(Let me digress a bit about the music. The American music industry was then promoting the sounds and talents of the singer-songwriters like James Taylor and company. This was a different track from the American Songbook and Rodgers and Hammerstein variety, sang by the likes of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennet, but this was after artists such as Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger, the Joan Baez, Gordon Lightfoot, and Peter Paul and Mary had made their mark, and as aspiring poets and artists ourselves, we looked to James Taylor, Carole King, and Cat Stevens, among others, not just as entertainment providers but as admired creative models and reference points to our own creative work.) 

And so, after listening to my records, we went back to our current Martial Law reality and it was time to go up the church grounds for the teach-in. This was our relative activist’s peace.

As we know now, the two activists would cease visiting me rather abruptly, as they met their inevitable tragic ends. Alex or Angel Belone was cornered by the military on Ateneo Avenue in Naga City. He fought and fell like a warrior, it was told, because he was an easy prey for the pursuing soldiers. His corpse was paraded for all the people to see and they gouged out his eyes to make him an example, to frighten everybody. Henry, the Manila Bulletin correspondent, disappeared into thin air, forever, apparently. What was left of him was his image with his famous buri fedora, in a cryptic news item about his disappearance, which made for an obit in the newspaper he worked for. I didn’t know how to react. I refrained from telling my mother the news. I was both quite intimidated and angered, I had to lay low for some time for my own safety. This segment of my martial law story had come to an end. 

Still to another degree of irony, I left the province in late 1977 as I was offered a slot at the NFA Centra Office to write for the corporate publications of the agency, the internal organ Grains, and the industry publication Gintong Butil. I worked at the Directorate for Public Affairs under newspaper columnist Art Borjal. Borjal, who was later to inherit the Jaywalker column from Doroy Valencia. Certainly, I made friends with other NFA writers, among them Danny Consumido, the late Dindo Odra, and Feddie Espiritu. We were sometimes asked to write first drafts of speeches for the Frist Lady, Imelda Marcos, who was Chairman of NFA, while Danny and Dindo ghost-wrote for Borjal’s Jaywalker column. Now I had swung to the other side of the spectrum. But Danny Consumido introduced me to the Galian sa Arte at Tula (GAT), the poetry group founded by now National Artist Virgilio S. Almario. The poetry organization was of the modernist, socially-oriented literary school.