love with writing for my country when I was college sophomore at the University of the Philippines’ College of Agriculture in 1960. As a writer of the student paper Aggie Green & Gold, I wrote against the coming of the US Peace Corps Volunteers in the Philippines. Yes, I did.

I fell in love with writing about the good, the bad and the ugly when I started as an information writer at Forest Research Institute on 16 April 1975. Forestry, Agroforestry.

And on 18 March 1967, I fell in love with lovewhen I got married to Amparo Reynoso Hilario and fell in love again with the Roman Catholic Church on 1 January 1991 during a Marriage Encounter seminar in Tagaytay City under the sponsorship of Bukás Loób sa Díyos, San Pablo District Community.

Every single day I fall in love with something or other – and so via a Facebook Private Message, on 21 November 2020:I fell in love with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and his “Farewell Letter,” where he says among other things, that if he did not have cancer:

I would give merit to things not for what they are worth, but for what they mean to express.

I would sleep little, I would dream more, because I know that for every minute that we close our eyes, we waste 60 seconds of light.

I would walk while others stop; I would awake while others sleep.

To all men, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love.

And so today I say, “I love you” to whoever you are!

I have been earnestly blogging since 2007. Blogging to share what I think is the good and differentiating it from the not-so-good science in Agriculture. I suggest things people can do; they choose. “I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.”

But unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez , I keep discovering things for what they are worth – and what they are meant to express. I love the world.

Many farmers are hard-headed workers, and that’s a match: I am a hard-headed worker myself!

“To old people I would say that death doesn’t arrive when they grow old, but with forgetfulness.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, I would forget myself but not others!@517